My ‘slaad’ days in the 60s and 70s
centred around Curzon Road—today’s K.G. Marg—and a five-mile radius around
it, the venue of many firsts.
Delhi’s first takeaway: an Electric Lane eatery, from where a surly idli-man
with crooked teeth and thick soda glasses worked the length of Curzon Road
door-to-door, sloshing sambhar out of a Brite plastic bucket like a farmer does
pigswill.
The summer’s first amaltas on Atul Grove Lane—connecting Curzon to
Janpath—which splashed their golden shower before any others in the city, even
as searing winds whipped up mini tornadoes of dust and yellow petals along
phantasmagoric tar.
Delhi’s first coffee house at Connaught Place—Rajiv Chowk’s namesake was
still in his Doon School shorts!—all greasy vadas, watery brew, loud, leftwing
intellectuals and the arthouse crowd from Mandi House.
And our first bug-eyed sight of voyagers: large overland buses from London
pulled up just where Palika Bazaar pocks CP like an ingrown carbuncle today.
Filled with longing, we’d stare at the psychedelic peace signs and route maps
on their sides. Across the street, BOAC and Quantas beckoned and twinkled but
stayed expensively out of reach.
The chrome-and-steel jukebox at Standard Restaurant was as decadent as its peach
melba, and Kake da Hotel was the original home of Delhi’s feathered mascot,
the tandoori chicken.
It was a Delhi of rides aboard DTC’s route 220 to get to St Stephen’s for an
early morning ‘tute’, of being the ‘second batch of girls’ and
deliciously outnumbered by boys, gorgeous boys.
It was a Delhi of great dance floors—the Cellar at Regal, Tabela at the then
Oberoi Intercontinental or Wheels at the Ambassador. And it was a Delhi of canny
enterprise: Jean Junction ensured we didn’t have to wrangle for denim, Dateline
Delhi, the city’s first thinking-man tabloid, gave us summer jobs and
stories.
In the brief misty monsoon, the pavements steamed over with the ripe smell of
neem fruit crushed by our platform heels. A few weeks later they’d be replaced
by jamun, whose colour purple dyed the earth.
Delhi is where the dreaded chocolate barfi was born, this is where Band on
The Run played repeatedly in the Chanakya lobby while you waited for Abba
The Movie to begin. This is where Salma Sultan dimpled her way through the
country’s first black and white telecast, this is where Coca Cola died and
prohibition saw us sip beer out of Chinese teacups.
But as some French dude put it: the more things change, the more they remain the
same.
Portly sarkari employees in bright hand-knit sweaters and woolly caps ending in
a baby frill around their napes, still crack peanuts and soak up the winter sun
at traffic roundabouts on taxpayers’ time. The musty smell of winter sleep
still pervades taxis, odes to Sunny, Bunny and Happy still adorn three-wheelers
and the Meena community still benefits from job reservations in Delhi Police.
George has long vanished from under his canopy at India Gate, Wellesley and
several others morphed into Mughal emperors and Rattendon underwent a sex
change.
But it’s still my Delhi—at least, till some zealous do-gooder changes its
name. Kukkadprastha, anyone?
This article originally appeared in Delhi City Limits, January 15, 2006
