Ulysses as a Dilli odyssey

On celebrating James Joyce’s Bloomsday

“And Bloom letting on to be awfully deeply interested in nothing, a spider’s web in the corner behind the barrel, and the citizen scowling after him, and the old dog at his feet looking up to know who to bite and when.”

This line from James Joyce’s novel Ulysses is the very essence of an aimless walk in the city. In which you are not looking for a tomb from such or such era, or the best eatery to eat such or such nihari. In which you are not searching for a metaphor that will tell you some profound truth about the city. In which you are simply absorbing the texture of life as it is lived at the moment, on the street you are passing through. And try to become one with the city.

Every metropolis has a book that might become a companion to anyone who walks its by-lanes. Delhi has many, such as Ahmad Ali’s Twilight in Delhi, or poet Ghalib’s collected letters. But no matter where you are walking—be it Ghantaghar in Hari Nagar, or Golf Course Road in Gurugram, or Brahmaputra Market in Noida — one book for the flâneur to understand a place most ethereally is Ulysses.

Today is June 16, the date on which the entire novel is set. It is celebrated as Bloomsday, so named after Leopold Bloom, the protagonist. The book mostly consists of the characters walking the streets of distant Dublin, portrayed with remarkable precision and scads of details. Despite such geographical specificity, the Dublin in the book (of the year 1904) has become universal, so much so that you will always find some landmarks and people in the book resonating with landmarks and peoples in your own city.

This logic makes Ulysses a model walking guide to Delhi and its surrounding cities. Indeed, an elderly tailor in Gurugram’s Santlal Market (already profiled in these pages) finds his corresponding self in the novel. An episode devoted to a graveyard is like walking among the graves of Dilli Gate Qabristan. The episode that immediately follows is set in a newspaper office, synchronising seamlessly with the Delhi setting, since a host of newspaper offices stands next to the qabristan. And the Martello Tower on Ansari Road finds its twin tower in Dublin’s Martello Tower, where Joyce’s novel’s famously starts. A couple of months ago, this column exhorted citizens to read aloud the opening of the novel at the Ansari Road monument, as a perfect celebration of Ulysses’ ongoing 100th anniversary of its publication. This week, Irish ambassador to India, Brendan Ward, did just that.

In the novel, Joyce notes that a “good puzzle would be to cross Dublin without passing a pub.” The Delhi Joyceans will echo that belief, asserting that an equally good puzzle would be to cross Dilli without passing a chai stall.

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