Love and the city
Describing his years as a young academic in New Delhi in the mid-1980s, novelist Amitav Ghosh writes: “I was living in... Defence Colony — a neighbourhood of large, labyrinthine houses, with little self-contained warrens of servants’ rooms tucked away on rooftops and above garages... those rooms had come to house a floating population of the young and straitened journalists, copywriters, minor executives, and university people like myself. We battened upon this wealthy enclave like mites in a honeycomb, spreading from rooftop to rooftop.” Ravish Kumar also describes such an existence in an unnamed poem of his book, A City Happens in Love: “...a tenant has no city of his own. There must be so many cities living in lakhs of houses in Delhi. I’d found you on the terrace of one such house.”
Translated from the original Hindi bestseller, IshqMeinShaharHona, by New Delhi-based poet and translator Akhil Katyal, these short poems — described by Kumar as “LaPreK ( laghu prem katha or nano love poems) — are as much about Delhi as they are about finding love in its ruins, buses, metros, barsatis and momo stalls. Over the past couple of years, a number of poetry books in English have eulogised the national capital, also the adopted home of these poets. Some of the books I can think of immediately are Michael Creighton’s NewDelhiLoveSongs (Speaking Tiger, 2018), Katyal’s own Night Charge Extra (Writers Workshop, 2015), Maaz Bin Bilal’s eagerly awaited Ghazalnama and mine, VisceralMetropolis (Red River, 2017). These are only the ones I know of and there must be many other poetic hearts beating eagerly in love for this city.
Kumar started writing these poems a couple of years ago as status messages on social media. They were collected and published by Rajkamal Prakashan. In these, he transforms from the senior political journalist of NDTV India and winner of multiple journalism awards, to a young man falling in love in the city, with the city. It is tempting to imagine the masculine voice as belonging to Kumar himself and the addressee as historian Nayana Dasgupta, to whom he is married. “Friendship with Nayana transformed this city... Rather, it transformed me for the city,” he writes in the introduction. But, there is also something universal, metropolitan about it, like Delhi itself, full of non-natives who have adopted this megapolis as home. “Love makes better city-people of us all,” Kumar writes. “We begin respecting every unknown corner in the city. We fill up these corners with life.”
The book seems to travel to every nook and cranny of this enormous sprawling city, going from Karawal Nagar to Greater Kailash, Chhatarpur to Mehrauli, North Campus to Badarpur. “We have loitered about a lot in love. That desire to say a little more before the goodbye made us walk miles.” These pedestrian adventures, of travelling in autorickshaws, buses, metros or on foot, informs many of these short love stories. The little stolen moments of lovers who do not have the luxury of loneliness is brought out with pathos: “It was March and the air had begun to heat up. Both of them insisted that the autowalah should drop down the flaps on both the sides. Even in the din of the auto, there was now an extraordinary silence inside. One of the driver’s eyes got stuck on the rear-view mirror. To escape him both of them began to hide in each other. The driver forgot the score of the meter. The auto began to race towards Shankar Road...”
Not all the love stories in the book end happily though. In one, a boy from Bihar falls in love with a momo seller from the Northeast in Lajpat Nagar. She reciprocates by “giving him one extra piece for every plate of momos”. (Kumar deftly introduces a pop-culture reference: “After seeing Shahrukh’s (sic) Dil Se, it seemed to him that this one extra momo was paving a new way for love.” There are many other such references.) Kumar writes how he used to think of the city as a place where people go to forget their village. In another poem, he describes the transformation, albeit in culinary preference: “He who used to eat chuda-dahi and bhaat-achaar began sitting on sidewalks and eating prawns. When he ate Chettinad chicken for the first time at Swagath Restaurant in Defence Colony, he became crazy about it.” Like food, love— for a city or for the city dweller— can be addictive. This book is a testimony to that.