Delhiwale: Chai time with Joyce
The nit-picking fact-checkers might pick on one of these names, objecting that this writer has got nothing to do with Delhi. They have a point. Even so, no matter wherever you might walk in Delhi-NCR—Jacobpura in Gurugram, or Turrab Nagar in Ghaziabad — one book that comes in handy to crack our city most intimately is James Joyce's Ulysses.
The celebrated novel mostly comprises of characters walking the streets of Dublin in Ireland. The city is mapped out with extreme precision. So much so that the book's Dublin has become universally relatable. The places and people in the novel resonate with places and people in the reader's own city. At one point in Ulysses, the hero remarks that it would be a good puzzle to cross Dublin without passing a single pub. A good puzzle will also be to cross Delhi without passing a single chai stall. Indeed, sometimes while strolling the galis around Turkman Gate, this reporter does confuse between the two cities. For you have to understand that the chatter and curses in the Dublin pubs and Dilli chaikhanas are the same! The crowds of men, the tobacco smoke. For instance, the 'applause and hisses' of Barney Kiernan's (in Ulysses's chapter 12) find their exact twins in Old Delhi's hyperlocal Kale Tea Stall, Irfan's tea stall, Babban's tea stall, Ashok's tea stall, and Rani's tea stall.
What's more, the Martello Tower in apna Ansari Road is a twin of Dublin's Martello Tower, the iconic landmark where Joyce's novel starts.
June 16 is falling on coming Monday. This is the date on which the entire Ulysses is set. The day is celebrated worldwide as Bloomsday, so named after its everyman hero Leopold Bloom. Indeed, the best way to mark Bloomsday in Delhi is to be at the Ansari Road Martello, and read aloud the novel's opening lines: 'Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead…'
PS: This photo was clicked two years ago at Haveli Azam Khan's Modern Tea House, which recently shut.
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It reveals the horrors of war and the self-importance and egotism of colonial bureaucrats but its concern is with the pains and pleasures of individuals. It is about how we live as much in memory and imagination as in a house or a city. Clarissa experiences everything, from fresh morning air to meeting old friends, in two dimensions—the past and the present. She has a tranquil and affectionate marriage, but she fondly recalls Peter, the man she refused to marry because she found his insistence on sharing everything 'intolerable". Although their intimacy was exciting, she refused his proposal because she knew, with wisdom remarkable in a young woman, that 'a little licence, a little independence there must be between people living together day in day out in the same house". This is a sentiment which anyone who has been married for many years would understand. 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Is it the ecstatic sense of oneness with the universe? She is not sure but she knows that it is obscured in her own life: 'closeness drew apart; rapture faded, one was alone. There was an embrace in death. But this young man who had killed himself—had he plunged holding his treasure? 'If it were now to die, 'twere now to be most happy,' she had said to herself once, coming down in white." The novel ends with love—Peter filled with excitement at the sight of Clarissa, Clarissa's husband Richard with love for their daughter, and Sally's statement, 'What does the brain matter compared with the heart?" Ruth Vanita is a professor, translator and author, most recently of the novel A Slight Angle. Topics You May Be Interested In
