Last night, I dreamt I went to Anand Niketan, Delhi. To the street that skirted the E block park. While it looked much like any other row of wall-to-wall houses in a South Delhi colony, you only needed to take a short stroll and breathe deeply to know there was a difference. In CR Park, you were more than likely to smell mustard oil and maachh in the air. In GK, the aroma of aloo parantha s frying in ghee would hit your nose. In Mayfair Gardens, at any time of day, the smell of roasted papad s would linger.
In Anand Niketan, a large number of houses belonged to the Sood community. However, in the ‘80s, most had been rented out to middle-class families like my folks. Down the road from my house was a Malayali friend’s home. His mother’s kitchen always welcomed you with the aroma of freshly made prawn pickle. A little further up was the large Anglo-Indian family in whose home many a birthday bash had been hosted, potent rum punches had been sampled, first kisses been tested, rejected, girlishly gossiped about. Just a little beyond, past the press-wali ’s stall was the Pahari family with their inviting Dogri music and a whiff of khamiri roti s. Further up the road, you’d bump into the new kid on the block — the lanky Polish guy, with his polished vocabulary of choice Hindi phrases, punctuated by fragrant pastrami burps. You’d run away of course, only to bump into one of the Rao kids, on their cycles. And because they were actually half Telugu and half American, you had as good a chance of sampling steaming hot idli s with gongura pickle as getting first dibs on their grandma’s warm apple pie.
The street had them all. The Bengali family at the top of the park, whose father was mad at you, because your Tamilian friend had tried sneaking love letters to his precious daughter! So you hurried past… to the Parsi family’s home. Only to find that Uncle Russi’s World War II vehicle had (again) run out of fuel. Well then, you ran along and got your dad to come help. By the time they returned, overflowing jerry cans in each hand, a potluck was taking shape. The Coorg family from next door had joined in with a bottle of spice-infused rum, fresh from their estates. Rachmaninoff played on the turntable; cutlets piled up on another table.
This rich, multi-cultural exposure to people slightly different, but so much like me; the inclusion into all those different lives shaped the person and writer I was becoming. It gave me the fertile ground to write and air my first script, a modern Ramayana , at the age of 13. A benevolent neighbour generously had a shamiana put up in the park for the show. The only catch was there were too few people in the audience. I’d cast almost everyone from the street in some role or the other.
Even when I thought I had left Anand Niketan and Delhi behind — I couldn’t really. So many of these influences resurfaced and became a part of my last book, Tick-tock We’re 30 , set in the Anand Niketan I remember.
Early this morning, I dreamt I went to Anand Niketan again. The images were fresh from a walk I took there recently. The homes had never been architectural marvels, but now there was a uniformity to them, as second and third generations chose to go the builder-collaboration way. New owners were moving in from all over the city into these Italian-marbled mini mahals built on stilts. When I woke up, I’d put my finger on it. Much like the rest of the city, the old road in Anand Niketan now smelled a little like… new money.
Milan Vohra is India’s first Mills and Boon author. Her books include ‘The Love Asana’ and ‘Tick-tock We’re 30’. She has also written short stories for several anthologies.
