Or rather was. One month after our arrival in Delhi, Mr Singh and I had an accident. Taking a road junction with more phlegm than usual, we careered into the Maruti van, impaling it on its bows, so that it bled Mango Frooty Drink all over Mr Singh’s bonnet. No one was hurt, and Mr Singh—strangely elated by his ‘kill’—took it stoically. ‘Mr William,’ he said. ‘In my life six times have I crashed. And on not one occasion have I ever been killed.’
Although I am devoted to him, Olivia is quick to point out that Mr Singh is in many ways an unattractive character. A Punjabi Sikh, he is the Essex Man of the East. He chews paan and spits the betel juice out of the window, leaving a red ‘go-fast’ stripe along the car’s right flank. He utters incoherent whoops of joy as he drives rickshaws on to the pavement or sends a herd of paper boys flying into a ditch. He leaps out of his taxi to urinate at traffic lights, and scratches his groin as he talks. Like Essex Man, he is a lecher. His eyes follow the saris up and down the Delhi avenues; plump Sikh girls riding side-saddle on motorbikes are a particular distraction. Twice a week, when Olivia is not in the car, he offers to drive me to G.B. Road, the Delhi red light district: ‘Just looking,’ he suggests. ‘Delhi ladies very good. Having breasts like mangoes.’
Yet he has his principles. Like his English counterpart, he is a believer in hard work. He finds it hard to understand the beggars who congregate at the lights. ‘Why these peoples not working?’ he asks. ‘They have two arms and two legs. They not handicrafted.’
‘Handicrafted?’
‘Missing leg perhaps, or only one ear.’
‘You mean handicapped?’
‘Yes. Handicrafted. Sikh peoples not like this. Sikh peoples working hard, earning money, buying car.’
Ignoring the bus hurtling towards us, he turns around and winks an enormous wink. ‘Afterwards Sikh peoples drinking whisky, looking television, eating tandoori chicken and going G.B. Road.’
The house stood looking on to a small square of hot, tropical green: a springy lawn fenced in by a windbreak of champa and ashok trees. The square was the scene for a daily routine of almost Vedic inflexibility.
Early in the morning, under a bald blue sky, the servants would walk plump dachshunds over the grass, or, duties completed, would stand about on the pavements exchanging gossip or playing cards. Then, at about nine o’clock, the morning peace would be broken by a procession of bicycle-powered vendors, each with his own distinctive street-cry: the used-newspaper collector (‘Paper-wallah! Paper-wallah! Paper-wallah!’) would be followed by the fruit seller (‘Mangoes! Lychees! Bananas! Papaya!’), the bread boy and the man with the vegetable barrow. My favourite, the cotton-fluffer, whose life revolved around the puffing up of old mattresses, would twang a Jew’s harp. On Sunday mornings an acrobat would come with his dancing bear; he had a pair of drums and when he beat them the whole square would miraculously fill with children. Early that afternoon would follow a blind man with an accordion. He would sing hymns and sacred qawwalis and sometimes the rich people would send down a servant with a handful of change.
In the late afternoon, a herd of cattle twenty or thirty strong could be seen wandering along the lane at the back of the house. There was never any herder in sight, but they would always rumble slowly past, throwing up clouds of dust. Occasionally they would collide with the household servants wobbling along the back lane on their bicycles, returning from buying groceries in Khan Market. Then followed the brief Indian dusk: a pale Camembert sun sinking down to the treeline; the smell of woodsmoke and dung cooking fires; the last raucous outbursts from the parakeets and the brahminy mynas; the first whirring, humming cicadas.
Later on, lying in bed, you could hear the chowkidars stomping around outside, banging their sticks and blowing their whistles. There were never any robberies in our part of New Delhi, and the chowkidars were an entirely redundant luxury.
But, as Mrs Puri said, you had to keep up appearances. Mr Singh also had strong views about appearances.
‘You are Britisher,’ he said, the very first time I hailed him. ‘I know you are a Britisher.’
It was late afternoon at the end of our first week in Delhi. We had just moved in and were beginning the gruelling pilgrimage through Indian government departments that all new arrivals must perform. We were late for an appointment at the Foreigners Regional Registration Office, yet Mr Singh’s assertion could not go unquestioned.
‘How do you know I’m a Britisher?’
‘Because,’ said Mr Singh, ‘you are not sporting.’
‘Actually I am quite sporting,’ I replied. ‘I go for a run every day, swim in the summer …’
‘No Britisher is sporting,’ said Mr Singh, undaunted.
‘Lots of my countrymen are very keen on sport,’ I retorted.
‘No, no,’ said Mr Singh. ‘You are not catching me.’
‘We are still a force to be reckoned with in the fifteen hundred metres, and sometimes our cricket team …’
‘No, no,’ said Mr Singh. ‘Still you are not catching me. You Britishers are not sporting.’ He twirled the waxed curlicues of his moustache. ‘All men should be sporting a moustache, because all ladies are liking too much.’
He indicated that I should get in.
‘It is the fashion of our days,’ he said, roaring off and narrowly missing a pedestrian.
Mr Singh’s taxi stand lay behind the India International Centre, after which it took its name: International Backside Taxis. The stand was run by Punjab Singh, Balvinder’s stern and patriarchal father, and manned by Balvinder and his two plump brothers, Gurmuck and Bulwan. There was also a rota of cousins who would fill in during the weekends and at nights. Over the following months we got to know them all well, but it was Balvinder who remained our special friend.
That first week, and the week following it, Balvinder drove Olivia and myself through a merry-go-round of government departments. Together we paid daily visits to the rotting concrete hulk known as Shastri Bhavan, nerve centre of the Orwellian Indian Ministry of Information and Broadcasting. Here, in the course of nine visits, I deposited four faxes, three telexes, two envelopes of passport photographs (black and white only) and a sheaf of letters from my editor in London, all in an effort to get accredited as a foreign correspondent.
In due course, as the slow wheels of bureaucracy turned, my application did get processed—but not until about a year after the newspaper I represented had ceased publication. Undaunted, to this day Shastri Bhavan still refuses to acknowledge the downfall of the Sunday Correspondent, and continues to send its India representative daily press releases detailing the reasons for the decline in the production of Indian pig iron, or celebrating the success of the Fifth International Conference on the Goat (theme: The Goat in Rural Prosperity).
More depressing even than Shastri Bhavan is the headquarters of Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Limited. The Telephone Nigam is India’s sole supplier of telecommunications to the outside world. Without the help of the Telephone Nigam one is stranded. This is something every person who works for the organization knows; and around this certainty has been built an empire dedicated to bureaucratic obfuscation, the perpetration of difficulty, the collection of bribes and, perhaps more than anything else, the spinning of great glistening cocoons of red tape.
It was a hot, dusty late September morning when I