Nostalgia for a Delhi of yore
Having lived in Delhi since 1958 I have some very fond memories of it, before it started becoming a gas chamber about 40 years ago. Very few people now remember Delhi as it was before the Asian Games of 1982. Those games turned the old bucolic and bureaucratic Delhi into a boom town and it has not stopped booming since then. The fixed population of Delhi today is around three and a half crore. Another crore or so people float in and out annually. In 1980 the population was barely 70 million, mostly rural, living in the areas of Haryana and Uttar Pradesh surrounding Delhi like Gurgaon and Noida. Indira Gandhi’s farmhouse, by the way, was on the very southwest outskirts of Delhi. Today it’s south central. All those rural areas have been assimilated into a single toxic zone called the National Capital Region (NCR) and they are fully urban now. The NCR is so huge that when you fly into Delhi you can see the pollution the region causes rising up to 15,000 feet and extending some 200 miles in all directions. This is largely because in 1980 there were barely a lakh motorised vehicles. Today there are around three million.
The Delhi of yesteryear, till the early 1980s had two outstanding features: clear blue skies and clean air, both of which were free; and some wonderful restaurants that were not. The sky is still there but it’s grey-yellow and not blue. Some of the old restaurants, too, are there but they are a shadow of their former selves, not frequented even by old timers who nurse their private memories and talk about them very infrequently. Food, after all, has a distinctive way of troubling you — and in not just gastrointestinal ways. Nostalgia is especially acute if you took your girlfriends to these restaurants and even got them to pay the bill once in a while.
One of these girls forwarded me photos of some paintings of Delhi’s old restaurants. These brought back a lot of mouthwatering memories. Wengers for pastries. Nirula’s pizzas. De Paul’s chilled flavoured milk. Karim’s kebabs. Moti Mahal for tandoori food. And so on.
In those days the restaurants were almost all owned by Punjabis who had come over after the Partition. They invented what is now called mughlai food. Its main feature was lots of oil, white butter and cream. It was utterly delicious, and tasted even better because no one cared then about cholesterol, LDL and such like. Food and medicine were kept strictly apart in our minds and every morsel that we put into our mouths wasn’t accompanied by a nasty guilt pang. And this was true of even our parents and grandparents. They ate to their heart’s content and died happy.
These restaurants also had clean bathrooms. In those days when there were no public restrooms, the men could go behind a tree or face walls or simply against a stationary bus of which there were always several. But there was absolutely nothing for women and these restaurants were a godsend. You went in, ordered a coke and chips for about two rupees and used the loos. Some even had air-conditioning.
One of the biggest advantages of these old restaurants was that they had phones with subscriber trunk dialling without STD locks. Those came in the 1980s. These restaurants let you call for an exorbitant two rupees thinking it was a local call. But they couldn’t see where you were dialling, which could be anywhere in India. And you could talk for as long as you wanted. I was a master of this deception. But I always left a generous tip. It seemed the honourable thing to do.
