Delhi Noir

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Delhi, a city that’s been reborn in various locations and forms throughout its thousands of years of history, was in the midst of yet another colossal transition when I arrived here four years ago. This latest metamorphosis was being fueled by legislation that opened up India to private and foreign investors. International brands like the Wall Street Journal and Chanel were setting up shop. The city’s cruddy public transportation system was being revolutionized by an ultramodern metro. My mother’s massive Punjabi family — Partition refugees who’d happily lived in a one-bedroom Connaught Place flat during the 1950s — were driving Hondas and Hyundais and comparing plasma television prices.

For the first time in decades, members of the educated elite were experiencing a gleeful surge of nationalism, and they wanted to savor it. They bragged about the new malls and cinemas going up in Gurgaon, a quasi-American suburb in which civic planning plays second fiddle to corporate whims. They reveled in the number of billionaires who called their city home, as well as the rising values of the houses their parents had built. But things weren’t — and aren’t — as good as everyone wanted to believe.

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