时间：2022-05-20 04:24:00
It happens every year, at this time of year. regular as clockwork. even more regular than clockwork, actually, if that clock is running on Indian standard time, which always and invariably is ten minutes late, if not more. But despite the regularity of its occurrence, each time it happens it occasions amazement, astonishment, shock and awe all together. you would have thought people would have got used to it by now. that they’d come to expect it and be prepared for it. Just like people have come to expect the fact that in the middle of the monsoons it’s likely to rain, for instance. and that if you go out without an umbrella you’re likely to get wet. rain will do that to you: Make you wet if you don’t have an umbrella. But there’s this one annual phenomenon as predictable as monsoon rain (in fact, considering the increasingly erratic nature of the monsoon, even more predictable) that people just can’t seem to get used to and learn to anticipate. and that’s Delhi’s seasonal disappearance come winter. every winter. Last winter was no exception.
Last winter Delhi disappeared. One moment it was there, large as life and twice as unnatural—with its vvIps in pooh-paah cars and its child beggars, its stray dogs and strayer human beings, its killer buses and its road rage, its Metro construction and its unending rubble of excavation, its scams and its scandals, its power brokers and its power cuts, its Lutyens’ bungalows and its garbage heaps, its gracious tree-lined boulevards and its men pissing in public, its pomp and its pomposity, its pageantry and its piffle—one moment all of this was there and the next—poof!—it was gone. Just like that. Disappeared. Whatever could have happened to it? It was an enigma that had the whole country wondering.
had some magician, a great jadugar like the legendary p.C. sorcar‘vanished’ the whole city, the way he is said to have once ‘vanished’ the taj Mahal? had aliens from outer space zoomed down in their UFOs and abducted Dilli in its entirety, rashtrapati Bhavan, jhuggi-jhopris, polluted yamuna, women molesters and all? But would aliens—no matter how alien they were—want to abduct the damn thing?
Mind you, Delhi had a long history of disappearing itself. In fact, if historians were to be believed, Delhi had disappeared itself no less than eight times, only to be reborn in a new avatar, Indraprastha, shahjahanabad and so on. so had Delhi disappeared itself for the ninth time? and if so, what would it reappear as? Commonwealth village? Gameswalabad? Or seeing as how the Commonwealth Games turned out to be one of the bigger scams of all time, in hindsight should the bornagain Dilli be named Kalmadigaon, after suresh Kalmadi?
Then the mystery cleared. Delhi’s disappearance had nothing to do with magicians, or with aliens. Or indeed with suresh Kalmadi. Delhi had disappeared because of fog. not just fog, but the worst fog in 20 years. some said it was the worst fog since either Delhi or fog had been invented. Whatever the case, for almost a whole week in January, fog—so thick and impenetrable that you felt you could cut it into huge chunks that would help replace all those melting himalayan glaciers that r.K. pachauri’s been carrying on something fierce about and which mayn’t be melting after all— smothered Delhi in a total white-out and wiped it off the face of the map.
In fog-blind Delhi, planes couldn’t land or take off. trains were cancelled. road traffic ground to a standstill. thousands of Dilliwallas were stranded outside Delhi and couldn’t get back into the city, and thousands of non-Dilliwallas were stranded within the city, unable to get out. and because of what? One three-letter word: fog. as in: Fog you too. Which is what a lot of all those stranded people kept saying as they camped out for endless hours and days at non-functioning airports and railway stations and bus depots waiting for visibility to return. Was this the pride of India, the showcase capital on which thousands of crores were being spent in the name of Commonwealth Gamesmanship? some show, some case.
and then, miraculously, the fog lifted. the sun returned, blushing with shame for having gone a.W.O.L and causing all the pother. and—poof!—as suddenly as it had disappeared, Delhi reappeared. yes, by golly, there was Delhi back again. Delhi with its vvIps in pooh-paah cars and its child beggars, its stray dogs and strayer human beings, its killer buses and its road rage, its Metro construction and its unending rubble of constant excavation, its scams and scandals, its power brokers and its power cuts, its Lutyens’ bungalows and its garbage heaps, its gracious tree-lined boulevards and its men pissing in public, its pomp and its pomposity, its pageantry and its piffle, its…
Oh God, make the fog come back again. please?