Dilli meri jaan

PERPETUAL CITY
Author: Malvika Singh
Publisher: Aleph
Pages: 128
Price: Rs 295

Everyone who grew up in Delhi in the 1950s and early 1960s simply must read this book. It is small; it is cheap; and, most important, it brings back deeply buried memories of what this wonderful town used to be before it became a power-city.

That happened from the 1970s onward when the "wrong" sort of people began to ooze into the dress circle. Delhi hasn't looked back, since then every decade has brought its own set of those ghastly parvenus.

Much of the book is like a relaxed (though somewhat one-sided) chat in the drawing room while you wait for someone to arrive - random thoughts held together by the common theme, Delhi. There is some sort of chronology - starting in the 8th century and strolling down, albeit in a military sort of way, to the 21st.

There is also a bare-bones recitation of family events, interesting not only because they are so commonplace but also because the commonplace is common, even amongst people who were part of Delhi's "inner" set then. It was all wonderfully cosy. You knew everyone and everyone knew you and those who didn't tried to get to know you, just as you did them.

Singh clearly had a privileged life even by the austere standards of those days. In spite of trips to Jama Masjid for food, and other places for this and that, she doesn't mention the dreadful buses and trams of the Delhi Transport Undertaking (or DTU as it was known then).

Nor is there any mention of the mandatory queues at 5 am for milk at the Delhi Milk Scheme (DMS) booths. Nor of the influx of the Haryanvis in the 1970s and the Biharis in the 1980s and 1990s who changed the city's language for good.

There is no mention of encounters and confrontations with the annoyingly abrasive PPOs (Persons of Pakistan Origin), the refugees, whose continuous aggression was a real pain in the neck for the original citizens of Delhi.

The rude and combative rascals who drove the auto rickshaws - that at least hasn't changed - may also well not have existed for Singh, as indeed the wonderful Sikh taxi drivers who lasted till 1984 when Rajiv Gandhi's programme drove them away.

Yet, the book touches a deep chord because it talks with gentle nostalgia without getting embarrassingly lachrymose about it.

Singh recognises that every generation has its own memories and no one's memories are intrinsically superior to anyone else's.

That indeed is the main strength of this book.

Read it in an hour, gaze out of the window for a few moments in silent requiem for an age gone by, and shrug as you pour yourself a nice tumbler of one of those ubiquitous Glens - you know, fiddich, livet, morangie and so on.

Those, at least, make the present better than the past.

We have come a long way from the Golden Eagle beer, the Black Knight whiskey and the Hercules XXX rum, thank God.