Rahul Jacob: A Capital experience

How's the move going," a school friend asked a couple of months ago. "No complaints," I replied equivocally, prompting a gale of sceptical laughter. New Delhi gets such an unremittingly bad press - on everything from its road rage to the lechery that women encounter to the routine unscrupulousness of business dealings in the city - that not to be traumatised by a move here counts as an achievement.

It is a city much maligned by the rest of India, but often deservedly so. Answering my friend, I had glossed over the carnage of a contractor doing repairs in the flat I had recently rented whose workmen punctured a pipe in the bathroom and then neglected to tell me about it until I discovered the mess the next morning. By this point, the flat downstairs had been flooded as well. I had chosen not to retell the story of the Renault showroom in south Delhi where everyone from the sales manager down was so determined to sell me pricier diesel versions that they absurdly insisted their petrol models did not have dual airbags (the popularity of diesel vehicles, which account for 40 per cent of cars on the road, many of them SUVs, is nowhere more apparent than in Delhi and has made it more polluted in some respects than Beijing).

There is also the matter of the peculiar attention deficit disorder that many of Delhi's bold and beautiful display at social gatherings. Their habit of looking over your shoulder initially seemed like that game we played as children of talking to a make-believe friend, but it gets in the way of meaningful conversations. I was reminded of how much more convivial Mumbai is on this score while at a childhood friend's party in Alibagh last Saturday. I had long chats with a succession of interesting people. And when I thought about it later - and only living in Delhi for a few months made me think about it later - I had been chatting with an executive at a large US private equity fund, a senior manager at an international sovereign wealth fund, a senior lawyer and a Wall Street Journal reporter I have admired for years. Each had reason enough to look over my shoulder in search of a more interesting person to say hello to rather than listen to my bass monotone, but didn't.

Reports of the death of civility in Delhi can be exaggerated, however. Its poor record on women's safety aside, much about the city has changed for the better. There are more book discussions and concerts in a week than there were in months in the torpid Delhi I knew as a college student.

In good and bad ways, the city is a prism of the national condition. We are inconsiderate to people we don't know - queue jumping and rashly switching lanes may be an Olympian sport in the capital but are rife across the country - and very considerate towards friends and family. The help lavished on me as I settled into Delhi has been extraordinary. Colleagues have been uniformly solicitous and supportive. One friend loaned me a four poster bed fit for a Mughal for my guest room because as she all too bluntly put it, "You won't last three months in the city so why waste money on new furniture?" A friend of a friend decided to take on the task of chauffeuring me around for test drives because I don't drive. No sooner had a hotel manager friend heard that the tank above my bedroom was leaking than she was on the phone offering to send her head of engineering across to sort things out.

From New York to London to Hong Kong, I have moved every seven years or so and come to live by Isabel Allende's dictum in My Invented Country, her memoir about Chile: "From saying goodbye so often, my roots have dried up, and I have had to grow others." It is in Delhi paradoxically where this has been easiest to do and where I have been adopted by multiple families. Relationships with the older generation seem an especially enjoyable privilege for me after being orphaned in the past decade.

On Wednesday, I called to wish a friend's grandmother for her birthday. She had taught me how to make a pink gin when I was in and out of her home as a college student. "Is Nani 95 today," I asked her daughter, before she passed the phone. Ninety seven, in fact. "Do you remember his name," she had been challenged when I visited a month or so earlier. Unfazed even though she didn't remember, my friend's grandmother replied with a beatific smile, "You tell me."

It is one of India's resilient charms that there is no such thing as a generation gap. Many of my newer friends in the city are thirty-somethings, better read and more cosmopolitan than I am. My 90-year-old landlord, meanwhile, routinely greets me with a hug these days. Even my new tendency to look over the shoulders of people I am speaking to at parties suggests I am beginning to feel at home.