Love and the city

Like food, love - for a city or for the city dweller - can be addictive

Describing his years as a young academic in New Delhi in the mid-1980s, novelist Amitav Ghosh writes: “I was living in... Defence Colony — a neighbourhood of large, labyrinthine houses, with little self-contained warrens of servants’ rooms tucked away on roof-tops and above garages... those rooms had come to house a floating population of the young and straitened journalists, copywriters, minor executives, and university people like myself. We battened upon this wealthy enclave like mites in a honeycomb, spreading from rooftop to rooftop.” Ravish Kumar also describes such an existence in an unnamed poem of his book, A City Happens