The family business

Last year, Kabir turned to his diary of two decades ago to check how he'd fared against the goals he'd set himself - the serious as well as the facetious - when graduating from college. He'd turned his back on the family's well-established business to become an entrepreneur, travelled, made and lost friends, managed to avoid discussions on politics, appeared on television for his five minutes of vicarious fame, taken up riding, given up riding, trekked to the base camp at Mt Everest, eaten escargots (under duress: he won the bet, but threw up after), got drunk and gone to a strip club in Bangkok, got drunk and sung karaoke also in Bangkok, made his first 10 million before turning 30, and now, on the cusp of 40, he was looking at his potential failures. He hadn't fallen in love, hadn't married, and any hope of becoming a father appeared remote. "I'd promised myself I would be a dad by the time I was 40," he mused.
 

You'd imagine love would be easy to find in India's capital with youngsters hanging out at hip bars, meeting over clouds of hookah smoke and whisky fumes, but Delhi remains conservative in these matters. Here, kids grow up seamlessly from dissolute youth to responsible adulthood in a snap of fingers and an arranged marriage. They might be avid fans of Grey's Anatomy and Gossip Girl but rarely stray on the wrong side of discretion.

Luckless at 40, Kabir renounced matrimony. "But I wanted be a father," he said to me. "He adopted a child?" my wife asked, when I told her about our mutual acquaintance's graduation to fatherhood. "He opted," I pointed out, "for surrogacy." How strange that a city that could be so lacking in affection should offer that cloak of anonymity, unconsciously making room for apparently profligate single fathers to move from the fringes of society to mainstream monotony. Single, divorced or gay, whether porn star, gym instructor or model, working graveyard shifts or up the corporate ladder, Delhi's morphed sophisticates now had room for everyone sans the gossip and censure it would have attracted in previous years.

As the capital has grown increasingly cosmopolitan in a self-absorbed, self-obsessed way, neighbours no longer have the time to pry into others' business, and traffic woes triumph over spying across landings and shared staircases. Malls are the new hangouts, and lounge bars the habitat of the city's youth when they're not at work. Home is where they make an appearance when it's time to crash or, like Kabir, when it's finally time to settle into some semblance of what now passes as the new nuclear family. While it might go against the grain of the Indian joint family, it's being replicated faster than the joint family can lose its flanks of cousins, nieces and in-laws.

At a recent party, I sat next to a woman who'd divorced her husband of three decades because she "got bored". Beside her was a friend who'd taken her sibling to court on the small matter of a family inheritance and was Rs 200 crore richer for it. Across from her, a retired gentlemen was set to marry a lady young enough to be his granddaughter, but who hadn't bothered to accompany him "to be with the fogies", so it seemed they would spend their years of forthcoming matrimony socialising with their own age-group friends. Kabir need have no inhibitions about his unusual paternity - in Delhi, there's room for him, and more.