2/9 – Charging through the early morning countryside on the Shatabdi express towards Agra, a rare example in Delhi of something that works without a lot of shoving and hooting. I’m feeling particularly misanthropic at the end of a week in which several sources of discontent have come to a head. Perhaps it’s the alchemical nigredo of this residency, and the Taj Mahal will provide a crucible for the next stage of the work. And tea has just been served, which always improves the complexion of the moment. It’s bag in a cup, providing a nice, familiar BR feeling, rather than the rocket-fuel chai with which days at the studio are punctuated.
On Wednesday we were invited round for dinner by Pooja, the vivacious and slightly vampy director of Khoj. It was the first social event of the residency, slightly tardy perhaps, but there was a nice bunch, including a german journalist, resident in Delhi for some time, who was telling me about having her breasts squeezed by suspicious hijeera whom she was filming on a pilgrimage, passing herself off as a transsexual.
The buffet was delicious, wine copious and the apartment clean, comfortable and air-conditioned. It threw into relief the rather different conditions in which the resident artists are expected to survive. Lacking AC, sleep is only possible when lying directly under the ceiling fan turned up to maximum. Even then, one wakes sticky with sweat. On Thursday night both the electricity and the back-up supply failed. Almost instantly, it became like sitting in a sauna. The Khoj response was to send Ramesh to poke around ineffectually, and then suggest we spent the night at the studio. I opted for a hotel, and the following morning took advantage of being near a metro station to head for Chandni Chowk market again.
The reason for this masochism was that the previous day I’d got the first mercury oscillator working. The Dead Kennedys vibrated the blob of mercury sitting on the tiny speaker into fascinating patterns of ripples. But bouncing a laser off it was disappointing, creating only faint blurry reflections. It seemed the fault lay with my use of window glass to encapsulate the device, so I was on the hunt for scientific glassware. You get the feeling that most things are available somewhere in Chawri Bazar, but it’s only through luck or personal connections that you’ll find them. I ended up with a slightly random collection of tubes, phials and microscope slides, on the way encountering a beggar with a total of one and a half limbs, rolling around on his back and groaning piteously. How do you ignore an appeal like that? Am I a moral pygmy because it takes that level of disadvantage to trigger my sympathy? It seems to me morality is a constantly negotiated process. We have an inherent facility for deception, and an inherent need to think well of ourselves.
Whatever your buttons, they’ll get pushed here. The tragedy is the banality of one’s reactions. Is a religion that preaches karma a consolation or the root of the problem? How do Indians themselves tolerate these levels of inequality? Perhaps one should treat the whole bewildering spectacle like a Victorian circus, applauding the acts that revolt or fascinate the most. In which case the guy we saw at the station would win the jackpot. His feet were swollen to nightmare proportions, every toe the size of a fat banana, jiggling as he strode down the platform. In actual fact, he wasn’t asking for money.
Situations and ideas like this are constantly challenging my belief that art-science collaboration has any relevance here. One’s experience of the city is so powerfully coloured by the apparent absence of shared social space, which we take for granted in European cities. In its place there seems to be only juxtaposed and competing, privatised fragments, characterising everything from driving styles to the discontinuity of pavements. Sure, there are the vast, grassy boulevards of Lutyens imperial masterplan, but they seem to bear no relation to the scale and needs of everyday life, evidence of a lack of empathy of another kind.
