Delhi Read Online Free

only to mention the latter.) India was already famed for many things—its elephants and snakes, palaces and hovels, sages and collaborators, its many gods and tongues. You might, like Mark Twain, kill thirteen tigers on your first hunt. You might classify verbs or skull sizes. You might go out to find yourself a husband from among the eligible young lieutenants and polo players. Of course, you might find the life out there all ‘stupid dull and uninteresting’, like a 21-year-old Winston Churchill. All this lay at the end of a tedious months-long journey over the waves.
    At the other end of that voyage was my family, and other animals.
    My grandpa, my father’s father, grew up in Calcutta. A sociable younger son, he trained first as a classical Indian singer and later as a lawyer. (This law degree was obtained in a fit of pique: after his father called him a flibbertigibbet, he studied at night just so he could slam the certificate down on the table in the next argument.) In photos he has sleek hair and a Hitler moustache: Nazi Germany was a big hit with the young idealistic Bengalis of the 1930s and 1940s (and their champion, Subhas Chandra Bose, looks oddly like the melting Gestapo agent in Raiders of the Lost Ark ). In fact, the Nazis are still popular in India. The state of Maharashtra is full of Hitler brands, Mein Kampf is still a big seller, and I saw a DJ in one upmarket Delhi bar proudly wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the red, black and white swastika (he was reclaiming it, he said). There was even a recent TV serial about a very stern female breadwinner, set in Delhi: it was called Hitler Didi .
    But six decades ago, my grandpa abandoned newly independent India for the bright lights and loose postwar immigration policies of the imperial motherland.
    From Trinidad to the Netherlands, South Africa to Canada, the world is full of Persons of Indian Origin. The diaspora outside India includes between 9 and 30 million of them, depending on how propagandistic your definition of Indianness is. They have poured from the subcontinent in overlapping waves. Merchants to the four corners of the earth: from Russia to Kenya, Indonesia to Persia. Sailors and indentured labourers and imperial policemen across the British Empire, from Hong Kong and Singapore to the Caribbean. More recently, academics, doctors, entrepreneurs and the IT lot to the rich West. Now another surge of poor workers clean the Gulf states’ toilets. Everywhere they have been unpopular: thrown out of Idi Amin’s Uganda and coup-ridden Fiji, ‘curry-bashed’ in Australia, second-class citizens in Malaysia, Guyana, Sri Lanka, and the Gulf.
    Many migrants fight hard to preserve their homelands’ cultures overseas. They force their children to take traditional dance classes, learn the mother tongue, marry within the community. Over time, as the motherland changes but the diaspora group does not, this can have quite weird effects (just look at V. S. Naipaul). They can become more Indian than the Indians, militantly committed to a very particular idea of India. And ordinarily, no community is more militant about this cultural preservation than the Bengalis.
    In India, the ‘Bongs’ are stereotyped as brainy dweebs. My former professor, himself owlish and clever, told me regretfully that they used to be considered great marriage catches, until the rise of the musclebound cash-wielding Punjabi in films and firms. Bengalis are bespectacled, soft-handed and sweet-toothed intellectuals, most often to be found spouting leftwing political philosophy late into the night. The only thing they love more than fish is arguing, and the only thing they don’t argue about is Bengali culture: they are utterly convinced that their language, literature and brains are the greatest in all world history.
    But in London my grandfather’s plucky Bengali spermatozoa encountered my grandmother. In this formidable Finnish ice-hockey player