Delhi Read Online Free Page A

with a taste for bespectacled brown men half her height, he met his match. The two nationalities could not be more different. Bengal is muggy, filled with mangrove swamps at one end and the hilly tea plantations of Darjeeling at the other; Finland is flat and icy. The population of the Kolkata metropolitan area alone is almost three times the entire population of Finland; its population density is a thousand times greater. The Bengalis chatter and eat sweets and dodge sport; the Finns ski in grumpy silence. The two share only a depressing handful of things: the aforementioned love of fish, the ability to survive sauna conditions, and a disproportionate propensity to commit suicide.
    The compromise between the two extremes was English, football, and the suburbs. Their three children—my father a jolly and perpetually nude baby in the middle—grew up speaking neither Bengali nor Finnish, understanding neither Hinduism nor Lutheranism. They might have reclaimed this heritage in one of the attacks of genealogical panic that seems everywhere to seize the middle-aged. But into this mongrel mix was thrown the Mothership’s side of the family too: a Scottish-Irish muddle of customs officials, conscientious objectors, and even one shipwreck-prone whaler who apparently confessed on his deathbed to cannibalizing a cabin boy. In this melting pot, Bengal was boiled up with all the other ingredients and transmogrified into little more than bad eyesight and a surname.
    My home turf in northern England was full of South Asians, and all that entailed: great curry houses, sketchy corner shops, headscarfed mothers, rightwing politics, a race riot in 2001. If we were lucky, on the way home from swimming lessons we’d stop for gulab jamun , sticky-sweet fried dumplings, alongside our fish & chips. I remember giggling over the chorus to Cornershop’s smash hit ‘Brimful of Asha’: ‘everybody needs a bosom for a pillow, everybody needs a bosom’. I never knew that ‘Asha’ was in fact one of Bollywood’s greatest singers. I remember casting my first vote, glad to see that the idiotic racist vote would be split three ways by three idiotic racist parties. I remember filling in a tickbox form and choosing my ethnicity as ‘White Asian’; it sounded exotic and faintly incredible, like a white tiger.
    There were hints of Indianness in our house. The Mothership gamely discovered cumin before all the other mothers, and once spent an entire day boiling pints upon pints of milk to make a microscopic amount of kulfi icecream, an attempt never to be repeated. In my bedtime stories Ganesh got his elephant head, Krishna sucked his demon nurse dry (terrifyingly illustrated), and Rama battled for pages and pages to free Sita from the demon king Ravana, only to chuck her out again in a moment of alpha male paranoia. Every few years relatives arrived with gold rings for my brothers and complaints about the cold. One sari-clad woman insisted we call her ‘Grandma’, which we knew to be an alarming lie. She was probably my grandpa’s cousin; we were never entirely sure because all Bengalis all have two names: a perfectly respectable one plus an arbitrary two-syllable family nickname, so that your stern elderly relatives might introduce themselves as, say, Pinky, Hippo and Tushy.
    But really, India left barely a mark on my childhood. In terms of impact on my youthful consciousness it was somewhere above Thatcherism but below the Spice Girls. In the late 1990s, I remember watching the sitcom Goodness Gracious Me together on the sofa. (The rasp of my father’s crisp packet, the exasperated sigh of the iron. The Mothership perhaps cradling a glass of wine, back when Chardonnay was still the apex of British middle-class leisure, a small brother slumped over each sofa arm.) One of the sketches that evening involved the provenance of the British royal family:
    They all live in the same family house