Prose before hos

"Tinder has ruined this generation", piped Xenia as she changed her car gear. She says that with empathy, knowing very well that it's all that I am doing in the eternal pursuit of finding a distraction worthy enough to blend in comfortably with my hobbies.

We're on a road that I've possibly never seen, and sure as hell never been sober while traveling on it, that she insists on calling "home".

"Ghar aa gaye yaar ab to", she says and switches her hand from the gear to her phone and turns off the GPS. "I know the way from here". I'd be lying if I said I had any idea where we were at. Apparently, it was just off Khan Market.

I am tempted to ask her, how's she so clairvoyant about life, things and certainly the direction in which that car (and our lives) are headed but I focus on the road and try to think if I've been there before.

"How did you meet him?"

She's on her way to meet the man she's dating. It's been five months since they first got together, a quickie after a family dinner that resulted into this. Truth be told, she timed the stint for no longer than a month.

It's a little after 6 pm and she's been kind enough to offer to me to drop home. Strike that, I requested her to drop me midway. I could do with a familiar face and some conversation, my cooling off period from a wild weekend that involved meeting over hundred odd people.

Xenia went to an acquaintance's house party with one of her party friends. Party friends are the kind of people you take with you to parties because they're fun as hell and know how to have a great time, In the people Pyramid, they are the opposite of awkward friends who you chill with on a Saturday night in the guise of playing Scrabble.

He happened to be there and knew a few odd people, exactly like Xenia. Both of them had nobody in common, yet they caught each other's eye. They talked for fifteen minutes, exchanged numbers and got around talking on the phone later. He tried meeting her for date but she was a bit too skeptical about seeing a guy who she had no idea about.

"He showed up for fifteen minutes and..."

"The rest as they say is history?"

"Exactly."

Got me thinking, when was the last time I saw anyone for the first time who I didn't meet off Tinder. Easy enough, it was last night and I harassed him to play Taboo with us. Poor guy, he looked traumatized each time it was his turn to go and perform. By the end of the evening, I could tell he's never showing up as a plus one with anyone for atleast a week.

To make matters worse, I got his name wrong for most part of the evening.

I don't seem to understand why we as a collective generation in this city are sucking at making an impression. This includes me, probably on top of the list. I can blame myself for being out of practice, for resigning myself to meeting the same people (when I do) at a familiar space and never venturing out of it. I'm an old soul and I've made peace with this amount of fun. I don't need more to have a rockingggg timeeeee!

Can I blame Tinder? Maybe.
Do I blame other people. For sure.

There's no space, opportunity or the safety to make these impressions and be at the receiving end of it. Call me a hypochondriac and blame me for pointing my finger out but even if I want to be at the receiving end of this, I'm too terrified to step out and do it. Earlier today, a bunch of us were at this upmarket hotel, attending an upmarket sundowner bazaar of sorts. I had a Bratwurst to tend to while the rest of the girls were down with a drink and a smoke. We had huddled in a corner when one of us looked up at a man who had passed us.

"He groped me" she looked shell shocked.

"Did you see it?" she asked us all. Only one of us had, and that took close to 45 seconds for any one of us to come down to a reaction. Rage.

We were all too stunned to react, to move and to challenge him to asking why or how dare he walk into her space and do that.

At some point, the guy had the nerve to return back to the spot. This time, she confronted him. He had mud all over his face and on his clothes. Xenia speculated, "He's drunk out of his mind", almost as if it's an excuse to let him be. To be honest, I'd have said the same if I hadn't lived this horror with her.

The girl who had been groped wasn't going to step back. She asked him why he did what he did, after calling him out from a distance. He calmly walked to us, started talking, as if we are old friends with the man. Asked us if the bazaar was going to be on tomorrow as well.

"Can you please leave us alone. You're in our space.", Xenia and another friend added assertively.

He continued to stay.

By this time, the girl who had been groped repeated the same and added, "We'll have to call the security".

Unfazed.

In a gathering of over thousands of Delhi and expat elite, this man had the nerve to grope a friend, overstay his welcome when five of us had huddled together right in the center of things, a lawn, with complete security.

I was quiet all throughout. Too stunned to react, almost as if I relived what went down with me a year ago in a supposed friend's car. While this was on, I saw a guard walk by and rushed to him. By the time I alerted him to the situation, the culprit lost his last nerve and ran in the crowd to blend with them and escaped us all.

This, ladies and gentlemen, happened a few hours ago today. Xenia was driving me because I thought it's safe to get the hell out of the place with someone I know, to as far as I can go, without allowing myself to share a space with an unknown man. That's Delhi for you. That's Delhi for me.



I stay in what qualifies as a highbrow neighbourhood with the best of market, pubs, lounges etc just a few meters away. If I truly want, I just need to step out. Dressed well, in clear make up and dewy skin, all I need to bring is my face, to make a long lasting impression. One Green Apple Shisha and a few beers in, I can clack my heels around and eye fuck men who probably can't differentiate between "your" and "you're". They'll be just as receptive and we can possibly exchange numbers and take this forward.

However, there's a reason my standards don't allow me to succumb to drawing the attention of men who use multiple exclamations as a substitute to a question mark. There's a reason my pickup line (100% original) continues to be, "Would you like to punctuate me?"

I digress, but I am a pissant when it comes to men and more often than not, my patience doesn't allow me to go out of my way and allow someone to make an impression. More often than not, it's their demeanour which gets to me. This man could have approached us politely for a conversation, instead, brushing and feeling up a friend's arse is hardly the way to go about it. While I understand, a misplaced punctuation in a post party text is all it takes to get my head out of the person's text window (that's what she said?), this behaviour is not how you take things forward with anyone.

What I'm badly trying to explain is that, as a city, Delhi has failed to give me spots to meet anyone IRL and take things forward organically. The apps that are there can only serve a limited purpose, if you're in for a quickie and have balls the size of King Solomon to allow a stranger to do you and you do back. I admit, I'm a prude. I like things the old fashioned way, where you do meet the person in a setting unfamiliar and both of you are just as out of character as the orange flavoured vodka you're offered. There are things to talk about, there's stuff to look out for.

However, the city we are at offers nothing. It doesn't offer opportunities, it doesn't offer safe space and sure as hell, doesn't offer men who you can trust.

Everytime I am in half a mind to meet a guy off a dating app, my friends closely vet and bring to a no. Their judgement, as harsh as it maybe, keeps things relatively safe.

However, to what extent?

Does one stop stepping out altogether? Grow old in the eternal hope that someone bumps into you while you're buying groceries at the nearest General Store and hopefully doesn't brush their hand up your ass and punctuates their text properly?

I'm onto you.

If places could be personified, then SDA might be the only place in Delhi which would have seen most of my dates and I, together. It's strange, if you think about it. You're attempting to forge intimacy with someone and yet, zero to few people know them, let alone have met them. Unless ofcourse you're Divyanshu's version of a woman, where everyone tells everyone everything and all women then laugh about penis sizes together.

No, really. That's how he thinks womenfolk behave in private.

I digress, but SDA is the single space in Delhi that's seen me from my "haha, I'm SO cool sitting at Village Café and watching two women blow a man over a stupid Pineapple drink phase" to smoking weed with a Tinder date at 1 am (dressed in a Sari, nothing less), to even going there after my Post Grad convocation with a bunch of people I loathe. In that way, SDA qualifies as the most versatile space, I've been there with my friends, dates, assignments, broken heart and terrified gut- all of it.

Like the can of worm that conditioning is, SDA and I started out really early. Mum stepping out of her car to get me a simple, coleslaw filling sandwich on the day of the last exam in Final Term (from Rainbows) is how I remember it. That became our ritual, until my mother abandoned it around the time I was 14 or something. No one likes to deal with a budding teenager, I suppose. However, thankfully Rainbows did not give up on me. It continued to make appearance in and around my life till I graduated out of school. Well within the first year, a bunch of us from school decided to meet and call it a 'reunion'.

Reunions are amazing, only people who attempt to put them together are those who have met with the others probably thirty times in a year (and yet insist on calling it a fucking reunion). Regardless, at that outing the food had become insipid. The sandwiches that we used to look forward to receiving as a part of "refreshment box" from school for volunteering during the inter-school competition were dry, and filled with two day old stale cream and chopped cabbage mostly. To add insult to injury, Rainbows from my childhood went down the dumps, when we were thrown out of their basement- some 15 of us from school, as we were making a lot of "noise". I don't understand how could I miss the circular saying that Rainbows had become a fucking hospital instead of a chilled out pastry parlour.

By the time I was one set of Board examinations old, Barista had come up. I also had the first misfortune of attending a friend's insult lesson when a Barista from Barista told her that she should have known before ordering an Americano that it's black coffee. The said friend added three sachets of sugar and still claimed, "कड़वा है" (it's bitter). Nobody was pleased, least of all their staff. I believe it had something to do with the fact that they were overloaded with people like us, dressed in school uniforms and ruining their marketing plan of looking at freelancers and fellow marketing executives to work out of coffee shops than offices or homes. To this day, each time I order Americano, I go back to wondering, whose fault was it really? My friend's for not being culturally aware or the pissed Barista for explaining why the coffee tasted bitter (it's my friend's, for being completely stupid, I know).

There were those occasions when my batchmates from school would pay money to the guard to ask him to bring us a plate of chole kulche from the guy standing the intersection. He's no longer there, neither is Shefali Sweets, who was a poorer cousin of Anupam Sweets in GK-2. Shefali used to do killer chaat at some point, which when they stopped, I was extremely sad. For years later, I would stop at the Frankie outlet outside Shefali to buy a Mutton Egg Frankie, the best 140 bucks you could spend at SDA. Last couple of times I went, that guy's missing. Everything familiar about SDA is lost in time.

Off late whenever I visit, I find myself transfixed at the magazine/stationery shop in the middle of the market. His shop faces the park, and the old man looks idly into the space. I am moved, each time I see how hopeful he looks, when I just stop to look at magazines. I wonder, how long until he shuts the business. Maybe till he dies? Is it his way of entertaining himself in the absence of company? How would it feel like to be in a market full of people where everyone is with someone and you're by yourself? Satisfying? Easy to see no customers flock to buy Greeting Cards, Magazines or obsolete tech? Last I remember, it was about a year ago and I was on a date when the man and I decided to play a round of cards (disclaimer- his idea). I bought a pack from the man, and proceeded to Beer Café, without battling an eyelid. Later, ofcourse, it occurred to me why on Earth would a magazine shop stack playing cards? Over the next couple of visits, I found he was selling everything- from miniature animals to complete school projects, to plastic glasses so people can drink in their cars after buying the booze from the alcohol shop next door. Versatile, the only way you can wrap the idea of SDA around your head.

There used to be this tiny shack selling the best Rajma-Chawal in the same market. The owner was really hospitable, especially so for the size of his operation and scale of venture. My working hours don't allow me to get back and stop for a plate of subsized lunch, curated to target the IITians, across the road but man, I'd go back in a heartbeat. A family run setup selling chai and bread pakoda has come up on the side of this guy's shop, they take over starting 4 pm or so, selling the office staff and IIT folks in the market, cheap and strong cup of tea. Chaayos, Barista, Costa Coffee and other coffee shops in the same market have nothing on this family. Goes on to say, if you're good at something, you'll always be valued well.

Which also comes to life for SDA. The place was a small, sleepy market that nobody cared about, years after till HKV was a thing. It's coming up to life now, with new flashy cafes, pubs, fine dine restaurants, cheap booze, cheap food..everything in between. There are so many vendors selling momos, each rumoured to be better than the other by old Hauz Khas veterans who claim that their recommended stuff is out of the world. There's everything at SDA, marketing executives (which Barista once wanted) to rich kids with deep pockets (because HKV is so 2012), broke school and college students, brooders and pretentious mofos, world's friendliest dogs, condescending cats, Rajma Chawal, Nitrogen Ice Cream.

However, the only thing that SDA and I share more than others is this sense of nostalgia, that bitch of a feeling of ownership, of loyalty and definitely that of fondness. I'm so crippled of sharing this sense of affection, attachment with other beings, but wear on my sleeve for the market that SDA is.

When I was young, my stomach used to have butterflies (of a variety which would make me want to throw up every morning as soon as I landed up in school) as soon as I would enter SDA. The snake like turns inside the residential area always terrified me of the Math class starting in under 7 minutes, of the horror of being inside the Physics lab and not knowing anything, of wanting to tear eyeballs out of everyone...and yet, years later, I'd kill to be back in the labyrinthian lanes of SDA and walk around. There's plenty of Delhi there, the Delhi I knew from the 90s, the place that gave me a home outside of home.

Maybe, one day when I leave my residence for better things, I'll find myself house hunting (and hopefully landing) at SDA. Until then, I can only see it from a heart full of emotions in moving car when I'm crossing it to get back home.