An Open Love Letter to North Campus
[warnings for: strong language, rape mention]
I.
When you turn the corner ahead of Sri Ram College of Commerce, the red brick wall ends and a notebook store on a thatched mat begins. On this square metre of knitted straw, a man sells folders in all colours of the rainbow (if, hypothetically, the rainbow had only two colours, which were green and violent pink), pre-punch holed sheets, and large binders emblazoned with Swami Vivekananda’s baby buttock-smooth mug. Beside this notebook store is a chai shop where, in the red alert days of Delhi pollution, you’ll reliably find college students pulling down their protective air masks to enjoy a smoke. Beside this chai shop is a fruit shop at which, if you ask for a single banana, the proprietor will look at you with murder in her eyes. And beside this fruit shop begins Photocopy Lane, a concentration of photocopy establishments ordered in a crooked row for as far as the eye can see.
A few Thursdays ago, I reached the entrance of the first and most popular fiefdom in this lane: a crumbling bodega where pale yellow skin peels back to reveal cement viscera. Two burly men were standing outside, as they always are. Their hands were crossed over their crotch like club bouncers; their faces gave nothing away. They asked me what I wanted. I told them I wanted a photocopy. They seemed at peace with this answer, possibly on account of my being in front a photocopy shop which, to my knowledge, offered no other service. One of them jerked their head in the direction of a narrow entrance, the one which leads into a poorly-lit cave.
Here, the hum of photocopiers is total and encasing, the way silence is in a cathedral. Men attend to their machines with caresses and quiet confidence: the delicate and knowing stroke of a key, done without a single glance downwards.
A man seated in front of a computer printed out four pages of an assignment I’d finished writing the other night. I know what you might be thinking. You might be thinking: but Shreya, couldn’t you just email this assignment? Has it not been two thousand and eighteen years since the Christians won time? And if you were thinking thusly, I might have replied that indeed, that would’ve been ideal, had my professor not been a part of that niche of Marxists which apparently doesn’t believe in pdfs.
The man cited: 20 rupees for four pages. 20 rupees. For four pages. I looked at him, and he looked at me, and I’d like to think that in all that looking our souls contested: when we looked away, I wasn’t sure who had won. I was being scammed—this, I knew. I thought back on all the times I’d ever been scammed in Delhi, a history so long that it appeared to arc and eventually vanish in my mind’s eye. I thought ahead to all the times I was yet to be scammed, and abruptly realised that these possibilities were numbered. College ended in two weeks; I would be done with my exams in a month.
There is a scene in the 1989 film Say Anything, where Lloyd Dobler’s best friend warns him off pursuing the beautiful Diane Court; she’s out of his league, and he’ll only get hurt. Lloyd deliberates for a split-second of silence, before flinging his hand into the air, adamant: “I wanna get hurt!”
I wanna get scammed, North Campus. I wanna get scammed.
I stepped out into bright daylight after the transaction, blinking at my surroundings like a newly-released prisoner and clutching my printouts as if they were the sum of all my worldly possessions. Smack dab in the middle of the pavement was a pretzelled dog who was nuzzling her anus. People side-stepped the dog without missing a beat, pausing only to feel the firmness of an orange, or inspect the quality of paper behind a creamily unstubbled Swami Vivekanada. I watched this dog efficiently clean out her orifice with nothing more than her tongue and an air of grim duty; she paid no heed to North Campus, and North Campus paid no heed to her, even though between the fruit shop, the chai shop, and the notebook shop, they only had one foot of clear pavement to ignore each other.
There seemed to be a sharp arrow-head of nostalgia lodged deep in my chest, for a place I hadn’t even left yet, and it shifted with every breath: this was a spectacle, and I was moved. I was thrilled. I wanted to collapse on my knees and give thanks to some higher entity. There was so much fucking mess here, so much filth and grime, and not nearly enough space to spread it all out and make it tolerable. Everyone parked their business right in front of your face so that you could watch them lick it. How grotesque. How beautiful. How very determinedly alive.
II.
Jeff Goldblum says the following dialogue (and I say Jeff Goldblum, and not Dr. Ian Malcolm, because Jeff Goldblum has only ever played himself in all his vast & varied filmography) in Jurassic Park: “Life, uh, finds a way.” But Shreya, you might be thinking, wasn’t he talking about interbreeding among female dinosaurs? And if you were thinking that, I might concede the point, that indeed, Jeff was talking about interbreeding among female dinosaurs, but by my count he was also displaying a three-button cleavage while tossing off that particular line, and besides, it’s a metaphor, and even more besides that, I can tell you for a fact that Jeff Goldblum has never enrolled in Delhi University. Life hasn’t just found a way here in North Campus: it’s found it, punched it, and asked for its money back.
Have you ever been sitting in a cycle rickshaw and made eye-contact with a man urinating on that no-man’s land stretch of wall between the Sudhir Bose Marg red light and the Roop Nagar roundabout? The place where stale corn lies scattered on the sidewalk like empty bullet casings, and crows flutter in the shadow of overhanging trees like messengers of death? Have you ever just locked eyes with this man, this man who is pissing out of the selfsame dick that he is holding in both his hands, wetting brick as if it’s an honourable public service done at great cost, and he’s looking at you as if he’s the offended party? Isn’t that incredible? And isn’t it incredible to know that his piss will wash down the wall and dribble into the the small rectangle of soil, and nourish the tree growing on the sidewalk? That this man is doing more for Delhi foliage than you are? It should be. It should be incredible to you. That life will find a way, not in spite of his piss, but because of it.
III.
If we’re really talking about life finding a way, let’s talk about pigeons. It is a fundamental fact that pigeons are incapable of having sex without a third party spectator. Anyone with an exhaust fan in their bathroom which opens out into the street can tell you as much. I was shuffling along the ladies’ queue to put my bag through the X-ray at Vishwavidyala Metro Station, intermittently making eye contact with the stranger behind me: are you seeing what I’m seeing? Are you fucking seeing what I’m seeing? And it was a real moment of human connection, because she was holding back a giddy smile, as if to say: I am. I am. And what we were both seeing was two pigeons absolutely railing each other in broad daylight, while perched, in an act of stupendous balance, right on top the narrow frame of the metal detector. I mean, they were going for it, hard. This wasn’t ‘fucking’, I’d never say anything so banal as that. It was more: the pigeon on top was an 18th century boilerman, and it was vigorously and desperately shovelling coal with what I imagined to be a tiny fragile bird penis, into the pigeon at the bottom. This wasn’t sex; this was survival. Meanwhile, the security lady was frisking passengers with a hand-held metal detector and a face that couldn’t have been less invested in the miracle happening right above her head. My entire life had reconfigured around these two pigeons, but that wasn’t her life. In her life, she was awake, but probably functionally asleep, fantasising about getting paid for overtime and putting her feet up on a soft pillow. So there I stood, in the security line at Vishwavidyala Metro Station, watching a crush of passengers flood the stairs with all their myriad lives and aspirations, as these two pigeons pounded each other in a world that was partly everyone’s, but also, partly wholly their own.
IV.
If you walk past Sri Ram College of Commerce in the opposite direction of the notebook shop, past Daulat Ram College, past the food cart, and take a right, you’ll be walking along the haunted road that takes pedestrians to Old Gupta Colony and departed souls to hell. This road somehow manages to be completely busy, with cars zooming by every couple of seconds, and simultaneously utterly abandoned, the kind of abandoned where lonely plastic bags surf the wind. On a good day, it looks like a place I’d get raped. On a dark evening like the one where I saw a cow eating from a garbage heap, it looks like a place I’d get raped, left for dead, mistaken as actually dead, and raped again. I hear you, I hear you: what cow, Shreya? And stop with the tasteless rape jokes. I can’t make any promises.
So I was walking along the road to Old Gupta Colony, which curves at a certain point and takes you past a garbage heap. As I was approaching the curve, I could make out the silhouette of a cow, so I crossed over to the other side. I don’t mess with cows. Cows are scary. Their eyes have the pathos of a vengeful mother but their bodies have a hundred times the hulking mass. None of this will make sense unless you’ve seen a cow running. By the sickly light of a municipal streetlamp, I could see this cow was nosing through the garbage. She would move things around with its snout, find something acceptable, and then chew for a while—before moving a few centimeters to the left with heavy, considered steps, and repeating the process. She wasn’t a very clean cow. A cow vigilante wouldn’t want her on their poster, is what I mean. She looked like a cow you would kill to put it out of its misery. This cow was beige and moss-green in patches, and her rear looked raw-red and flayed. As I watched, a pat of dung burrowed upward from beneath her tail, and dropped unceremoniously onto the ground. It wasn’t a huge pat of dung; it was small, the kind of pat you might step into if you weren’t looking. And the whole while I was walking along the curve, she never stopped eating.
Fresh cow dung looks like it came out of a cow. It looks soft and sheened over. Old cow dung is black and looks like it could’ve come out of anywhere. I remember another evening, where I had invited myself to a dear friend’s student collective meeting. It was happening on one of the lawns at the giant Arts Faculty courtyard, and as people spoke intelligently and empathetically about struggle, and about banding together, I was acutely aware of a hardened fist of black, unidentifiable dung, not two metres away from where I was sitting on the grass. Chipmunks flitted in and out of the group circle, trying to steal the Parle G biscuits that students had passed around. A dog howled behind a hedge somewhere: no one could say why. All around was the busy ebb and pulse of students rushing past or staying to talk, and to the side was a folded piece of cloth. On it was a painted sign meant to show, for anyone lost in the bustle, that the meeting was happening here. The collective hadn’t been allowed to put it up. As far as the campus guards were concerned, any painted sign made by students had inherently sinister connotations. But the collective had gathered anyway, and the collective talked and exchanged questions, and wondered what lessons they could draw from Chile’s student movement, and they did all this in the midst of some pretty tremendous fucking mess.
What is dung, if not the evidence of life? Life: vital and affirming, chomping its way through sustenance and discarding the useless parts through a winding intestinal journey, and then demanding more? The first thing that struck me about North Campus was how filthy it was. Three years later, it’s still the first thing that strikes me. But if you plunge your hand past that layer of filth and grime, past the cow dung and unknown animal excrement, past the suffocation and crowdedness, you will feel a pumping heart. It is pumping for all it is worth. Life finds a way here, doggedly, determinedly; people find a way here. They navigate through all this fucking mess, and thrive, and if they can’t thrive, they try and survive, because they have to. Because your heart pumps with or without your permission. I don’t know if that’s inspirational or tragic, but I do know it’s significant, and I do know it’s worth a double-take. So if you ever chance upon a dog cleaning her asshole on the street, stay still against better instinct, just for a moment, and regard her. She’s worth a little regard.
With thanks to Sourya, for his feedback and advice.