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On the finest days of March, the city of Delhi is earthy, flavoursome, and wistfully beautiful. The poetry lingering in the busy streets of a city that has known many names, flies into a frenzy. These are days where a walk in a wayside street will make a poet out of just about anyone. Delhi is a beauty that lives, untrammelled, side-along with great ugliness. Or is it the other way around?Â
The drive from Indira Gandhi Airport to my University that lies an hour and a half away in the state of Haryana, allows me a strange kind of voyeurism of the ugliness. Some of the scenes that span the drive from Delhi to Sonepat, Haryana, are in one word apocalyptic. I think of Ghalib and Mir whose lives were lived, not all that far away in both distance and time. What words would they use if they could chance upon some of the newly acquired ugly secrets that their beloved Dilli is suffocating under. The Yamuna that was once blue and bountiful (I presume because I have never seen it as such) could well be a large-sized, half-dried gutter. Its banks have no trace of green. There is only dirtied, dusty cement for as far as the eye can reach. Thousands upon thousands of cars and trucks pass the highway that I am on, every single day, and yet, expansive as it is, it is always choked.Â
The mountain we always cross is unmissable. The first thing to come to terms with is the fact that it is not a mountain. I don’t know if, with enough faith, a man can move mountains but I do know that with enough indifference he can certainly create one. In official parlance, it is known as the Ghazipur landfill. Currently, it spans an expanse of seventy acres. The pit has been past its capacity for eighteen years. Those of us who have learnt to live with it, out of strained acquiescence, toughness, or practiced acceptance of just how things are, have more rigorous thresholds. To me, its genesis is sickening but simultaneously, awe-inspiring. It is, to my mind, a manifestation not of cruelty, violence, or evil, but ruthless indifference. A humanity, both infinite and infinitesimal, can create things wondrous and things disastrous beyond all conception.Â
Even if one dozes off in the rumbling drive between Delhi and Sonepat, one recognises even in somnolence, the smell of putrefying garbage that envelopes the entirety of the surrounding areas. These days I notice it lesser and lesser. Have I somehow managed to get used to it in a matter of no more than an hour or two stretched over three years in batches of twenty seconds? For all the horror of its sensuous assault and its dire implications, the heap is unsettlingly grand. Its proportions are such that if one looks out of the corner of their eye, it could be a tall, rugged feature majestically placed in Haryana’s dry and sandy terrain. The illusion is short-lived. At any-given time of the day, one will find tractors and garbage trucks precariously making their way up the slopes to add some more waste. Sometimes, there are numerous, thick trails of grey smoke wafting into the sky caused by fires in the heap, a bare minimum means of ghastly maintenance. And then there are the birds of prey, high up into the overlooking sky, constantly circling, opening a chasm from a different world from where all such things manifest. Because, surely, it cannot belong to ours?Â
I get twenty seconds every alternate weekend or so to be a cheap voyeur into a world that I can scarcely believe exists, and one I am all too glad to forget. And I have no doubt that a similar sickness ails all of Delhi and the regions bordering thereof. Some creations like the Taj Mahal in the city of Agra a few hours away, are a testimony to remembrance and the enticing power of memory. Others, like the Ghazipur landfill are a testimony to collective amnesia. I learnt, recently, that the landfill will soon cross the Taj Mahal in height. Like the many carefully forgotten memories stacked in a dark corner of our minds, there will always be another mountain, more terrible and unsurmountable than the one we are capable of forgetting. I fear that one day, far more than twenty seconds will have passed, but this new-age mountain will go on.
By Divya Somani, for the Trans Solidarity Fundraiser