Books Literature

When Delhi was the city of the future

Rana Dasgupta

01 January 2014

AT THE DAWN OF THE PRESENT CENTURY I was working for a marketing consultancy firm in New York. The job was becoming a burden: I was increasingly consumed by the novel I was trying to write in the evenings and, moreover, I was in love with a woman who lived on the other side of the world—in Delhi. And so, at the end of 2000, I emulated, contrariwise, my father’s journey.

I arrived with one suitcase and a box of notes and articles I had collected for my writing. Everything else I owned I stored with an uncle in New Jersey. I didn’t think it would be long before I was back. I didn’t know how long it took to write a novel, but it surely couldn’t take more than six months. I had no intention of staying in Delhi: I had passed through it a few times during childhood visits to Calcutta, and remembered it as a polluted, charmless sprawl. I had no doubt I could convince my beloved to forsake it for sparkling Manhattan.

The author’s grandparents, Rama Prasanna Dasgupta and Ramala Dasgupta, in the early 1950s.. COURTESY RANA DASGUPTA — The author’s grandparents, Rama Prasanna Dasgupta and Ramala Dasgupta, in the early 1950s.
COURTESY RANA DASGUPTA

Rana Dasgupta is the author of two novels, Tokyo Cancelled and Solo. His latest book, Capital, a non-fiction portrait of Delhi in the 21st century, is out on 15 January 2014.

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