There’s a non-joke that we perform in tandem, my oldest friend Sweta and I, almost like marionettes. It goes like this: she tells me something about our Ranchi childhoods, and our old schoolmates, most of whom I hated with a black fury that could not have been healthy at 15. I listen to her story, and then declaim, with a martyred air, this practised bromide: “Main aur tum ek hi gaon se hain” (You and I, we’re from the same village). She perks up, and then repeats the line, sometimes forgetting how we arrived at it (again). The routine is often accompanied by saccharine smiles or flat-out groans of dismay. Not ours — what do you think we are, polite or something? — but from literally everybody else in the room. I have often imagined Alice, Sweta’s button-eyed half-Spitz, judging us for this non-joke. This is how intensely we feel the need to revisit it.

That is who we are some evenings: card-carrying Biharis and Jharkhandis (we’re still not a hundred per cent on our feelings about that one: the State is still a teenager, you see, and we just don’t know whether it will grow up to be a scientist or a poet or an axe-murderer), dreaming about Tagore Hill and sattu-puris and street ‘chomin’ that looks like it has been grease-mitzvahed thrice for luck. We drink in and from Delhi, emptying each cup to the dregs, blowing smoke rings that are visible for about three seconds before diffusing around us, like our pasts.

When I told my friend I was working on a story about Bihari immigration, Delhi and nostalgia in recent literature, I offered to lend her some of the Hindi books I read and re-read in preparation. She declined with a characteristic half-frown, saying, “itni Hindi nahi samajh aayegi (Can’t handle that much Hindi)”. I understood, of course. We had outrun parts of ourselves, her and I. Just not the same parts.

Global village

One of the books I offered was Ravish Kumar’s Ishq Mein Sheher Hona (To Be a City in Love, 2015), the first in what came to be known as the ‘Laprek’ or Laghu Prem Katha (short love story) series — three petite volumes published by Rajkamal, a Hindi publisher as old as independent India. These are very short stories, no more than a pocketbook page or two — vignettes, really. Formally, they’re urban love stories, set in Delhi for the most part. They are as knowledgeable about Mangolpuri as they are about Greater Kailash. They are adept at negotiating the density of Nizamuddin and the vertigo of Film City.

But what they also end up becoming is a new, exceptionally self-aware immigrant literature, one powered by (but also wary of) the massively disruptive forces of social media.

In the prologue to Ishq Mein Sheher Hona, Ravish writes, “Sheher meri zindagi mein gaon banaam sheher ke roop mein aaya. (…) Hum ‘sthaayi’ pata ke column mein gaon ka pata bharte the. Sheher ke dere ka nahi. Har mauke par Bihar ki rajdhani Patna se motihari jile ke gaon Jitwarpur lautna hota tha. Har waqt ghar aur dera ka fark bana rehta tha. Ghar matlab gaon, dera matlab sheher.”(My introduction to the city is through the ‘village vs city’ dichotomy (…) We would write our village address under ‘permanent address’. Not our city location. At every opportunity, we would return from the capital Patna to Jitwarpur village in Motihari district. At all times, we would differentiate between our village home and our city residence.)

When I first read this passage, I was struck not only by the ease of the symbolism, but also the sheer number of times the words ‘city’ and ‘village’ popped up on the same page.

It dawned on me that Ravish had, in effect, reduced the words to psychic categories rather than geographical ones (this is also evident in the title of the book), just like a poem reinforces certain ideas through refrains and phonetics.

I came to Delhi in May 2012, shortly after wrapping up my geology degree. A job at a small but hip English-language newspaper awaited me. On the morning of my first day at work, I arrived at nine, petrified, sleep-deprived and unaware that my colleagues would start coming in only around 11. Ever the overachiever, I planted myself in the nearest cabin. It turned out to be the CEO’s. Presently, a tall (and broad) gent accosted me, tie, briefcase and ’70s bouffant in place. He asked me, in a polished world radio baritone, whether I had been hired “in the newsroom” or as part of “Features”. I realised that I hadn’t the slightest idea what he was talking about. I had come here on the back of the editor’s email asking me to. To Mr Shah’s credit — and I remain grateful to him for this — he chose to ignore my shocking ignorance and asked if I minded relocating anywhere other than his cabin. I still remember the copious amounts of sweat that had collected on my laptop bag, as my forehead dripped freely.

I realised I had just become the kind of character that Manoj Kumar and, later, Govinda took up so often in Hindi movies — the village bumpkin who makes a royal mess of every social or professional situation he, willy-nilly, steps into. Years later, reading Ravish’s lines as I rode the Metro, I realised the cleverness of the gaon/sheher conceit.

Many of us ‘tier two city’-dwellers had bought into what Marshall MacLuhan, the patron saint of technocratic philosophy, had called “the global village” — a world bound by the intangible threads of electronic media. We had, thanks to our Anglophone education, internalised our inevitable future lives in the metropolis — a psychic category made up of dollops of Mumbai (because Bollywood) and second-hand sprinkles of Delhi or, in my case, Kolkata (I went to college in Kharagpur, a two-hour train ride away). Many of us had fancied ourselves born city slickers, simply by virtue of never having lived in a village.

This was a lie, and I knew it now. Sooner or later, we would all be humbled by a city, if not ‘the city’. And on some sweltering afternoons, we would all pine for ‘the village’, if not actually a village.

An LSR girl with straight hair

By the end of 2012, I had settled into the Delhi ‘jholawallah’ (Hindi half-comic, half-pejorative for journalists) routine nicely. I was the youngest person at my workplace, and the only guy. My super-smart, slightly intimidating colleagues would rib me good-naturedly; once, I even blushed, which was a new experience. Some jokes would be about the droves of female hearts I had broken upon exiting IIT; if you’re Indian, and haven’t been living under a rock, you’ll know that this is a joke for statistical reasons (If you’ve met me, however, you’ll recognise this to be a joke on general principle). Even Sweta warned me, ‘It’s time you find a girl or I will set you up on a date’ (she never did).

Two recent Hindi books by young Bihari men with a Delhi media background have romantic misadventures as framing device. Ishq Breaking News Nahi (Love Isn’t Breaking News) is the third, and most recent, book in the Laprek series, written by Vineet Kumar, an ex-journalist now teaching at Delhi’s Indian Institute of Mass Communication (IIMC). Vineet takes Ravish’s game in new and unexpected directions, expertly juxtaposing the addictive rush of daily newsroom deadlines and the push for a ‘breaking news’ scoop with modern-day romantic afflictions.

Non-Resident Bihari (2015), by Shashikant Mishra, is the story of Rahul, whose life is summed up by the pithy blurb on the back cover: “Ek taraf UPSC aur doosri taraf Shalu” (On one hand the UPSC {civil services} exam, on the other Shalu). In one clever fell swoop, it pronounces judgement on the Bihari boy’s idea of romance. To Rahul, Shalu is another test he can ace, if only he can keep calm, prepare well, get enough sleep and consume the breakfast of champions: a tall glass of sattu (roasted chickpea flour, described in the book as “Bihari Horlicks”) dissolved in water, with added salt and a slice of lemon squeezed in for good measure. He resorts to more and more desperate measures to ‘rescue’ Shalu from the clutches of her influential and boorish family. His are verily the labours of a Bihari Hercules, propped up on “lal batti ke sapne” (dreams made of red beacons aka a career in the bureaucracy), litti-chokha (another sattu-based Bihari dish) and the occasional glass or six of Old Monk.

The hijinks that Rahul and his friends get up to while living in Delhi’s Mukherjee Nagar (well known as the abode of thousands of Bihari civil services aspirants) are the comedic core of the book (not entirely dissimilar, in that regard, to Siddharth Chowdhury’s outstanding English novel Day Scholar). Their roving eyes take in their “eye tonic” of choice: the bodies of young women who look like they were to the manor born (even if some of them were immigrants, Biharis included, like themselves). Of particular interest is a certain kind of Delhi girl: LSR-educated (Lady Shri Ram College), straight hair, sundresses and endless legs.

This weird mixture of fetishisation and grudging respect was not new to me, courtesy Bihari college friends and the charming specimens of masculinity back home in Ranchi. Bihari boys, for the most part, are beholden to brand names and catch-phrases, muscular acronyms like IIT and UPSC and, in our infinite condescension, ‘even LSR’. This had been explained to me at length — including the ‘even’ bit — by a former neighbour whom I have since fallen out of touch with. Later on, his was the story that I heard most often from friends. For a while, he did live with a person who had studied at LSR. It’s not just that his English was bad (which it was), but also that his contempt for the same was shaped by misogyny, not ideology — he would imitate her (slight) accent ad nauseam. Apparently, he was dumped in the middle of what proved to be one too many of these impressions.

Here’s a ‘roving eye’ section from Non Resident Bihari.

“Aur phir in ladkiyon ke stylish, sexy, transparent dress! Dekhe ho kabhi kisi apsara ko aise dress mein. (…) Bechaari low-cut aur backless choli ke liye taraskar reh jaati hongi.”(...the stylish, sexy, transparent attire of these women! Have you seen any apsara in one of these? Poor thing must be craving these low-cut, backless blouses.)

By the end of the book, I realised that Shalu amounted to little more than a prop for the narrative. We are never told what her professional or personal interests are, whereas Rahul’s lal-batti dreams are narrated in excruciating detail. The one time she lands up in Delhi to meet Rahul, we are again told little from her point of view — beyond the experience of making out with her boyfriend near India Gate, that is.

This realisation made me feel smugly happy, even woke, for a grand total of 30 seconds, before I remembered I wasn’t all that different from Rahul, in fact, even angrier in some ways. Writerly success was my personal lal-batti, but the playground — Delhi — and its rules were the same.

A little less than two years after I moved to Delhi, I met a girl called Bharti (not her real name) via a short-lived bibliophile’s club I managed on Facebook. Long story short, we were in that delicious and impossibly stressful grey zone where you’re waiting for the other person to make the first concrete move — this is a land populated by ogres, hellfire and flirty text messages that dare you to type a suitably escalating reply. If you don’t reply, you end up receiving the kind of riposte I did: “I don’t date people who’re too busy for their own good...” The trailing ellipses hurt you more than the words do.

Did I mention Bharti was a Bihari LSR student with impossibly straight hair, a growing interest in Arun Kolatkar and a way with dogs and cats? Yes, dear reader, it was hiccups-and-stammers at first sight.

Until one day, when I told her what I needed to — and was turned down. Bharti told me that “romantic entanglements” were not her thing, and that she would have been more amenable had I asked for “friendship, or sex, or both”. She further revealed that she was quite the matchmaker: that a friend of hers whom I had briefly met (and soundly ignored) the week before, had in fact been dragged along as an intended future girlfriend for me. I lost my temper at this most innocent of deceptions and let her have a piece of my (very loud and hurtful) mind.

Why was I angry to the point of being scandalised? This was nothing I hadn’t come across before. I certainly did not judge my three Delhi friends who, I knew, had similar friends-with-benefits arrangements. And yet, the prospect of my name and a no-strings-attached physical relationship in the same sentence made me The Incredible Sulk. Was I a bad liberal or a not-good-enough conservative (not that these are particularly helpful terms to describe Indians, but you get the drift)?

That night, I consumed an unholy amount of Old Monk and litti-chokha and cried myself to sleep. I never spoke to Bharti again.

New Delhi, Je T’aime

For all the cheap thrills provided by Mishra’s novel, I found Ishq Breaking News Nahi to be a far superior book. In one of the first vignettes, a young couple, Antara and Arthaat, are bickering — Arthaat has just asked Antara bluntly: “Kya tum ‘conceive’ karogi?” (Will you conceive?) Antara first yells at him and then asks softly the reason behind his bizarre request. Arthaat reveals that he feels emasculated by her continuously calling him ‘baby’. He wants to prove to his friends that he’s more than a lapdog, that “hamaare beech ‘woh sab’ bhi hota hai” (all ‘that’ stuff happens between us).

When I asked Vineet about this story, he said: “Arthaat’s amateurishness is in his fear of being called a fool by his friends. Guys see getting physical as the ‘win-win’ part; you may call this ‘post-feudal’ thinking. I don’t really see this as a Bihar issue, or a purely class-based one. The point is not a Delhi girl doing something, the point is her being in Delhi while doing it.”

This is a view that Priyanka Om, for one, well understands. A popular Hindi blogger like Vineet, Om is famous for her bestselling book of short stories, Woh Ajeeb Ladki (That Strange Girl). Born in Jamshedpur (Jharkhand), she grew up in Bhagalpur (Bihar) and now lives in Dar es Salaam, the capital of Tanzania. Her stories are littered with the human costs of immigration. In one story, a hard-working small-town girl is met with contempt and exploitation at every turn in Delhi, until she is killed by a careless driver and becomes the ‘Laawaris Laash’ (unclaimed corpse) of the title. In another, a philandering husband uses business travels as an excuse to f*** “lipstick-waali” urban women. These stories chime with the wisdom of ‘psychogeography’, Guy Debord’s study (since taken up by Will Self, among others) “of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organised or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals”.

The 26-year-old Hindi poet Shubham Shree wrote these lines, in a poem called ‘Classroom Kavita’ (Classroom Poem). “Pata nahi kyon/ Hindi padhne waali ladkiyaan NCC mein jaati hain/ Aur angrezi ki ladkiyaan ‘join’ karti hain NSS / Bas itna hi toh antar hai / jitna woh, kya kehte hain / Seelampur aur Safdarjung mein” (I don’t know why/ the Hindi medium girls enter the NCC / While the English medium girls ‘join’ NSS/ It’s the same difference / as the one between/ Seelampur and Safdarjung). For Shree, the seemingly arbitrary, intangible class division between English and Hindi speakers is as real as the visible distinction between Seelampur and Safdarjung, one of the poorest and one of the more affluent neighbourhoods of Delhi, respectively. Similarly, in Anu Singh Chowdhury’s Hindi short story ‘Roommate’, Lily Pandey, a Bihari girl with Bombay dreams, is quizzed about her ‘hybrid’ name.

At IIT, an unthinking friend once dropped this bomb at breakfast: “You are so well-spoken for a Bihari. I wish more (Biharis) were like you. They say all kinds of shit, like using “hum” (‘us’) instead of “main” (‘me’).” I did not have the courage to tell him that I had recently stopped using the word ‘hum’ for myself, fearing ridicule.

Luckily, I have created a little ‘post-lingual’ world of my own these days, more than five years after coming to Delhi. Smatterings of Assamese punctuate this world, courtesy my partner, born and brought up on the outskirts of Guwahati. We speak of learning Japanese, so we may better indulge our shared love of Studio Ghibli films. She and I have taken to dog-sitting Alice, who reminds us that there’s more than one kind of linguistic barrier. I surprise my parents with broken bits of Maithili, the mother tongue I once couldn’t stop speaking — and now merely understand.

Last week, I returned to Delhi after a brief Ranchi trip. I went to see Sweta (and Alice). At some point, I found myself waiting to perform our old non-joke about being from the same gaon. But here’s the thing: no amount of memories about our shitty school (sorry, Sweta) could do it. I wasn’t provoked. I wasn’t even slightly irritated. In that moment, I felt as if after five years of living in Delhi the city, I had finally moved to Delhi the village. My heart had moved somewhere, at any rate, and my home would inevitably follow .