Seen the Martello. Got the soap from Sweny’s. Yay, I’m in Dublin! Gradually ticking things off the list. Thalatta! Thalatta! Next on the agenda—throwing pieces of Banbury cakes to the Liffey gulls.
Friendly greetings from a Joycean pilgrim. My dream of celebrating Bloomsday in Bloom’s city is just about to happen. After voyaging 5,000 miles over Asia and Europe (no Scylla or Charybdis—just airplane snacks), I landed two days ago. Switched the masala English for the Irish sing-song. Such happiness to be here.
I’m a city writer and photographer, and for the past 20 years I’ve been compulsively documenting and narrating life in Delhi, the city where I happen to live. It could have been Paris. It could have been Kampala. It is the Indian capital. My blog is called “The Delhi Walla.” Since 2017, I also write a daily column for the Hindustan Times, India’s leading English-language newspaper. The column is called “Delhiwale”—in Hindi, this is the equivalent for Delhi of ‘Dubliners.’
Twenty times larger than Dublin, Delhi has 20 million Delhiwale—compared to 1.5 million Dubliners. At one point in Ulysses, the everyman hero Leopold Bloom observes that it would be a good puzzle to cross Dublin without passing a single pub.
A good puzzle would also be to cross Delhi without passing a single chai stall. And sometimes, while strolling the congested streets of the historic walled city, I have to admit I confuse the two cities. But you must understand—the chatter and curses are the same! The crowds of men. The tobacco smoke. The “applause and hisses” of Barney Kiernan’s find their exact twins in Old Delhi’s hyperlocal Kale Tea Stall, Irfan’s tea stall, Babban’s tea stall, Ashok’s tea stall, and Rani’s tea stall.
But what’s a city—any city. Men walking the streets, their pockets full of crumbs and their heads full of thoughts? Yes, I’ve seen them in Delhi, in the narrow alleys of Old Delhi and on the posh paves of south Delhi neighbourhoods.
Crowds following coffins? I’ve spotted them too, many a time down my place in Chitli Qabar. While Bloom sat in churches to observe and reflect, I sat in Sufi shrines and did the same. I’ve met lots of Blooms, actually, and I’ve met Mollys too, waiting at home in seeming stillness, but who know more and who say yes. Once, I met a Stephen Dedalus; his name is Vishal Nagraj. Gaunt figure, wispy beard, a hat on his head. Always in a jacket, even during Delhi’s unbearable heatwaves.
He sells used books for a living. With him, casual chitchat is not an option. His conversations are peppered with quotes from Nietzsche and Kafka.
My first reading of Ulysses happened in 2021, a few months after the horrific second wave of Covid that swept through India and took millions of lives. The streets, bereaved and more silent than usual, made room for the novel’s voices and crowds.
At first, I was seriously bogged down by all the unfamiliar references. Who’s Parnell? And what’s an Orange Lodge? What’s more, the language was far from being as straightforward and polite as that of Jane Austen, one of my early loves in Western literature and the author from whom I borrowed my middle name.
On certain days, while trying to find my bookmark to resume my reading, I would wonder if picking up where I left off made any difference at all amid all that gibberish, and if resuming from a random page wouldn’t be just as sensible. “Don’t bother,” I would tell my bookmark with a sigh, “any page will do.”
But something in the book made me insist and toil on. What was it? I’m not sure. I learnt to treat each sentence as a miniature monument, meant to be experienced individually. I started living with the novel and gradually acclimatised to the high altitudes of its prose.
I still couldn’t understand much, but for some time at least, coursing through the words was enough. My blood was wooed by grace of language, as Joyce would have put it—the Stephen way.
Today, Ulysses has become my walking companion. Book in hand, wearing my imaginary Latin Quarter hat, I head to, let’s say, Delhi’s Connaught Place—where citizens from across classes unhesitatingly gather together, strolling along the white colonial-era colonnades. With the novel’s help,
I try to understand my city better and to become a better writer. For Ulysses maps out a most panoramic and most microscopic evocation of city life, accurately capturing what is public and what is private. One sentence, in particular, keeps sharpening my writerly gaze: “And Bloom letting on to be awfully deeply interested in nothing, a spider’s web in the corner behind the barrel, and the citizen scowling after him and the old dog at his feet looking up to know who to bite and when.”
A few weeks after finishing the novel for the first time, I remember being thrilled to discover a place in Delhi that directly connects it to Ulysses. It actually frames the novel’s opening—this is the Martello Tower. Indeed, Delhi and Dublin share this same relic born of a common misfortune: both lands were colonised by the British, who built Martello Towers across their empire. In Dublin, they did so to ward off the Napoleonic forces. In Delhi, the tower was built in the years following the crushing of the 1857 Uprising, India’s first war of independence.
Truth be told, Delhi’s Martello is nothing like Dublin’s. It is in ruins. The little stone bridge leading to it is broken. You can leap over the gap, but risk falling into the smelly drain below. Nobody visits the place, not even on Bloomsday.
But I am here now. And this Bloomsday 2025, I’ll make a pilgrimage to the Martello Tower of Dublin, and do something that isn’t possible from its eastern twin in landlocked Delhi. I’ll climb the dark, winding stairs, and on reaching the top, I’ll walk over to the parapet, rest my elbow on the jagged granite, and gaze out over Dublin bay.
(The author of this piece writes the popular daily column Delhiwale for Hindustan Times, India’s leading newspaper.)
