Vishwajyoti Ghosh's Delhi is not restricted to the wide avenues near Akbar Road, nor to the exalted addresses of Defence Colony or Golf Links. Those parts of Delhi are important, certainly, but these are not his centre. Ghosh's map shifts outward, away from Connaught Place, toward Ajmal Khan Road or Mall Road, streets that during the 1970s had electricity and telephone wires strung between poles. It is these wires, and the narrow lanes they circumscribe, that frame Ghosh's drawings of Delhi. Here, in these other avenues and roads, the side stories of the Emergency play out.
As the novel commences, Parliament is put into a coma, and one of our lead characters, VP, must go to work as usual. He has opened his day in the customary fashion, with Karl Marx and Mohammad Rafi. But when he steps outside, nothing is as it was. It is 26 June 1975. Delhi is to be calm. 'The President has declared Emergency,' Indira Gandhi has announced, 'There is nothing to panic about.' VP is a journalist, but his newspaper no longer exists. The Censor has spoken. Delhi is calm because it has been forced to be silent. But the quiet does not last long. VP meets up with his old comrade, Parvez. Clandestine papers need to be delivered. VP is cautious, Parvez insistent. The story unfolds.
Ghosh's novel is structured around two poles: on one side is the epic political battle between Moon (Indira Gandhi) and the Prophet (Jayaprakash Narayan), and on the other are the mundane lives of everyday activists caught in the extraordinary period of the Emergency. The variation in tempo between these two poles is beautifully captured in the way Ghosh tells the two stories, and the way he draws them. Moon and Prophet come to us as if in a dreamy memory: the drawings are set in a faux newsreel from the Indian government's Films Division, and the text is something that might have come from the pen of Ezra Mir or Jean Bhownagary – the magician, actor, writer and filmmaker who set up the first animation unit in India in the 1950s. There is even an echo with S Sukhdev's 1958 film for the Films Division, The Saint and the Peasant, about land-reform movements led by the philosopher and Gandhian, Acharya Vinoba Bhave. The pen portraits of Moon and Prophet stay close to biography but veer off here and there – ironically, playfully (remember that the Amar Chitra Katha on Jayaprakash Narayan comes to a magical end as the Emergency starts, which is another way of playing with reality, hiding what is perhaps unpleasant for the publishers). Neither Moon nor Prophet comes off without blemish, or without humanity.
The other pole, that of our activist friends, comes in sepia, much darker, less cinematic. VP, Mala, Parvez, Master and the others struggle to find their feet in resistance, or at least in survival. They have to dodge the havaldar, the sterilisation-wallahs, the intelligence moles and other assorted characters. Ghosh captures the banality of life in a time of a crisis: coffee must be drunk, golgappas must be eaten, queues must be formed and children must be taught. Life goes on. Moon cannot vanquish the spirit. Our band plots to end the Emergency, to end all human pain.