Delineating Delhi: Spaces of the Neoliberal Urbanism in Tarun Tejpal’s The Story Of My Assassins

Recent Indo-Anglican literature has also seen a burgeoning of the genre of urban crime fictions set against the backdrop of India’s modernizing metropolises. While explorations of the contemporary Indian city mostly consists of non-fictional, journalistic writings, like Katherine Boo’s Pulitzer winning book Behind the Beautiful Forevers, William Dalrymple’s City of Djinns and Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City, the genre also includes fictions like Altaf Tyrewala’s critically acclaimed debut novel No God in Sight, Vikram Chandra’s bestseller Sacred Games, Tarun Tejpal’s The Story of My Assassins, Hrish Sawhney’s volume of short stories Delhi Noir, Atish Tasser’s The Templegoers and others, which deal with the dark underside of the cities. Significantly, as rapid urban growth deepens existing disparities, a distinct rhetoric conflating impoverishment and criminality emerges, further justifying the exclusion of certain sections from the vision of urbanism. This paper looks at the representation of Delhi in Tarun Tejpal’s novel The Story of My Assassins, as a dystopic space riddled with contradictions of.

The so-called urban turn has also been impelled by the recognition that the Indian city is now in a new post-nationalist stage marked by the deepening contradiction between economic inequalities and political opportunities, giving rise to new claims and conflicts over its identity.
In this paper I study how Tarun Tejpal's novel The Story of My Assassins challenges the narrative of Delhi as a sanitized urban space of neoliberal growth and success and instead projects the various contradictions that riddle the city. Teeming with criminals, marginalities, spaces that threaten the city, threatening to unravel the apparent semblance of peace and control. Dismissing the myths of economic boom and progress brought in by economic liberalization in India, Tarun Tejpal's novel The Story of My Assasins takes up the form of the noir to expose Delhi as an urban dystopia of inequality, crime, and exclusion of the marginalized. Set in the present day cityscape of Delhi, Tarun Tejpal's The Story of My Assassins projects a sharp critique of India's neoliberal turn in the 1990s and its discontents (Note 2).

City of Contradictions
Theorizing the cultural manifestations of postcolonial cities, Rashi Varma asserts that the "postcolonial city is riddled simultaneously with imperial legacies and nationalist re-inscriptions of spatial practices, as well as with the complexity of representing difference within the city, situated as it is within a global capitalist order". Varma terms it as a "conjunctural space that produces a critical combination of historical events, material bodies, structural forces and representational economies which propels new constellations of domination and resistance, centers and peripheries, and the formation of new political subjects" (2). As a city that has experienced a dizzying variety of historical moments closely-the Mughal empire, British colonialism, the vagaries of partition, emergency and Sikh pogrom-and acts as the hub of political power and the epicentre of India's urban expansion into localized nodes of global capitalism, Delhi's conjectural space has been variedly represented in Indian Writing in English in polychromatic shades. A series of novels etch the city in the nostalgia of a historical past-Khushwant Singh's "Delhi: A Novel" traces the trajectory of the city over centuries, Ahmed Ali's "Twilight in Delhi" invokes a nostalgia for a fading Mughal past, while Krishna Sobti's The Heart Has its Reasons tells a torrid love story amidst the bustling bazaars of old Chandni Chowk. In contrast, Anita Desai's "Clear Light of Day", Nayantara Sahgal's "Rich Like Us, and R. Chandrasekar's" The Goat, the Sofa and Mr. Swami" present the turmoils of a post-independence city amidst the mechanisms of power, politics and state bureaucracy. However, the most memorable sketches about the city have often come through a depiction of its underbelly and their struggles on the margins-the slum demolitions of Rushdie's Midnight's Children, the struggling marginal lives of Uday Prakash's The Walls of Delhi or the seething, dangerous underbelly of Adiga's White Tiger have etched the city in strokes of unabashed discrimination, where multifarious forms of power coalesce together to produce a deeply divided city of privilege and deprivation. In Tejpal's novel, Delhi is more than just a backdrop to his noir tale. Rather, Delhi's unique www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/sll Studies in Linguistics and Literature Vol. 5, No. 4, 2021 108 Published by SCHOLINK INC. history and their multiple urbanisms add a distinct character to the dystopia of violence that Tejpal constructs.
Gyan Prakash points out that literary representation of the twentieth century city has been predominantly dark and dystopic. The city has variously appeared as "dark, insurgent", "dysfunctional", "engulfed in ecological crises, seduced by capitalistic consumption, paralyzed by crimes, wars, class, gender, and racial conflict" (1). Similarly, Amardeep Singh points out the trend of new urban realism in contemporary fictions, asserting that "The style also tends to feature an encounter with themes of criminality, violence, corruption, and anopen-eyed acceptance of liberal Indian hypocrisy (especially in an era of simultaneous wealth accumulation and urban slum growth) and double standards around topics such as caste and religious biases" (6) PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, LITERATURE. Singh thus contends "Urban Realism might be the Indian analogue to "post 9/11 fiction" in the British and American publishing worlds". Subsequently, noir being a literary form that essentially represents a bleak dystopia of violence in a dysfunctional society, ushered in by the modernizing forces of technology and capitalism, becomes a preferred mode of etching the modern city. The emergence of the film noir in America coincides with the turbulence of the World War II era, the form commenting on the insecurities, violence and pessimism of the post-war society. However, Jennifer Fay and Justus Nieland assert that despite its American roots, the popular crime form "is best appreciated as an always international phenomenon concerned with the local effects of globalization and the threats to national and urban culture it seems to herald" (2010, ix). Similarly, pointing out how film and literary noir invoke overtones of pessimism and disillusionment about the modern society, Lee Horsley comments that the genre of noir embodies the voice of violation and dissent-"it also has the potential for critique, for undermining complacency and illusions (the false promises of the American dream, the hypocrisy of the British establishment)"...More generally, the noir sensibility might come to the fore at any time of discontentment and anxiety, of disillusionment with institutional structures (2001, pp. 143-144 on Latin American societies over the past two decades.
Matthew Christensen observes a similar connection between the prevalence of African popular crime genres and the problematics of structural changes imposed on African nation states by market-driven policies of the IMF and World Bank. The genre resurges with prominence in the context of the neoliberal changes, as Christensen observes: "Given its historical engagement with the crises of liberalism and global capitalism, crime fiction offers an even richer critical apparatus for investigating the morphing valences of sociability, criminality, and political legitimacy under neoliberal governance" (2013, p. 106).
In the same strain, the rise of the Indian film noir of the 1990s in mainstream Hindi cinema and the morally ambivalent, dystopic and cynical worldview it represents coincides with the free-market  What kind of Indian reality emerges from this new fiction? It is almost unremittingly dark…Literary fiction of the last five years is far more cynical, for in it finer feelings have all but died out and pretty much everything is meaningless. Power mongers and businesspeople are unsentimental and terrifying; their relationships and intellects are crippled. The majority of society lives precariously amid violence and exploitation, and it must kill and manipulate to survive. There is not even any room for moral judgement because the world is so sick-and its protagonists, spiritually lost, have no comment on the terrifying reality they discover. Respite and tenderness are found contrasted with the "normal", law-abiding citizens of the urban community. Though the assassins are essentially lumpenproletariat, their descent into crime is not individual choice or a faulty moral judgment. Rather, each assassin testifies the systemic violence affected by the triple forces of a failing welfare state, an intensely discriminatory society, and exploitative economic systems-both feudal and capitalistic. Amidst attempts to sanitize and aestheticize the city for the elite, the assassins thus stand out as oddities, coalescing with the bourgeoisie imagination of the urban poor as the dangerous, criminal "other" threatening the order of the neoliberal city. Gooptu notes that there has been an aggressive effort to re-engineer the erstwhile images of the Indian cities like Kolkata, Mumbai, Ahmadabad from being cities of poverty, squalor and political unrest to world class cities of entrepreneurial opportunities (37). The conjoining of the urban poor with criminality, however, is a legacy that Delhi has carried from the colonial times. As Michael Waibel points out, the conflation of criminality with the poor populace of the city was reflected in colonial urban policies where "respectable elites" were segregated in separate areas from the common populace residing in Old Delhi (53). During the Emergency period too, Waibel observes, the urban poor were targeted by draconian policies of slum clearance and forced sterilisation. The criminalization of the poor takes a more ominous turn with India's neoliberal transition that was implemented, as Nandini Gooptu notes, with an aggressive effort to re-engineer the erstwhile images of the Indian cities like Kolkata, Mumbai, Ahmadabad from being cities of poverty, squalor and political unrest to world class cities of entrepreneurial opportunities. Consequently, the "misfits" of the new urban space are often identified as non-productive, thus potentially dangerous and disruptive. Reproducing the discourse of criminality as intricately associated with poverty, the descriptive profiles of the criminals conjure crime essentially in the slums, streets, shanty town and underbelly of the city.
There has been, in the past decade in particular, a rise in literary and cinematic representations of the "undercity", the slums and shanties that flank all the major Indian metropolises, especially those of Mumbai and Kolkata. A small but significant constellation of films and novels has taken on the burdens of representing the allegedly unrepresentable, and it is important to register the emergence of this genre at this juncture in India when economic liberalization and the forces of globalization have created a heretofore unprecedented spread of the middle-class.
In Tejpal's novel, the essentially noir elements of darkness, a black vision of despair, loneliness, dread and violence unfold in the shanty one-room apartments, the dingy slums and the filthy railway station that shelters the beggars and the street children and in the raw violence of the rural hinterland. In a striking difference with the spaces that stand for "privatopias and cathedrals of consumption" (MacLeod, p. 261), Tejpal describes the sordid "two bedroom second-floor flat in Punjabi Bagh" (164) which harbors criminals like Mr. Healthy and the dagger-wielding Chaaku. The spatial description is detailed and clautrophobic: Built on a two-hundred-square-yard plot, the flat was dark and delerict, all sun and light cut off by the houses crowding it in. It had one bathing bathroom with a leaking brass top, and one Indian-style crap cubicle with an old style iron cistern strapped high on the wall…Even with all lights on it felt like a dungeon.
Scatological excesses add to the effect of abjection: "All the window sills and grilles were daubed with bird droppings, mostly pigeon", while the entire space is rendered uncanny by anthropomorphic visages of inanimate objects: "the bathroom slats had nesting sprouting from them like tufts of hair from an old man's ears" (164).The below mediocre quality of this flat stands in acute contradiction with the spaces of affluence and aesthetic appeal that the narrator describes in the other half of the city.
Significantly enough, these localities marked by underclass residents also form the germinating spaces of crime and disorder. branded as a dangerous criminal precisely for his "mussalman identity". The police act under the instruction of the politically powerful officer whose son was targeted in a brawl over a common love interest, meting out severe "punishment" in the form of castrating Kabir and slapping sedition charges against him. The prolonged scene of police torture for an inconsequential issue like brawl is a grim reminder of the oppressive legacy of Indian police right from the colonial times. Emasculated and falsely implicated with terrorist charges like the Arms Act, Kabir is damaged for life and becomes a permanent 'criminal' outsider to the mainstream society.
Tejpal paints a darker picture of a more precarious space in the portrayal of the Paharjung railway station-a place that signifies the chaotic transitory space of the city, since the railway station serves as the gateway to the entry and exit from the city. The platform is a fecund space of chaos, consisting of several groups of the urban underbelly who find no place within the inner city space-the petty street vendor who sell "magic potions", the homeless children, the beggars, the prostitutes, the criminals and drug dealers. Unkempt and disheveled, the platforms are no better than garbage dumps with the "debris of cracked tea kullads, stitched-leaf plates and rough napkins" (300) strewn all over the place. It is also a place the police too break laws and torment the station dwellers, imposing a reign of terror through exhortations and sexual abuse. Teenagers like Gudiya are gang raped in the station and Dhaka, the young leader of the homeless children's group is found dismembered on the railway tracks due to a gang war. Tejpal's depiction of this space of darkness is both frightening and repulsive, and the detail with which he etches out the bleakness of this place evokes immediate comparison with the glitzy, secured, vast and beautiful spaces of the neoliberal city. In an evocative passage, Tejpal describes the temporary night shelter of the station children-the drainage gutter-with great visual minutiae that speaks of the immense deprivation of the station children: The band moved home again…and was now snugly ensconced in the gutter between platforms four and five…There was a trickle of sludge in the groove at the centre, but the boys had thrown old railway sleepers across it to bury its slime in deep. The iron cover of the manhole had been stolen and sold long ago, and now the entrance to their home was guarded by a cratewood trapdoor, the dozens of nail-heads in its flesh glinting in the midday sun (338).
Surviving in such inhuman living conditions, the station children can only be stunned when confronted with the city of opulence-resplendent with "dazzling glass-fronted shops and big glowing signs", magnanimous cinema halls and "roads where big cars shone like diamond" and inhabited by upper class elites "so beautiful, so sweet smelling" (356) that seem almost unreal.
Significantly enough, the core urban space of Delhi stands in contrast not only to its urban underbelly but also to the threatening geographical spaces of dark crime and underworld dealings that lie outside Again, slipping away from a "darkened bedroom" from a wife whom he describes as a mere splash of a human figure that seems "squashed by a giant foot", the narrator ends up in his office that embodies a globally connected, yet Baudrillardian world of meaningless images: "Private passions were dead.
Anger was an icon. Love an image. Sex an organ. Even god would finally be shrunk to size. No larger than the screen. No denser than a pixel" (6). This postmodern pastiche of human experiences defines the narrator's dysfunctional world that is at once depressing, meaningless, violent and comic, and probably best summed up by Hathi Ram: "nothing in this city is what it seems"(21). Tejpal's Delhi is www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/sll Studies in Linguistics and Literature Vol. 5, No. 4, 2021 115 Published by SCHOLINK INC.
not only desolate, but is also a space of raw violence manifested in differential power equations. Power and violence in The Story is also historically informed across various layers of society, thus construing an urbanscape of the capital that is relentlessly bleak and in an incessant turmoil among conflicting groups that jostle for space and control in the capital city.
The Delhi projected in Tejpal's novel is an urban space that testifies the power of the state. The narrator evocatively describes the core of the city-the stately roads of Lutyens' Delhi, that curve with "an imperial assurance around imposing edifices of the National Stadium, the National Gallery of Modern Art and the India Gate, the taking the high road to Raisina Hill where the monoliths of North and South Block continued to be metaphors for the imperiousness and inscrutability of the state before finishing up inside the excessive sprawl of the presidential palace, an appropriate metaphor of shallow decorativeness" (74). The power metaphorically inscribed in this space is re-inscribed by patrolling police jeeps that continue to convince the state of "its power and purpose" (74). A candid representation of menacing state power, the police force navigate in the novel's fictional space as an all pervasive manifestation of violence. The first impression of the policemen relegated to protect the narrator is that of sloppiness and a cartoonish caricature-the self-proclaimed bahurupiyas-who are comically named as Hathi Ram (Hathi translates into Elephant), the sub-inspector entrusted with protecting the narrator is invoked in mutating-animal metaphors: "sometimes he was Chooha (mouse) Ram, or Lomdi (fox) Ram or Sher (tiger) Ram or Bakri (goat) Ram (20). However, at the same they are also disconcerting agents of constant surveillance, lingering as shadows, spying over the narrator's every move that gets reported and decoded. Calling them the "purveyors of petty power" (36) who needed their daily dose of fear from others to feel validated, Tejpal etches a dark world that runs on muscle flexing-both physical and metaphorical. It is primal and barbaric, where the more powerful unleash unmitigated violence on the less powerful. As the narrator puts it: "through the centuries, we had not only been mahaphuddus when vassals, but also had a track record for being barbaric mahaphuddus when in control" (36).
It is interesting to note how aesthetically designed spaces in Tejpal's novel ironically convey the inner rot of the system. The reader is reeled into a network of sophisticated crimes-of scams, corruption and money laundering-against the ridiculously opulent spaces of the luxurious private quarters of the rich and the powerful, as follows: There were water spurting Scandinavian marble mermaids with large Indian breasts, a topiary of dinosaurs, a swimming pool shaped like a flounced skirt…undulating manicured lawns with colourful steel birds poised for takeoff, lines of mast trees trimmed to precisely the same height flanking every pathway…a Yeats pond with the fifty-nine swans of Coole, a dining room in a mock stable with two handsome horses tethered in a corner (55). Million dollar illegal deals are made in this lavish private farmhouse of the Frock Raja, described as "five acres of lala land" (55). Farmhouses, or what Soni calls as the "prized fiefdoms of the urban gentry" (77) that are essentially private sites of elite consumption also signal the irredeemable rot of the city and an overwhelming entrapment in corruption that is suffocating for the narrator. Again in another instance, the corruption of Kapoor Sahib and his transnational network of crime in illegal arms trade is visualized through his spatial opulence, projecting an urban space that Choon-Piew Pow aptly describes as "been meticulously planned and ordered to create a picturesque and pristine living environment" Thus, Aditya Nigam's impassioned study of Delhi, which he calls a "postcolonial city with a first world desire" (40) reveals a restructuring of the city in accordance to neoliberal urbanism that aims to make Delhi into another "global metropolis". As xxxx points out: Consequently, the current Indian government has been quick to assimilate the neo-liberal urban planning vocabulary of the Global North in promoting investment www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/sll Studies in Linguistics and Literature Vol. 5, No. 4, 2021 117 Published by SCHOLINK INC.
hubs, cyber-cities and so-called "smart cities": urban regeneration programmes which include initiatives such as "Skill India" and "Digital India" designed to make cities "Engines of Growth". In However, though incredibly rich and powerful, the cityscape essentially exudes a dystopic feel even for the privileged narrator. In an evocative passage detailed with images of suffocation, Tejpal narrates a stifling urbanscape that is decaying inside: "In an excess of sprucing up, the city had been choked…Every pore blocked, every breath stemmed: the earth was given a hard, impregnable gloss…and then the stench of diesel fumes would stain the air, and the swelter would get under skins and fray the nerves, and the city would curse and scan the festering skies" (51). Snippets of sexual violence also add to darken the city's spatial connotations. Tejpal's world is monochromatically masculine with female characters virtually non-existent-violence also gets played out in terms of sexual abuse in his girlfriend Sarah's apartment. The narrator is an unapologetic sexual abuser, filtering out the episodes of his abuse in Humbert-esque manner as acts of mutual consent. In most sexist terms, Sarah's status as a single, independent, educated woman and social activist is projected as a testimony  (14). Filtered through the narrator's perspective, Sarah is presented in solely sexualized terms-her empathy, anger, and frustration against the corrupt system construed as a passing fancy that must be indulged in to extract more sexual favours from her. Thus, beneath this sheen and glamour of the modern city Tejpal exposes an urban dystopia that offers no relief, either as a physical space or as a moral matrix where the characters operate. It is an unremittingly dark world that is both depressing and dangerous and seems Bazaar-all of which characterize the low class ghettos within the inner city. Similarly, the rural miscreants like Chaaku and Hathoda, who escape to the big city from their villages, again do not make it to the urban spaces of the politically powerful and the economically affluent. Thus, poor remains confined within the spatial underbelly of the city; being constructed as dangerous and potentially disruptive populace, the city also implements tangible policies of urban governance that regulate the "misfits" and prevents such excluded citizens from permeating into the city space secured for the entrepreneurial class.
Tejpal depicts the dark underbelly of contemporary Delhi bred by acute economic disparity that lies beneath the its sheen as a global city-in the shanty one-room apartments and the slums and the filthy railway station that shelters the beggars and the street children. The same generalization is applied www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/sll Studies in Linguistics and Literature Vol. 5, No. 4, 2021 119 Published by SCHOLINK INC.
when poor and marginalized groups are targeted in the neoliberal urban space, where entire groups of marginalized population are identified as potentially dangerous and disruptive. Consequently, they are rendered essential targets of correctional biopolitics and hence subjects of regulatory control. The novel exposes how neoliberal urban policies of aggressive quarantine and elimination policies for the poor constitute a key process of policing the undesirable underclass in the city space.
The Story thus works in a dual way as a noir fiction. Firstly, by revealing a bleak sage of multifaceted crimes, it replaces the euphoria of India's neoliberal progress with a milieu of corruption, violence and cynicism. Secondly, projecting a dark world of lawlessness at both the upper and the lower strata of the city, Tejpal's exposes a deeply flawed discourse of criminality in an era of neoliberalism that defines crime not by its illegality but by identifying and regulating a certain group of underclass "criminal" population who do not fit into the scheme of the neoliberal city. Challenging the vision of the sanitized city that is propagated by neoliberal urbanism, the city in Tejapal's novel is universally bleak at every level of the society. Thus, as much as exclusionary urban policies attempt to quarantine the poor at its fringes by branding them as criminals, the fictional world of the novel constitutes moral depravity as permeating through every strata of its decaying society, signifying a rot that blurs the boundaries between the rich and the poor, the haves and the have-nots. Significantly enough, the novel's redemptive ending-the final reinstatement of the narrator's empathy over violence and moral vacuity-comes through a small gesture of kindness from one of the assassins. The narrator's life is saved by Hathoda Tyagi's attachment to the stray mongrel who is treated kindly by the narrator's wife.
At the end, while Tyagi gets killed for raising questions and posing a threat against the higher authorities, the narrator carries his legacy of empathy for a fellow living being and appears humane for the first time. The Story thus ends with a moral redemption only for its middle-class privileged narrator; the underclass assassins end up incarcerated and dead, reinforcing the abysmal darkness of the urban underbelly that lies like a festering sore beneath the glamour of the world class city.