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Business News/ Mint-lounge / Features/  Delhi’s Belly: Capital rover
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Delhi’s Belly: Capital rover

Author and columnist R.V. Smith, who has been covering the city for 50 years, quietly releases his new book

R.V. Smith in his drawing room. Photographs: Priyanka Parashar/MintPremium
R.V. Smith in his drawing room. Photographs: Priyanka Parashar/Mint

Heaps of musty newspapers are piled up everywhere. Even the sofa has not been spared.

As Ronald Vivian Smith digs out his typewriter from under a stack of files, his wife, Alvina, enters the drawing room of their sparsely furnished flat in west Delhi’s Mayapuri. “Look at the condition of our house," she says. “Once, famous people frequented us at Christmas. But he never used his connections to get our children admitted to English-medium schools. He never asked his rich friends to get nice jobs for our sons. What’s the point of being a writer?"

A photograph of Smith taken in 1995 at the old Statesman building in Connaught Place
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A photograph of Smith taken in 1995 at the old Statesman building in Connaught Place

Writers tend to be a disappointment to their families. The only material advantage the paan-chewing Smith seems to have gained from his profession is his MIG (middle-income group) apartment, allotted through the journalists’ quota in the 1970s. A long-time columnist of The Statesman and The Hindu, he was a reporter at the first newspaper for more than 30 years.

Once known as a Casanova, Smith now talks at a snail’s pace, his tired eyes staring at some distant point that only he seems to see. Most visitors simply boggle at the pile of old newspapers, containing the thousands of offbeat stories he has written on Delhi, in his drawing room.

His first story, he says, was on a painting he saw hanging inside St James’ Church in Kashmere Gate. Smith’s memory fails him when he tries listing his books. “The Delhi That No-One Knows," he says in his low voice, “Tales The Monuments Tell; Capital Vignettes…. The other books are slipping from my mind...." Never mind. This month, Smith quietly released a new book.

Delhi Rambles: Quaint Cityscape Through A Roving Eye is a collection of Smith’s recent newspaper columns. In the foreword, author Pran Nevile wonders if Smith has been “inspired by the Muraqqa-e-Delhi by Dargah Quli Khan, who penned a fascinating account of Delhi’s social and cultural life in the 18th century."

It’s hard to equate this frail, paper-skinned man with that flamboyant traveller from Hyderabad. Smith is so quiet that one could sit for hours in the same room as him without registering his presence. It’s difficult to relate to him as the man about whom Rakhshanda Jalil, author of Invisible City: The Hidden Monuments Of Delhi, says: “I find Mister Smith’s work extremely valuable. No amount of bookish knowledge can compete with the sort of insights and real, lived memories he has. The Delhi he has known at first hand is an altogether different Delhi that cannot be accessed by the generation of writers who came after him. What is more, he has a fund of anecdotes and qissa-kahanis (stories) about the city, its people, places and passions."

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The typewriter Smith inherited from his father

With titles like “Killer Tree In The Red Fort", “Durga Puja In The 1950s" and “Loneliness & Street Cries", the crisply written chapters in Smith’s new book are like a flying carpet that take the reader into a city only he has seen.

Unlike other celebrated writers on Delhi, Smith remains as invisible as the people and places he writes about. He is never seen at book launches or literary gatherings. “My friend (the late author) Khushwant Singh, who greatly admired Ronnie’s writings, always regretted that Ronnie could not achieve the fame he deserved," says author Sadia Dehlvi, who has known Smith since the 1980s. She adds, “Once Khushwant jokingly told me that maybe Ronnie should have changed his name, which, according to him, was too foreign-sounding for somebody (principally) writing on Old Delhi. Ronnie is like a faceless djinn to his readers, a kind of character that often appears in his own stories."

Like most Delhiites, Smith too is a migrant. Raised in an Anglo-Indian household in Agra, he is descended from the adopted daughter of a British adventurer called Salvadore Smith, who was drafted into a maharaja’s army in 18th century India. The next generations opted for more settled professions. Smith’s father was the Agra correspondent for a number of national dailies. It was through “Papa’s letter" that he was appointed in 1964 as a sub-editor/reporter at The Statesman in Delhi.

For many years Smith had no permanent home in the city. He lived in the cheap hotels that surround the Jama Masjid to this day. This semi-nomadic existence enabled him to explore the Walled City like an insider: His archetypal street-side stories are the stuff that today’s blogger-flâneurs dream of.

“First I moved to Naaz Hotel, where I stayed in the room that was earlier occupied by (painter) M.F. Husain when he lived in Old Delhi," says Smith. “I later shifted with my wife to Azad Hind Hotel, where my son Tony was born. We ate most of our meals at Karim’s. In the evenings, we sat on Jama Masjid’s stairs, where we would have seekh kebabs."

Life for Smith’s wife has been harder because their youngest child, 28-year-old Rodney, suffers from Down syndrome and needs constant care (their two other sons work as a designer and a photographer in newspapers). It didn’t help that women would fall easily for her husband. “This reputation has been blown out of proportion," says Smith. “I had my share of affairs when it began to be rumoured that I had a penchant for young housewives…it was true that most of my girlfriends were wives of acquaintances."

Delhi Rambles: By R.V. Smith, Hiranyagarbh, 152 pages, Rs499
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Delhi Rambles: By R.V. Smith, Hiranyagarbh, 152 pages, Rs499

Smith was intimately acquainted at one time with the residents of GB Road’s red-light district. Society women too were not safe from his charms. “He once dedicated an entire Statesman column on my loveliness," says a well-known south Delhi author who does not want to be named. “I still have the clipping of that column saved in my files," she says.

But what will be the fate of the newspaper clippings in Smith’s study? What about the scores of yellowing black and white family photos and letters he has preserved? This accumulation is a rare window not only into an Anglo-Indian world of Saturday night dances and Tambola rounds in Agra’s Postal Telegraph Club, but also into the life of a Delhi writer who has chronicled those aspects of the city that otherwise would have remained unknown.

Smith’s possessions ought to be part of a climate-controlled archive but he doesn’t seem to be concerned. There is yet another “Down Memory Lane" to be written for The Hindu and one more “Quaint Corner" to be filed for The Statesman. It’s his birthday next month and he will have to go to Bara Hindu Rao in north Delhi to get his old favourite Raju ki mutton biryani for the celebrations.

There is no time to plan for posterity.

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Published: 13 Dec 2014, 12:56 AM IST
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