Gather around me, friends, as I sing you a dirge. This week, Delhi's party-goers karaoked to a swansong before the music faded away into a banshee wail. Bartenders and DJs joined the queues of the unemployed. Architects were hired to create bunkers where residents could tuck their booze and spare tokens out of sight. Gloom descended like a cloak, snuffing out its night lights. A persecution complex cast its spell over the capital. "It is the end of times," I was told. "It is the end of Delhi," neighbours rang up in despair. "It is the French Revolution," friends warned.
There was a blue funk among at least some of the city's residents, as its latest crusader prepared to take oath as chief minister. Ignoring the mandate and the issues that had catapulted him - again - to office, they seemed fearful only that he would persecute them for their wealth, ignoring his promise of a safer, more liveable city. In just a few hours of the poll results coming in, dozens of acquaintances rang up to whine that "he will target us", no matter that they would have little to worry about if they were law-abiding. But why should they worry about personal security when dozens of gunmen surrounded their babalog as they went to school, or hustled people out of the way because memsahib wanted to go shopping for petticoats in Lajpat Nagar. With illegal tubewells in their town houses, their own gen-sets, endangered birds and animals in their farmhouses, and an army of retainers, their pampered lives had received a jolt they weren't prepared for.
The fallout has been nothing short of catastrophic. Already, weddings under planning in Delhi are being shifted to Gurgaon and Noida, hitherto considered the badlands of partydom, for fear of Aam Aadmi reprisals. Pammi Aunty has decided not to return from London any time soon. Her sniffy brat, the pugnacious Junky Baba, has had his garage of sports cars sealed. If trouble comes, he says, he will have them shipped to Dubai. "India is over," Junky cribbed to me, "these people are not with us, they are against us."
Whether the new chief minister is or isn't a party pooper, Delhi isn't holding its breath either way. What it is doing is cleaning up - and fast. But a pall seems to have set on its mollycoddled existence. Will the new government shut down restaurants? Bars? Spas? Will teams of mango people spy on kitty lunches, reporting on the perfidy of auntyjis consuming not one but three desserts? Will there be a ceiling on how much they can spend on their satins and silks? A restriction on the number of guests Baby Babli can have at her birthday party? Raids on their shoe closets? Inspections of their lingerie spends?
Gossip has consumed New Delhi. While the incumbent chief minister has said nothing, a sub-section of New Delhi's privileged residents are preparing to lie low. For now, they've hidden away their diamonds and mothballed their pashminas. A few have left to seek mannat at Vaishno Devi. But it won't be long before they're back. Delhi is nothing without its parties and its gatecrashers, its irreverence for rules and its mocking cupidity. It flouts systems and has its own hierarchy of wealth and power. Its islands of opulence and conspicuous consumption are an ode to profligacy. There might be momentary clouds on its horizon but it is only a while before it descends, once more, into its currency of chaos and its destiny of decadence.
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