Let me begin by saying this is not a puff piece for a hotel. It is not an obituary either. It is an ode to a legend that defines Delhi’s golden age of celebrity when there were no Page 3 paparazzi; the big spenders had both money and pedigree; discotheques were cool and tobacco-scented bars were kosher. If the courts decide to bring the gavel down unfavorably on the Taj Mahal hotel’s life expectancy, it will be goodnight for many of Delhi’s Midnight’s Children.
Dressed in pink Dholpur stone and surveying the green treetops of Lutyens’ Delhi, the Taj (as Delhi calls it) is the capital’s alternate centre of influence. Once, politicians spent their ‘me’ time sipping premium scotch at Number One, watching members and guests dancing the early hours away. Famous artists would spend afternoons with goblets of lemonade on the impeccably-kept back lawns. Tycoons who flew in by private jets ordered bespoke meals at the exclusive Chambers; RK Laxman’s cartoons lined the Whisper Class corridors.
The Emperor’s Lounge has been the playground of Delhi’s elite, from influential editors to MPs, who are served fragrant pekoe and Lapsang tea by tuxedoed waiters whose smiles are as warm as the tall glasses they bear are frosty. The long-gone Captain’s Cabin was more suitable for power powwows than spending just any other golden hour with products from Scotland’s glens. If the Taj says goodbye to Delhi and to scores of travellers from cities across the world, along with it will be gone Machan, the comfort food layover of a generation of the capital’s late night revellers; the House of Ming, which set the bar for what indulgent food historians call “Punjabi Chinese”, and Ricks, the watering hole that has outlasted its competitors with its packed weekends and an impromptu dance floor.
Good hotels represent a city’s class quotient. Great hotels are part of a city’s soul. Novels have been written on them. Movies have been shot in them. The Raffles was Somerset Maugham’s refuge; the last tiger in Singapore was reportedly shot while cowering under one of its garden tables. The Algonquin, New York, was patronised by literary snoberatti; it was not a refuge of tigers but a soiree scene of society lions. The fin de siecle Taj of Bombay, built by the Tata patriarch, is so powerful an image of India’s business puissance that terorrists unleashed evil on it for four days in November 2008. The 19th century Grand of Calcutta was a crown jewel of the Raj when the city reigned as the capital of British India. The colonial grace of the Connemara has a je ne sais quoi that is reminiscent of pink gin and tonic nursed by ladies in lace.
Years before Donald Trump, I encountered two old-timers shooting the breeze over cold beers in a bar in a one-horse town on the Mexican border; a white man wearing a flannel shirt and a black man in faded workday jeans. They asked me how the Great Eastern Hotel of Calcutta was faring. It appeared they has been young GIs fighting the Japanese on the Eastern Front with Calcutta as their RR pitstop from nearby Rangoon. World War II is long over, but the hotel lives on in its original avatar in the memory of two old soldiers. Novelist Edna O’Brien said writers live in the mind and in hotels of the soul. There is one such hostelry on Man Singh Road that has both; be it adieu or au revoir.
Ravi Shankar
ravi@newindianexpress.com