As a shopping mall, it’s not quite Milan’s Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II. In fact, with no department store, there’s not much to shop at Star City. There’s no cineplex either, although a travelling circus does pitch its tent in the hardscrabble field behind it from time to time when AQI levels and India’s precarious circus economy permit.
SCM’s 40,000 sq ft of atrium space, out of a total area of 2.5 lakh sq ft, was once touted to house the biggest Reliance supermarket in Delhi-NCR. Didn’t take off. An HDFC Bank branch still conducts business as if it’s a Chase Manhattan branch on the Upper West Side that never got the memo about being gobbled up by JPMorgan 24 years ago.
But today, SCM’s singular USP lies in the plethora of liquor shops it contains, arguably the highest per sq ft density in the country. Thoughtfully, it even has one store exclusively for women. While not quite abuzz with life as it was till the early 2010s, its cheek-by-jowl private liquor stores, ancillary namkeen-chips-cold drinks shops, few functional ATMs, one CCD outlet, and idiosyncratic escalators make it a living mall.
If Mayur Vihar is India, SCM, for whatever it’s worth, is its Taj Mahal. It’s the visible symbol of my intense patriotic feelings towards Mayur Vihar Phase 1.
Patriotism, for reasons that have to do with taxes, votes, and rationalising shortcomings of the state, has come to mean the feeling of love, devotion, and a sense of attachment to a country – ‘my country’, since there seems to be some unwritten rule against being patriotic towards ‘another’ country. In this restricted form, such a definition of patriotism makes little sense. The word ‘patriot,’ like ‘patriarchy,’ comes from the Greek ‘patrios’, or ‘of one’s fathers’ – not to be confused with the Bengali phrase targeted at a busybody: ‘Tor baaper ki?’ (‘What is it to your father?’). In fact, according to Finnish historian Aira Kemilainen, patriotism was ‘applied to barbarians who were perceived to be either uncivilised or primitive and who had only a common Patris or fatherland’. In other words, unsophisticated enough not being able to develop one’s own bonds with a place, so having to rely on the easy template of ‘pitribhumi’. As it happens, my father’s association with Mayur Vihar is highly tenuous. He has been here only a few times while visiting me in Delhi. And yet, what I feel for Mayur Vihar is what we are exhorted to feel for India: love, fondness, belonging. Now exiled from MV, it’s the entity, both in space and idea, that I am nostalgic about. Not for the city where I was born or grew up in, or, for that matter, any city at all, but this stretch of Yamnapaar — And its quarter-century-old eternal symbol, Star City Mall.
So, imagine my shock when I learnt that some ragtag organisation was claiming that underneath Star City Mall there apparently lies an ‘ancient structure’ that needs to be ‘reclaimed’. This being the first week of December, the 32nd since 1992, my discomfort has been translated into mental images of the destruction of the Sheila Dixit-era Star City Mall to reinstall an HKL Bhagat-era restaurant under it.
Something always lies above something else. So, it stands to reason that something else always lies buried below something. Cities like Delhi and Rome are built upon layers and layers of historical remnants. As are neighbourhoods, which are far easier, less unnatural to give one’s heart to than wholesale nation-states. So, whether there are remnants of a tandoori restaurant destroyed during the Emergency on top of which Star City Mall today stands, or idols of deities buried within Jama Masjid in Old Delhi, what holds your gaze and heart is what you see now. No matter how much the mall footfall has fallen and the mighty despair.