Summer heat in Delhi

The grand tomb up close.
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Our arrival to Delhi should have prepared us for what was to come in the rest of India. That sounds ominous, so let me preface it by saying that I had long wanted to come to India, and had fond memories of it from when I was 12. Both Erin and I enjoy Bollywood movies, the company of our numerous Indian friends, and the various Indian foods. But once here we found ourselves frequently overwhelmed, shaking our heads in disbelief at the contradictory behavior of the people.

Our arrival to Delhi at 6am coincided with a few other flights, so there was a long line at the passport control. In fact, the line stretched from the 10 desks to the back of the room, snaking around, and was a thick 3 or 4 people wide, all jostling like jockeys to get ahead of each other. The line passed in front of the the bottom of the escalator, so that people arriving off the escalator were unfairly getting ahead in the queue. To counter the arrivals by escalator, the people at the back pushed forward and made the line unpenetrable. This blocked off the exit from the escalator and those people started falling over themselves and their bags and piling up on the moving escalator! Mayhem.

Parrots on the red sandstone.
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We pushed our way to the back of a line, and I watched the man next to me. He would place his hands on the stranger in front of him every minute or so and push him forward bumping him into the person in front of him. Eventually the man being pushed could not take it anymore and lashed out at the man: "Stop pushing me or I'll kill you." It was a long 2 hour wait to get through the immigration.

We had met a French girl who was also coming over on the flight from Turkey, and the 3 of us shared a taxi from the airport to town. There came a suspicious moment when the taxi driver, having agreed to the price of 200 rupees, tried to split us up into 2 taxis, each taxi only costing 100 rupees. We knew that the fixed price was 250 rupees, so why did they want Erin and I in one taxi and the French girl alone in the other, and for such a low cost ($2.5 for a 45 minute ride)? He said it was illegal for him to carry 3 passengers in one taxi. Luckily we didn't buy that. I still worry when I think of what might have happened if we let her go by herself. We grabbed our bags and started to walk away and the driver conceded and took all three of us.

Peacock wanders the grounds.
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We stayed in the backpackers strip of Delhi, a low cost and lively bazaar, called Paharganj or Main Bazaar. It was more densely packed with people and vehicles than those narrow lanes in the Moroccan medinas, and filthier too. There were so many people streaming along the streets, and cars, trucks, bicycles, scooters and motorcycles, auto rickshaws and bicycle rickshaws, pony carts, ox carts and people drawn carts, and cows, cows, cows everywhere. One day there was even an elephant marching down the Main Bazaar, carrying a man on his way to his wedding, we think. Poop and trash underfoot. Bad odors in the air, each night we cleaned out black boogers from our noses. Despite all of this there were common place beautiful sights too: bright, happy and festive colors, men and women with all sorts of jewelery, made of aluminium, steel, silver, copper, gold, and stones of every color and size. Everyone decorated themselves, putting a neat bindi on, or a big splash of crimson thumbprint as they walked out the door late for work. Some had lines of sandalwood paste drawn horizontally across their foreheads.

Peacock running on the grounds.
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Ten to 15 school kids sat in a cage on the back of bicycle riskshaws, with their bags hanging neatly off the back door. They appeared like convicts on their way to jail.

Some Sikhs had small and tidy turbans, others huge and stately. The Rajasthanis turbans were large and wobbly.

Everywhere there is color and sound and texture and smells, some wonderful, some good, some bad, some ugly and nasty. There is no escaping the overwhelming presence of it all.

We bought a used guide book on the street and marveled at the low cost of everything, and how we could stay for months and just absorb it all. We would be singing a different tune in the next 2 weeks as we caught a chest infection, suffered from 4 day long fevers and headaches, got diarrhea, developed mysterious lumps, and started day dreaming about the restaurants we missed back in Louisiana, and how comfortable life was back in those days.

Part of a wedding procession.
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We had arrived for the heat of summer and the monsoons. It was bad timing, but that's how our travels ended up. A perk to this was that there were fewer tourists, and we generally had good bargaining leverage with taxis and at hotels and with trinkets. Not surprisingly all the auto rickshaw drivers in Delhi said their meters were broken. It was a battle every time we wanted to take one somewhere. We had to first look at a map and see the distance and reckon on about 20 rupees for a kilometer (50 cents). Then we would start the dance of haggling and counter offers and walking away and trying a new one. A few times, the first taxi driver would follow behind us and call out his lowest price to the other drivers as we approached to set their lower limit. We were always overcharged and sometimes we just walked in frustration instead of giving in to their blackmail.

One or both of these boys are grooms to be.
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In one shop, I finished my water bottle and asked if they had a rubbish bin to throw it in. I got a quizzical expression in return, and then the shop keeper instructed me: throw it on the street! And he grabbed some papers and threw them out the door at the passerbys to demonstrate. Pedestrians beware! We did not see any trucks collecting garbage, although there are ever present beggars sifting through rubbish heaps, reusing anything not perishable. The cows and dogs ate what was perishable including the newspaper food wrappings. Eventually the rain would come and wash the remaining refuse down into the river.

Monkeys in the unban jungle of Old Delhi.
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We ate lots of great food while in Delhi. There was a dosa restaurant down the block. It was vegetarian which in India means not even any eggs are used. Non-veg includes eggs, and maybe chicken or lamb. It was easy to savor the numerous food regions in India just walking down the streets of Delhi. In fact, with all the tourists and especially so many Israelis, there were many restaurants that offer British, American, continental, and Israeli set breakfasts.

For sightseeing, one of the highlights was the tomb of Humayun, a large red sandstone building finely carved in the Mughal style, surrounded by orderly gardens much in the style (except for the stone of course) of the Taj Mahal. The colors are so rich: bright green parrots nest in the red sandstone walls of the tomb and brown eagles soar over it all. Luminescent white marble was used to create intricately carved stone lattice windows that glowed when the light shown through them.

Shaggy tailed sheep in Old Delhi.
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We also saw the Jama Masjid mosque, Red Fort, the National museum, and walked around the Palika underground bazaar. One afternoon we went in a Jain temple, a mosque, and passed a sikh temple, a baptist church and numerous hindu temples, all within a few blocks of each other. Religion is everywhere and really a way of everyone's life. Later on a train, a man was questioning me: What is your good name? What is your profession? How much monthly salary do you make? What do you think of your president? What do you think of the Indian Prime Minister? What is your religion? These are fair and common questions, and a visitor should be ready to face them on train and bus rides, and not be afraid to ask the same in return. In response to the religion question, I said I did not really believe in god. He could not comprehend this, and so asked again. He got a little vexed and so I eventually said I was Christian to smooth things over for the 12 hour ride.

The Jama Masjid mosque. We lied and said we did not have a camera in order to avoid paying the 300 rupee fee.
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We spent 6 days in Delhi on this visit, a little too much time, especially considering that we were to come to Delhi a total of 6 times during the next 3 months. The problem was we only got a guidebook when we arrived, and being such a wondrous country with so many spectacular festivals, we wanted to plan a good use of our time. We decided to head to Varanasi next, an important religious city, before we escaped the heat and went into the Himalayas. So we hopped on an overnight train and were pleased to share bunks with 2 young American women who had just arrived too.