Delhi - girl

Delhi 23-25/02/2010
Where to begin? Obviously, a Shantaram experience was what I’d whimsically hoped for. Sadly, a warm welcome into India and into Indian culture was not to be had. Instead there was the creepy hotel guy who conspiratorially informed us that he was giving us a shit room for one night but it’d be ok on night two. He was a bit surprised when we then complained about the damp box of a room right next to reception we were given. The second room was bigger and not so damp but the cleaner had clearly only just finished his last cigarette in there when we moved in. We elicited a free breakfast in compensation for still being in a crap room as well as a promise to move us first thing in the morning. It was claimed that we were the first people to ever, in the history of the hotel, complain. We didn’t bother directing him to the website of fairly mixed reviews! Room number three was bigger but neither of us managed much sleep on either night thanks to the porters’ lack of understanding about hotels primarily being for sleeping. Despite C asking a number of times, the noise was most certainly not kept down.
Creepy hotel guy was weirdly incapable of directing us to anywhere or showing us where the hotel was on a map - luckily whoever designed the business-card, was not. The Delhi metro was a lifesaver - easy to use, quick and clean. The only issue came when C thought he’d been pick-pocketed within minutes of being on the platform. A very miserable few minutes ensued until he realised he’d moved all the money to another pocket and then forgotten! Lucky boy.
First stop was a meeting for me with a guy from an NGO with whom I’d been corresponding. We sat for 2.5 hrs discussing issues facing street-living/working children in India. Fascinating guy and really interesting work. Meeting him has certainly made a lot of things about India much clearer. While the problems are clearly severe, civil society is a lot more developed than I’m used to in Africa, which means a seemingly greater level of understanding and compassion from local government and community structures - invaluable when working with vulnerable children.
We decided to walk from the hotel to the station - a mere one hour through screaming traffic, road-works, millions of people and anything else you care to imagine. However, the ease with which we purchased rail tickets more than made up for the stress of the walk. The highlight was seeing an extremely tall goddess statue with wooden scaffolding all around - people we making all sorts of interesting genuflection type movements to this plastic goddess. Perhaps an indictment of modern India?
Thankfully the train had no space on the day we wanted to leave Delhi so we were forced to leave a day early! For some unknown reason we allowed a hotel we were ditching to book us a cab - eventually a small, smelly, man with a small, smelly car, claimed to be our cab. Despite reason telling us not to go with him we did. It was fine (if smelly).
With eight hours until the train to Jaisalmer we decided to walk from the station to the Red Fort - yup, as dull as everyone said it was. However, the Jama Masjid mosque was not. After a walk through a long bazaar we arrived at this majestic building. Rather than leave our shoes outside we carried them in with us, which only caused trouble with the mini man guarding the entrance to the minarets tower - like a little troll in Rumpelstiltskin. He was convinced that our shoes would de-holy-fy the minaret (true, we had walked in de-holy-fy-ing water only minutes before). Clearly the 20 rupees we gave him to guard them re-sanctified the area.
After a great lunch in a well-recommended restaurant we wandered back to the station to collect our bags and enjoy the relative luxury and peace of the first class waiting room - sometimes I do love a bit of western arrogance (we certainly weren’t travelling first class).
Interestingly, despite all the poverty - evident in human and infrastructural form - after the first night I wasn’t particularly overwhelmed. Work in Africa prepared me well for slums and human poverty and work in the fSU prepared me well for the chaotic and collapsing infrastructure. Of course, seeing people forced to live in such appalling circumstances breaks my heart, but it also fascinates me to see whole communities living on the streets. I just want to meet them and understand their lives. Whole rivers of electric cables on the streets, high or low, have a strange beauty to them. We just kept asking ourselves, ‘but how could one ‘fix’ Delhi?’ The city’s decay is so severe, the chaos so all encompassing, that there seems little option but to keep on going, keep on half-heartedly fixing and keep on hoping nothing goes seriously wrong. Not a glowing reference for India’s capital.


I couldn’t say I enjoyed Delhi, per se, but I did find it enthralling and truly an education.