Three Days in Delhi

 

Jama Masjid

Day One

“In India, everything is difficult,” says Rosie, who’s been here before. I have to admit that at first I don’t believe her. After all, I’ve survived Bangkok and I’ve survived Hanoi: how much more ‘difficult’ could Delhi be? 

By the time we leave the airport at 6 AM it’s already warm. At our taxi driver’s request, we wind down all the windows in his little car as he pulls away into the early morning traffic. As we enter Delhi the roads gradually become narrower and more chaotic. With a little honk here and a little honk there, we weave our way among rickshaws, bicycles, pedestrians, scavenging cows and tatty-looking dogs, sometimes with just an inch or two of clearance. 

After having a sleep at our hotel in Paharganj we decide, for some reason, to have an afternoon stroll to nearby Connaught Place. Big mistake. As we turn right by the open-air pissoir at the end of our alleyway we’re besieged by a gang of auto-rickshaw drivers who take a very keen interest in where we’re going. We tell them that we’re just going for a walk. “Ah Connaught Place. Down that way,” they say, pointing helpfully.

There then follows a chase lasting several kilometres in which a succession of touts, either working together or against each other (they badmouth each other, but that could be part of the act) follows and misdirects us, trying to talk us into going to one or another “official” tourist bureau. The touts keep disappearing then reappearing: “Oh, I’m just walking this way,” they’ll say. “Let me show you where to go.” One of the rickshaw drivers from earlier accosts us. “I’ll take you to Old Delhi. Ten rupees! Five rupees!” he shouts. He doesn’t seem to believe me when I tell him that I like to walk.

 

Paharganj

We resort to hiding in banks to take a sneaky peek at our map. Outside it’s hot and dusty. By the time we find our way to Connaught Place, what should have been a twenty minute walk has taken the best part of an hour. The place itself is far from spectacular. There’s a busy road, new air-conditioned shops, hotels, restaurants and, at the centre, a circle of green parkland. Rosie has a look in some of the shops and I tag along. The touts have disappeared. All seems to be well.

I suggest that we cross the road and take a walk across the small park, seemingly an island of verdant calm in the heart of this noisy, jumbled city. No sooner have we set foot on the grass than a group of three local men walks over to us. (Maybe wearing my straw cowboy hat was a mistake). One of the men is carrying a shoeshine box, which should have set off alarm bells but didn’t. After his friend has tried to re-direct us towards one of the “official” tour offices, the shoeshine fellow suddenly looks down and gasps theatrically. “Oh sir, you have shit on your shoe!” he says. “I’m a shoeshine man!”

Sure enough, a big dollop of bird pooh has been squirted onto my right shoe while my attention was elsewhere. I’d heard about this scam earlier, so I’m as annoyed at myself for falling for it as I am at the men around me. “Well… I like shit on my shoe!” I say rather weakly, and march off before he can charge me for cleaning it off. He laughs, pleasantly enough, as if we’re the best of friends and I’ve just made a joke about the hot weather. Once we’re out of sight, I wipe the avian evacuation from my shoe as best I can with a tissue.

We cross the road to walk back to our hotel and are immediately set upon by a group of ladies collecting money for ‘charity’. Before we can utter a word of protest, Indian flags have been pinned to our lapels and the words “children” and “sick” have been used in a vague sort of way by the leading tin-rattler, who, suspiciously, carries not a tin but a roll of bank notes. By this stage, I’m feeling pretty cynical about my fellow man, so I shove a measly ten rupees at the women and, ignoring their protests, walk away. (I hope they weren’t really collecting for sick kids.)

Things pick up a bit in the evening. Having only large banknotes, we opt for dinner at a hotel rather than a roadside dhaba. On the rooftop terrace of The Metropolitan in Paharganj we enjoy lamb tikka, black daal and curried brinjal (aubergine), washed down with a much-needed cold beer.

Day Two

After yesterday’s events, we decide that it might be a good idea to have some sort of a schedule. By this time, we’ve realised that there’s a Metro station ten minutes’ walk from our hotel, which links us conveniently to much of central Delhi including, erm, Connaught Place (d’oh!). The Metro is a crowded but quick and cheap way of getting around town and, more importantly, it’s air-conditioned.

We take the train to the Red Fort (Lal Quila) and, ignoring the efforts of various rickshaw drivers to enlist our patronage, pass through the metal detectors and security pat-downs to go inside.

Built by the Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan in the 1640s, the Red Fort was sacked first by the Persian Emperor Nadir Shah in 1739, then by dear old Blighty in 1857 following the Indian Mutiny, or the First War of Independence as it’s called here. Because of this, the interior of the fort is not really as spectacular as you might imagine. Encrusted jewellery and metalwork has been stripped from the various palace buildings and the famous Peacock Throne carted off to Tehran.

 

Rosie at the Jama Masjid

In the afternoon heat, with sweat stinging our eyes, we head to the Jama Masjid, India’s largest mosque, also built by Shah Jahan. Ignoring the rickshaw driver who tells us that it’s closed (today is a Friday), we climb the main steps just as the lunchtime prayer crowd is leaving. It’s certainly a spectacular building, with huge marble domes and a vast courtyard, big enough to contain 25 000 people. A line of mats is laid out over the paving slabs in the courtyard, and we soon find out why. Without shoes (which have to be removed at the entrance) the slabs, which have been baking in the heat since dawn, are pretty damn toasty. I spend much time hopping around trying to take photos.

Rebuffing the attempts of a random hanger-about to give us a tour (“That is a minaret”; “This is the courtyard”) we climb to the top of the mosque’s tower for a good but dangerous view out over the narrow, crowded alleyways of the city’s Muslim Quarter. On a rooftop nearby, three men fly kites.

 

Let's go fly a kite...

Day Three

Day Three starts with a definite plan. We’ll take the Metro, which we know quite well by now, to Central Secretariat Station, at the end of the line. From there we’ll take a short walk down to Rajpath, the long boulevard that connects the Colonial-era India Gate monument to the Rashtrapati Bhavan, or parliament building. From there we’ll nip down to the nearby Nehru Museum, take a look around, and be back at our hotel in time for chai and scones and the 4.30 bus to Dharamsala.

As usual in Delhi, things don’t quite run to plan. It’s another hot and dusty summer’s day. As we stagger, sweating, down the Rajpath in the direction of India Gate, we’re plagued by rickshaw drivers who seem to appear from nowhere on the formerly stately and serene boulevard. It’s too far to walk, we’re told, even though we can see the imposing bulk of the monument rising on the horizon less than a kilometre away.

We’re offered ‘free’ rides; we’re offered tours of the city. A simple “no” doesn’t get us anywhere and neither do our attempts to lie ourselves free (we have to meet a friend in 45 minutes, we’ve already seen all the main sights). The only thing that works is to carry on walking and repeating the word “no” until the driver gets bored or finds someone else to follow. The four Indian tourists who are following us towards India Gate on foot soon overtake us and, unmolested, arrive at the monument a good ten minutes before us.

 

India Gate

India Gate looks, basically, like the Arc de Triomphe. It was erected to commemorate the deaths of both Indian troops and British troops from Indian regiments during the First World War. Busloads of domestic tourists cluster around and take photos while another ‘charity’ collector mutters the words “babies” and “hospital” and tries to pin a flag on me. This time I’m too quick for her though, telling her that I’ve already donated in Connaught Place.

The Nehru Museum proves to be further away than we’d thought. After some top-hole haggling on Rosie’s part we take an auto-rickshaw there. The museum is based in the house that Nehru lived in while he was Prime Minister. It stands on a wide, leafy street a few kilometres from the parliament building, amidst the huge high-gated mansions of today’s elite.

There’s hardly anyone there when we visit, which is a shame, as there are some pretty interesting exhibitions on Nehru, Gandhi and the independence struggle. You can also see the rooms where a young Indira Gandhi slept and where an old Nehru died. The chief attraction of the place however is its aura of shady calm. After the noise and chaos of Delhi, the house and grounds are a peaceful place to rest and gather one’s thoughts. I’m reluctant to leave, but leave we do, our rickshaw bearing us back, past chai wallahs and shoeshine boys, past families sleeping on the pavement and cows chewing on plastic bags, into the racing heart of the city.