Old Delhi

No pictures yet. I’ll do my best to take you on a tour around Old Delhi then.

“Of course, says Shilpa, my flatmate, if you are in Delhi in the period of Ramdas (Ramadan), you should try to go there in the evening”. So I did.
From the entrance of the Lal Quilat, Delhi’s Red Fort, a true masterpiece in elegance where I had spent some hours…we decided to cross the road.

(…and this, I can assure you, is not an easy (nor safe) thing to undertake. The road has three lanes per direction, at least officially. So, supposedly six in total. I guess there were a minimum of 7, if not 8 or 10, rows of cars, bicycles, auto-rickshaws, cows, busses, trucks, any kind of thing moving on wheels, for each direction. Everybody of course very keen on roaring and horn play. It is even written very colourfully on the back of most vehicles: “Please horn”. As usual the traffic light for pedestrians would never turn into green, you need to guess. But we did it, eventually…)

Maybe because we unexpectedly crossed without any major harm, we felt the burning urge to enter the flashing temple just in front of us, and maybe pray for a little moment. And old guy started explaining to us. It turned out to be a Jain temple. It was a special night for them, the end of a 10-days long fast, so the temple was covered with flashing colour lights, exactly how you would imagine an amusement park in Europe.
Jain’s motto, we were said , is “ life and let live”. Their core belief is the respect of every and any form of life, be it human or vegetal, from the ant to the people. Each of their temples has a “birds charity hospital”, for example, where sick birds are treated and fed. Mainly green parrots, incredible amounts of them you sometimes see covering small domes on the side of the road. They are vegetarians but do not eat potatoes and onions because since you have to take them out of the earth you are supposedly killing them. They have 24 masters, some kind of Saints who renounced to their royal and wealthy status, the guy continued, to live of meditation. The 24 guys look all exactly the same, a white statue of a meditating Buddha–like figure. For Jainism everyone has to look for the divine in oneself, not outside it. Those 24 found it.
Well, what I found out in a week and a half of India is that when an Indian starts to explain you something, s/he will never stop, never, unless you say you “must” urgently leave to go somewhere else and force the conversation to find its (un)natural end. And even then, they will bring you somewhere else to see something else and explain you something more before you are allowed to leave politely. So we did while hunger was driving our wills from those very white and pure divine figures to the very much earthly dream of a meat dinner in Old Delhi.
A very very brave guy insisted to drive us (the three of us, me and two friends) to the heart of Old Delhi, on his cycling-rickshaw for 20 rupees (40 eurocents). The guy was pulling more than 200kg and surely did not weight more than 45 kg himself. Even if it was him who had insisted, I could not help feeling very…heavy.

Kareem is a very famous restaurant in New Delhi, possibly the best. It is nothing about luxury, about nicely dressed waiters or nicely served food. It is just about what you eat. The family who runs the place descends supposedly from those who took care of the kitchens of the Mughal emperors during few hundred years. I do not know if this is true, but it is worth trying, you can hardly be disappointed. Delicious.
Fed and intrigued by the very colourful and crowded atmosphere, we finally started walking in Old Delhi.
You immediately realise it is a Muslim neighbourhood because of the quantity of veiled women and the frequency with which you see men wearing a white cotton embroidered cap on the top of their head. Men and children of course.
This part of the city is all about very narrow streets, packed with things, peoples, smells and lights: people going in both directions, and bikes, motorbikes, cycling rickshaws slipping through. It is an enormous bazaar working day and night. You can buy jewels, clothes, textiles, perfumes’ essences, spices, food of any kind (piles of sweets, coloured pasta, kebabs), every step you see something you’ve never seen ad you don’t know if you’ll ever know what it is. Over your head, hundreds and hundreds of cables hanging in the air from building to building. In the corridor-shaped textile shops you can see three of four black-veiled women, sometimes ten, sitting on a bench on the left of the room and some teams of very busy sellers showing off and praising all different kinds of fabrics from their tables, cupboards and shelves. In front of the restaurants you also see large groups of men, maybe 20 to 30, orderly and quietly crouching in two wings at the entrance. People who go in and out would pass through them. You quickly connect your obese neurons and understand they are waiting for the leftovers of people’s dinners. Your digestions stops for a second, but then you go on, there’s little you can really do, apart from thinking about how long it did take for you to realise what was going on and acknowledge you are becoming a bit more cynical, or maybe just a bit more pragmatic and a bit less pathetic about hungry people.

Not to get lost, we decided to head back to the main road, and immediately started bargaining with the auto-rickshaw drivers to get home. I’m getting better at it, even if usually, even once they accepted to switch the “meter” on, they will tell you at the end they have no change and you’ll have to quarrel in two different languages, just not to feel too stupid.
More soon, and on.