daily life

The beauty of Taj Mahal doesn’t need any word to be understood. There might be notions about it you can get only by studying its history or its architectural features. Though, the naïve amazement and deep, all-encompassing peace comes with no instruction booklet. The only thing I will add is how that vision was close to my idea of paradise...I swear, very close.

I want to tell you few things about daily life in Delhi. Few of those things I come across daily, those things, this time, I get easily used to.
The ironing stalls, for example. Wherever you are (and whoever you are) you will need to get things ironed. Even more since you usually wash them by hand. I, use to go down the street, 10 meters outside the gate of my block. (A friend of mine…she uses to throw everything from the balcony, down three floors to the man grabbing everything). There is a kind of wooden table on the side of the road, it stands between a pole well charged with cables and a tree. There is also a bed on the side of the table, where to put the ready stuff, each pile wrapped in a colourful cloth, and where people also sit and chat. The table is covered with flat clothes which work as the base. At first, you normally cannot avoid staring at the iron: exactly what I first saw in some museum of old customs sometime and somewhere back home: li-te-ral-ly an iron, with a solid-looking wooden handle. You understand it better when you pass by at sunset and see the burning red of the coal in the dark. You normally find men doing this job, sometimes also women, often couples making of it their family business. They charge 2 rupees a piece (4 eurocents). Some are more skilled that others, and, of course, you don’t abandon you work clothes in the hands of the first one you find. You try a few out and establish your special service relationship with them and their corner.
The same is true for “chai” corners, Indian tea seller (both the ‘seller’ and the ‘tea’ are very Indian I mean. I guess you won’t find anything like this anywhere else in the world). The best are for sure the ones you find on the street. Maybe you don’t fell comfortable with eating food prepared by the same person on the same dusty and dirty roadside, but you trust her or his chai much more easily.
There’s a lady who prepares chai just in front of where I catch an auto-rickshaw every morning. It’s becoming my breakfast hotspot just before 8:30. She does it beautifully and mechanically, with the inner elegance a woman wearing a saree does everything as if it were the most confortable dress cobination in the world. Though, if I published a picture of her spot you wouldn’t be very enthusiatic about it. When she’s not there it looks just as few black stones thrown on the side of the pavement. It’s excellent anyway, you taste the flavour of frshly crushed cardamom, milk, tea and some other spices sometimes. It’s four rupees, as much as ironing two shirts, or doing 1 Km by rickshaw, or even half an hour of internet, or half drop of most pretentious ‘caffe’ americano’ they sell at the bar of the High Commission of Wonderlands.
I still don’t get used to Wonderland standards, but I like the Chai lady and the iron man. Maybe the truth it’s just I need them almost every week, if not everyday…is that all about a service society like this one??
I shall have a chai while thinking about it.