28° 36’49”N, 77°12’31”E
Delhi is choking, gasping for air. Haze clouded gray with dust brown are the colors of the thick smog. Men are spitting a brown-red liquid in strings on the ground to mix with the dirt and trickling rivers of urine. A woman, as slim as a broom, approaches and folds over a cloth to show a bundle that is not moving and not breathing and not the right color in its tiny lips which are a cold blue and asks for change to feed the infant.
She asks, over and over in English, as she grips my sleeve tightly balled in her fist and I move quicker against the current of bodies to try to get free. A dizzying, blurry carnival of sights, sounds, smells, and everything is in so, so close. Everything has fingers and is touching me.
A snapped-in-half man drags himself through the streets past limping dogs. Stray cows wandering slowly, chewing trash, sleeping on sidewalks. Dogs with sharp ribcages are scattered on street corners amidst litter and filth, dozing in potholes.
Tucked underneath an overpass that serves as her roof, an old woman bends over a cooking fire, raking through coals with a stick as various half dressed children and unclothed babies gather and flutter around her ankles like skirts.
Two small puppies scavenge for scraps on the street, their tails wag in anticipation with the approach of someone. They have not yet been aptly reprimanded by the life they have entered. They will learn. They all do.
Waking up to choking haze, smell of trash burning, sounds of horns honking, tires screeching, through the walls sounds of throats being cleared of phlegm onto sidewalks and the sounds of birds singing.
A vendor on a paperclip bicycle sells fruits and another sells metals, funnels, keys, wire. There are sounds of children at their small school as the day commences: counting, singing laughing, as children do. Women ride sideways on the back of motorcycles that spew black smoke, perched with poise and grace, barely holding on, floating perfectly above the seat as the motor bike dodges in and out through the traffic, their colorful scarves floating behind them in the exhaust, lingering halos of bright silk. The collective breaths of a place packed so full of living things, a cradle that holds so many lives, all breathing in and out in the same space at the same time.
*
That first morning in Delhi, I peered out over the balcony of a friend’s apartment, scanning my surroundings unfolding in all directions. Watching the chai wallahs navigate the corridors, the people dropping parcels at the corner to be laundered, a man on a bicycle trailing a cart filled with fruits and vegetables calling out a repetition of Hindi syllables into the thick morning air, another man on a bicycle piled high with metal objects swinging and clanging like chimes.
My friend, a journalist, was away in Africa on an assignment, and had offered his apartment and emailed a three page, single-spaced list of exact instructions that would take me from the my airplane at the Indira Gandhi airport to the doorbell of his flat in the Jangpura Extention neighborhood. He would not be there to meet me, he would not return to India for a few weeks, but he had sent the instructions with the assurance that the list had been edited and re-edited over the five years that he had resided in India, updated and amended and modified by the many travelers who had received the list before me. The instructions were exact.
Change money at the window on the left before you exit the airport; speak to no one else regarding money exchange.
Book a taxi at the foreign taxi stand outside the main door on the left. Speak to no one else regarding taxis.
There were a few loopholes in his instructions, like “it is possible that you will have to instruct the taxi driver where to turn because he may be a fourteen year old boy from another country who had been in Delhi only six hours and on the job for two” (which he had himself experienced once). The driver will most likely speak no English; I speak no Hindi. Just point to the written address and do not get out until you read the address on the building. If he is lost, he will stop to ask people on the street for directions, he may stop to ask many people, many times for instructions. No matter how long it takes or how frustrated the driver gets, do not get out anywhere until you can read the address on the building. Otherwise, you will be utterly lost in India.
Postcards from the Perimeter: NOTES ON TRAVEL 