andrew bones: the other delhi

another e-mail i copy/pasted, sorry for the spacing problem, future entries won't be like this:

yesterday was my best day in delhi yet. i loved it. it started offwith buying that shirt, which i've already described and am stillwearing. then i bought my ticket for mcleod ganj. in actuality, thiswas a dark point in an anotherwise bright day. as any traveler canattest, this may be the most bewildering, disorienting,embarassment-inducing activity available to visitors of new delhi. itshouldn't be. the ticket office, air-conditioned, calm, clean,sparsely populated, and catering specially to foreigners with helpfulticket salesmen, is on the second floor. but no employee there willtell you that. you stand in line with an imposing number of indianswith no idea what you're doing, everyone packed in so closely the guybehind you is leaning on you, and you're leaning on the guy in frontof you. you get to the window. "pathankot?" i say. this is thestation i want to go to. "no" she says. "other line, to left, yougo." i leave the line and go to the one in the left. i wait in lineand reach the window. "pathankot?" "no, you go other line, inside."i go inside another area of the station. here there are tons ofindians lined up as well, and it says "second class." ok, i wantsecond class sleeper, so this could be where i need to be. i wait inline. when i get to the window, the lady gets up and leaves. thepeople behind me are getting angry and peering out from the end of aqueue 100 indians deep. i turn to them, grimaced, and try to shruginnocently, as if to say "this isn't my fault, i don't know whathappened." a few minutes later she comes back. "pathankot?" i say."you go outside, turn, go inside, other line." she gestured to the
place i had just come from. i left, dejected, embarassed, confused.i was also beginning to feel really angry. i should also mention thatduring this process, there is an army, the worst i have ever seen, ofscammers trying to lure travelers to the fake ticket offices acrossthe street, where you'll pay twice or more what you should for ticketsthat may not even be valid. a couple canadians i met later were takenin on this, but i've learned to ignore anyone trying to get yourattention in public. your frusteration is doubled for this reasonbecause you cannot ask anyone in the station. out of the question.you cannot do it. they will lead you elsewhere.what the *hell*, i thought...what the hell. i was going back into theother line. i wanted to get the window and strangle the person on theother side. i wanted a god damned ticket. to my salvation, while iwas in line a couple from spain, who i noticed looking similarlybewildered earlier, came up to me and told me they found the place toget tickets on the second floor. they led me there. they wereextremely nice. to the people working at the new delhi train station- when you see a foreigner, tell them to go upstairs. is that sohard? what the hell?i got my ticket and met a nice couple from montreal in the process.we left together and agreed to meet up in about an hour in the cafeacross from me. i used the computer for a bit in the cyber cafe nextdoor and noticed bhagat, from couchsurfing, had e-mailed me, saying"sorry i can't host you, but let me know if you want to get together." if he had sent that before i left, when he meant to, i would haveignored it and we would have never hung out. but it sounded prettygood now that i was here. i called him and he told me where to meet
him and that he was just going to hang out with two friends. i met upwith the canadians and asked them if they wanted to meet bhagat andhis friends. they said they did, so we left and of course had a bitof trouble finding them, which is a boring story, but we finally foundthem. this was the beginning of me seeing "the other delhi," which ishow i think of it in my head. we hung out near india gate and thepaliamentary district at first. finally, just some grass for us tolie on, hardly any people, lots of space, extremely impressive capitalbuildings. we talked about delhi and india and the world, everyonewas having a great time. it was our first real conversation withlocal indians who we weren't paying for something. it was awesome.it was also the first time i realized there were "normal people" inindia. i had e-mailed my friends rachna and vivek, asking how thiscity could have possibly produced two well-adjusted people. but iunderstand now. i had only, up until this point, inhabited the poorparts of delhi. we left india gate and they took us to a restaurantin some district of delhi, had to be south but unfortunately i don'tknow exactly where it was, where things were almost familiar, but withan indian flare. this is the delhi most high-paying tourists willexperience, i expect. luxury hotels and the upper class districts ofdelhi. i can't tell you how different it is than a place like paharganj or old delhi. it is similar to a modern city in the west, but itis stylistically indian. we went to a restaurant and they ordered thefood for us, it was so delicious, and i discovered anar juice(pomegranite juice). sooo good. 25 rupees ($0.50) per glass. idrank a lot of anar juice. i happily made myself sick on anar juice.
it's not at all like what you get in those pomegranite drinks in thestates. the guy goes to his pile of pomegranites and squeezes themright there in front of you until there's a cupful. it's ridiculouslygood.we parted with our newfound friends and experienced the delhi metrofor the first time, proving that delhi wasn't out of surprises yet.the subway is immaculate, pristine, extremely modern, far beyond mywildest expectations. the only thing i've seen like it is themontreal subway. it makes the new york and philadelphia subways lookfilthy. it's also dirt cheap, usually costing only a few rupees (justa few cents) to travel long distances. it is the way to travel indelhi if you can.we emerged, alex and saldrine (the canadians) and i, from the subway,and stepped out into a transformed connaught place. i realized i hadnever been in the inner circle of connaught place, only the muchseedier outer circle. we had emerged near a central park of delhi,where well-to-do couple and families were happily lounging on thegrass in the warm night. connaught place was glowing romanticallywith beautiful lights, idyllic and picturesque. i'm not sure how todescribe it but it struck me that i hadn't seen delhi before thatnight.we retired to pahar ganj and went to a bar. it was good to have madethese new friends, we got along really well. we talked abouttraveling and life and the such. they spoke very good english buttheir first language was clearly french.to make a long story somewhat shorter, i missed my train to mcleodganj. delhi for another day. i was hanging out with alex andsaldrine, and i realized it was getting pretty close to being time toleave. i ran to the intersection of the main bazaar and new delhirailway and found a rickshaw - "can you get me to old delhi station in
5 minutes?" i thought it was nearby. he looked grave. "we can try." what followed could have been in a carchase scene from a delhi actionmovie - the lights of delhi streaked past, headlights of oncomingtraffic were narrowly avoided at the last section, we weavedgracefully, avoiding death by seconds. sometimes, after an extremelyclose call, the driver would laugh manically (he was enjoying this)and call "fast driving, yes?" i was having too much fun to be scared,and i laughed along with him. i missed the train, i wasn't evenclose, but i had a good time on the ride. i walked to the stationjust to make sure. old delhi at night seems a bit seedy, but i'm notscared of any part of delhi any more. yes, many areas around here areabhorrently poor and pulse with people, but there's no reason to beworried here. bad neighborhoods don't really equate with dangeroushere as they do in philadelphia. there doesn't seem to be so much asdistinction between good and bad neighborhoods as between well-to-doand poor neighborhoods.so that was yesterday.today i woke up late for the first time, like 10:00, i couldn'tbelieve my watch but i needed the sleep i think. i didn't sleepduring the 20 hour flight, and every morning i've gotten up at about4am-5am just from pure excitement. i felt really comfortable in delhitoday. delhi is fun, delhi is exciting. no longer overwhelming ordisorienting. i went to mejnu ka tilla (sp), a tibetan colony innorth delhi. i took the metro, then a cycle rickshaw (these arecheap, like 20 rupees even though it was quite a distance). i'm prettygood at haggling reasonable rickshaw rates now, though you can'tescape the fact that you will always pay more than an indian. that'sjust how it is. mejnu ka tilla looked pretty haggard and run-down, a
ghetto like most places in india, i couldn't understand it's novelty.then i noticed a white marble building with an open gate. nooneseemed to be coming in or out. i went in and entered a very large,all-marble room where a little girl was peering out at me from one ofthe adjacent rooms. it appeared to be a place where people lived, butit was like nothing i've seen before. very clean, very exotic, verystrange, like something from a movie, like how the people on anotherplanet might live. a man came out of one of the rooms. "hello?" isaid. "can i come in?" he motioned for me to take my shoes off, andi did. then he wanted me to leave my bag, apparently he was going togive me a tour of whatever the hell this place was. i didn't want toleave my bag, but i looked around and thought "well, you can eitherleave it and see this place, or keep it and walk out now." i made aquick judgement of the place and decided to leave the bag. i felt icould trust these people. besides, there was hardly anyone here. heled me through a tour of what i would discover is a tibetan temple,with quite a few people living in it. it was completely amazing. wewalked down into descending, narrow marble corridors and emerged,bizarrely, into tiny, cell-like cavities fashioned into impressive,glittering shrines. picture it. it's so much fun, like exploring anancient tomb. there's this room, oddly shaped, circular i believewith a sherical ceiling, i'll have to check my pictures but this ishow i remember it, and branching off of it are two narrow marblepassageways. so you are in this tiny, otherwordly room with theseexits providing the sense that you are also underground. it was likebeing at the center of the earth. not marble floor, all marble. the
whole place is a milky polished marble. he led me back upstairs.occasionally these adorable tibetan children flitted past, laughingand stealing curious looks at me. he asked me if i wanted to eat, andi said i could eat a little. he led me into an eating area, a largeopen room with a cook at one end. they had rolled out two mats andabout 15 people were eating communally. there was one row on one matand one row on another mat. we were all facing each other. we atedelicious rice and spiced potatoes with out hands right off our plateson the floor. we looked at each other and smiled and laughed. i wasa spectacle here. the children were loving it, telling their parentsunintelligable things and laughing. "from america?" one woman said."yes" i said. this was the limits of our language exchange but wesmiled and laughed together, the universal language. we were happy.i washed my own dish and left. i really, really wanted to give themmoney, it was so nice of them not to ask me for any, but besides 500rupee bills (which i should have just given them, i'm so cheap, i'mkicking myself) all i had was 20 rupees, which i needed to get thecycle rickshaw, which might not be able to change 500 rupees. i tookthe cycle rickshaw back to the metro, then to the other end of theline, to an auto rickshaw, to kauz haus (sp), a neighborhood i hadheard was extremely rich and posh. i wanted to see more of the "otherdelhi." i didn't...he took me to kaus haus market, i have no idea ifthat's the same thing but it's no different than many of the marketsi've seen in delhi so i'm sure i didn't go to the right place. iwalked around it a bit but i saw no posh neighborhoods. i went back,i was done with running around for the day. i went to connaught place
and ate for the first time in a nice western-style restaurant just totry it. it was nice and air-conditioned and extremely well decorated(the posh was here, at least), but expensive, of course. still, itwas only about $12 for two bottled waters and a very good gourmetpizza.time to buy another ticket for mcleod ganj, since i wasted my lastone. i took a rickshaw to new delhi station (basically synonymouswith pahar ganj here, the station is at the beginning of the mainbazaar street). i couldn't believe it - the ticket office forforeigners closes on sundays at 2:00pm. i laughed. another day indelhi, looks like. no problem, i'm beginning to like this, and notjust in the way i liked it before, in that it is so different and loudand exotic and adventurous. i'm beginning to feel a bit endeared withthis delhi place, now that i feel i understand it a little. lastnight i peered out from the roof of my building, the only personthere, and looked over a darkened, sporadically
lit, still bustling,delhi. it's winning me over. i like this place.