Greetings from India! Before the arrival of the car and driver who'll take me to various sites in the south of the city - sites, actually, of some of New Delhi's seven predecessor cities - and as Brahms' fourth symphony plays rather aggressively in the little lobby of my hotel in Karol Bagh, I thought I'd take advantage of an opening at the free internet terminal to check in. Got in last night, the snug connection at Singapore no problem at all, an airport pick-up waiting for me, the hotel room quiet and clean (number one-naught-six).
The hotel's in a not very busy neighborhood, so my first impression of Delhi was the road getting here from the airport, which was fascinating. As cars, buses, trucks, tuktuks, motorcycles and bicyles hurry along the two-lane road in three constantly shifting lanes, like drops of rain spooling down a windowpane, imminent collision always averted so precisely that it seems like it was all choreographed, you suddenly find yourself not more than a foot away from the inside of another vehicle for a brief moment, before all move on. Each of these vehicular spaces seemed like a little world in the evening light, commuters and families and workers, people in suits, turbans, tuktuk-drivers with shawls to shield their faces from the fumes (tuktuks, if I've got the name right, have no doors at the front - any more than they have lights in the back).
I stilll feel the pulse of that road, the flashes of sudden closeness, the silence beneath the veneer of horns as people headed home, or wherever they were going. And beyond the cars in the somewhat misty air, a backdrop of low apartment buildings, dark trees, and the dark shapes of people - men mainly - standing along the road waiting, congregating, walking. I feel like I've seen the ingredients of the teeming streetscapes of Indian cities separated out like the ingredients in a television cooking program. And now: a tavola!
