A day on my own was no problemo at all. The new metro - whose vast cool modern spaces must be as disorienting to most Delhi-wallahs as they are strangely comforting to me - took me speedily to Rajpath, the great avenue between the India arch and the government buildings, across which lies the National Museum, and then back up to Chandni Chowk in the heart of the Old City, where I roamed and got lost but was found by another metro station at Chawri Bazaar and whisked smoothly home in fifteen minutes.
The highlight of the National Museum was its wonderful collection of miniature paintings, each one of which (as the Michelin guides say) vaut le voyage. What exquisite worlds they invite you to, full of details which seem more precise than photographs, hair-thin lines which on inspection turn out to be composites of more than one line and so give figures depth through subtle shading, and all in a somehow translucently deep two-dimensional world of bold bars and boxes of luminous color. Depth without the crudity of foreground and background...
Everything was foreground - in any case there was no room for any background - in the busy alleys of Old Delhi, most of which would fit comfortably, complete with the shops lining them, onto any of the metro platforms. I was following the map from a 20-year-old book a friend copied from me, which was to take me to a lovely quiet lane far from the hustle of the larger streets... but when I found the entry to it, the approaching larger street (at most 10 feet across) was a seething traffic jam caused by a procession of cycle rickshaws squeezing into that every alley, bearing - you guessed it - six pairs of western tourists, one of whom was blithely videotaping the whole melee. Gulp. That not only could be me, but it might be me tomorrow, as our tour of twelve is spending part of the day in the Old City. Not that anyone seemed particularly bothered. Getting bothered seems something one would have to save for far worse things if you're living there...
