After just a day, there's too much to report. Entirely to be expected, I suppose! But here's a quick summary.
Swimming along in my chauffered air-conditioned car (I'd forgotten that it was quite so honky and stop-and-starty in yesterday's rather oneiric description, but it does jibe with the quiet I observed, in drivers concentrating on the road as well as in passengers, trying not to) I got to roam around the vast, empty Red Fort in the (not so old) Old City; explore the gardens around Humayan's Tomb, the first great Mughal building and a sort of anticipation of the Taj Mahal, its many tomb chambers divided and united by lacey stone screens just as its 32 surrounding squares of garden were linked and divided by a system of flowing streams and little waterfalls; marvel at the pinkish-beige grandeur of Lutyens' Art-Deco-Indo-Italio-Hispanic New Delhi buildings (not Hispanic, British, you say, but I tell it like I see it, perhaps I'm being reminded of Franco's architecture), which, at the end of the long smoky drive from India Gate (bleachers still lining most of it from last week's Republic Day), seem to be a city floating disconnected and largely unpopulated from the rest of the city; delight in the stacks of stone quarried from destroyed Hindu and Jain temples (and still quivering with memories of their earlier incarnations) in the ruins of Quwwat-ul-Islam, the oldest mosque in India, and smile with the flower-buds at the ends of the strokes of the Arabic calligraphy ornamenting the enormous 13th century tower of Qutb Minar and the remains of a great arched sandstone screen; and feel the power of the relics - they are relics, attracting veneration entirely nonviolently - at the house where Mahatma Gandhi spent his last 144 days and died: how moving to see the glasses through which he looked, the stone he used in lieu of soap to clean himself, his staff. His utopia not the seven-terraced heavens and palatial forts of the Mughals, the detached splendor of the Raj, but a village, any village, every village.
The tour begins this evening, leaving today for me to venture out on my own. Try the new metro (which glides high above the city), check out the National Museum, and perhaps wander a bit around the warren of narrow streets which is Old Delhi. For the first time it'll be just me and the city. Wish me luck!
