An extract from this travel book. A page which I shall change randomly!
DELHI
New Delhi and I have bought a new pen. I write in Khan Market, drinking coffee with a runny nose, not from too much of nothing, but a genuine sniffle. This has come about because of alternating between the great heat and chilled air conditioning. The weather is very unpredictable. Suddenly, as I write, as if to emphasise the point the wind has got up. It has become quite squally but then it quietens as quickly as it arrived. . In the distance there is what sounds like the odd rumble of thunder. The clouds are thick and dense so maybe rain is on its way. Sarah has two permanent helpers.
Her house help is called Tulsi. She is a Nepalese woman, with an upright manner. She has the flat, sunken, broad face of the Chinese, rather than the look of the Hindi. On her arm she has a symbolic tattoo but I get the sense she is immensely proud of her position. When she asks if you would like something such as breakfast or coffee you sense she is compelling one to give an affirmative answer. In her way she is quite strict in her tone, so one obeys, unquestioningly.
Sanjay is the driver. He is thin, though wiry and I am sure quite strong. Before Kashmir he took me to Old Delhi. When we parked the car we were besieged by hustlers, predominantly selling helicopters that flew on a cheap string mechanism. As we perused the back streets Sanjay went into a toyshop asking for a remote controlled helicopter. It was, he explained, for his son and cost 1500 rupees, about £20. Several days later I gave him the money. Today he told me how grateful his son was for the gift. It pleased me more than a £20 note to give and be appreciated!
Delhi traffic is becoming less stressful. Whereas, at first, I thought every electric rickshaw was going to constantly hit us, now I’ve gauged its lack of speed. I ignore them, like other travellers, arrogantly certain of their inferiority and that it will concede to its petrol driven equivalence.
A chance to write a word or two in Khan Market the Mayfair of Delhi.
‘Maybe it will rain later, even storm, it’s close enough’, I muse as I finish the coffee.
I have a very painful tooth but I have made an appointment Thursday with the dentist. Apparently he is very good and very cheap. I feel tired and heavy limbed, time to return to Nizamuddin.
Samuel Pepys said that ‘when a man is tired of London he is tired of life.’
I say that when a man is tired of London he should try Delhi. It will wake him up with a bang!
A seriously strange city.
People living apparently in comfort, to them, in the middle of motorways or on sidewalks with their campfires on which they cook rice even, it seems, have a dinner party, for the people who occupy the grass, 30 yards away. There seems a natural hierarchy here socially, that allegorically, can be seen in the traffic.
The vehicle that doesn’t give way to anyone is the bus, although even they defer to an elephant, then the minibus/large Jeep type car, then the smaller car, the motorbike, the L.P.G. rickshaw and finally the bicycle rickshaw. Cows, of course, are Holy and are avoided at all cost, taken precedence before all forms of travel.
Socially it is the same. The binding force, perhaps, in both streams, being belief. For both the poorest and the richest, believe in Gurus, astrology, fate and afterlife. It is quite distinct, the belief of the happy ‘Hindi’ with his certainty of a next life and acceptance of all compared to the Moslem, fanatically in bred, foraging in their markets, poor but distinct, in white garments and hats, following, like a football crowd, the minuet call to Mosque. Yet both beliefs have ‘kismet’, ‘Gods Will’ embedded in their emotional psyche.
It is a complete turnabout to the western Christian whose emotional psyche has been subjugated to science and logic, which dominates any irrational call to what man cannot work out with the mind.
We, the West, have made God the ‘Ego’ whereas here they inwardly laugh at our intellectual emphasis. They hardly even argue, why would they even bother? After all, their ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, has feeling at its centre so there is no appeal to the mind enforced by mental, logical, Kant, Descartes, back up.
Again the driving allegory, no M.O.T.’s, no giving way, no tax disc, or speed cameras, no enforcement, all done by feel. Here there are over a billion people and even the lawmakers must know the absolute uncontrollability of such a populous. They rely on this emotion too, trusting to God, while we beat the drum of Christian Imperialism, carrying the banner into the 21st century and as we do so, all over this country the Mullah calls his followers to a Jihad, a Holy war against the infidel…
If Capitalist fight communist if Islam slays a lion there will be war in which the Poor will die to be born again as wing’d avengers to their incessant destruction by others of their own species.
I’m not a revolutionary don’t put me up against the wall. I’m not a revolutionary but listen to my call….
“A mouse between two cats, that is Kashmir,” says Azir behind a cloud of smoke.
Simultaneously to this remark finally it rains preceded by a huge clap of thunder and a strike of forked lightning that emphasises Azir’s comment.
