Delhi Ho!

After an incredible five months away from the states I am back in Delhi and preparing for my last week in India. It was not easy leaving the flowering hillsides of Paravati (or the snow) to return to the sweltering heat of this city, and the bus ride was a nightmare. I was swindled for the thousandth time in the thousanth way (again vowing to never be swindled again having learned a new sideways technique of the ever-scheming bus-wallas) and spent my night with the other two tourists on the bus in the very back against the harsh incline and metallic rigidity of the end seat. Watching with impotent rage as our Indian counterparts snored in cushioned recliners ahead of us, we yelped expletives each time our bus driver hit a hole in the road- in the Himalayas, mind you- sending us airborn and crashing into each other all night. When I woke with a sharp pain in my back, neck and knees at sunrise, I was primed to fight with somebody, anybody, about my condition. But where was the driver? He had turned off the main road from Delhi and was taking pictures of empty land strewn with bricks with his cell phone (clearly thinking of buying) in some obscure little town in Haryana while his passengers slept. When he pulled back onto the country road and into a small chai stand to ask for directions (can you imagine? "Excuse me, where is Delhi?") I nearly lost it. But what to do? Or, as the locals often say with a shrug and dismissal, "why like this?"

Luckily when we did finally reach a bus stand on the outskirts of the capital I found an honest rikshaw-wallah to take me to my hotel. He complemented me on my Hindi, assured me that he was my little brother (although he looked to be about 45), and asked the usual questions, which unfortunately always consists of American sexual customs. Pulling the rickshaw to the side of the road and offering me a bidi, he timidly asked, "Just one question, madame. Please, I am curious. In your country, on the night of wedding, is it the same?" And inhaling from my bidi, exhausted from the busride, I sighed and said, "It is the same, my friend. We are not God, only animals.... monkeys at the very best. It is the same in the whole world." Clearly pleased with my answer he started up the motor of his rickshaw, inhaling deeply the morning Delhi pollution with his tiny rolled tobacco. "Aha, madame, very good thinking you. This is true, we are not God. Very good." With this my Muslim friend skipped the custom of taking me to five of his cousin's hotels and actually dropped me where I had requested, for the price agreed. And as such rites of passage often dump me into this melting pot of histories, cultures, languages, confusion, and more confusion, I have arrived in Delhi. Luckily the heat is not what I expected, not nearly as bad as how Dalrymple describes Delhi in May:

"As soon as you awoke you knew it was going to be hot. The sun had just appeared over the treeline, as blond as clarified butter but powerful nonetheless, hinting at the furnace-heat to come. Soon the kites were circling in the thermals, a great helix of wide-winged birds sailing the vectors in sweeping corkscrew spirals. By late morning the air was on fire; to open the door on the roof terrace was to feel in your face a blast of heat as strong as that from a blazing kiln. Noon came like a white midnight: the streets were deserted, the windows closed, the doors locked. There was no noise but for the sullen and persistent whirr of the ceiling fans."

I think a bout of rain has saved me from this more familiar Delhi (the one with the sledgehammer heat) but I will not wait around to find out. I will focus my last week on the success of our Jantaa student loans (stay tuned!) and then challo! back to Amrika. For sure I will miss the little things: chai stalls, old women's smiles, the infamous and all-meaning head wobble, pointing at various things and saying "very danger!", but not others, such as my busride last night and all the experiences like it that make traveling in India traveling in India. But for now I will go to my favorite street dhaba, order a thali (a plate of food that consists of rice, vegetable, dhal, and chapati), and sum it up with a chai. Maybe this one will be the thousandth chai of my trip.