i was in Delhi recently. went with my folks and returned alone. lonely travel pushes the writer's pen, or keyboard, if you will.
i went by train. 2-tier AC. it was uneventful and boring. somehow train travel is incomplete if you travel in an AC coach. it has this dessicated feel. you see India passing by through tinted windows. sometimes if you look really hard, you can convince yourself you're really seeing a video stream, and the train never moved.
on the way back i took a flight. the usual exercise in self-induced silence. i wonder which is more boring - AC trains or flights. they both have their points.
Delhi was pretty. i'm always amazed by the trees that line the roads. and the flowers you sometimes see on the narrow strips between the main road and the service lanes.
Delhi was pretty and ugly. if you go over the flyovers, you see black plastics tanks arrayed over the roofs of pale yellow blockish buildings, going on for ever. but Delhi has something going for it. it's the kind of place you'll see a massive building for something like "Continuing Care for Cancer Patients", sounding like a place where they take care of the terminal cases. it's a city where money has done things that make you proud - monumentally proud, i guess.
i reached the domestic airport in Delhi early for my flight. it was early afternoon and i decided not to step into the crowded terminal right away. outside it was hot, over 40 degrees. there was a mild breeze - the kind that feels so dry that sometimes you wonder if you hear it crackling. the heat dries up your outer skin, and you almost feel psychedelically focussed on the process of putting foot in front of foot and going where ever you are. i have always been amazed at the kind of bareness and minimalism that such weather brings out. it's just your thoughts and the heat outside.
somehow, it's in that heat, in the bleakness of the hot searing urban landscape, that i really see the sensuousness of India. it's in that heat that i feel the pulse of a primitive instinct, and somehow feel that i share it with the men and women who lived in these plains for hundreds of years.
this is the India that i know as mine.
