I Did This. I Did That.

I've been in India two weeks. It seems as if I have accomplished little, but this is the trial run. I am preparing for future trips to India. On the other hand, I have a place where I buy bottled water, a shop that deals with my cell phone, a barber and a motor rickshaw driver, as well as a most helpful hotel. That's quite a list of accomplishments. I do not yet have a favorite bookstore nor a CD shop.

I'm hiding out from India right now in this Internet Cafe. The sign out front says it's a cafe, but aside from a Coca-Cola cooler and a very dubious looking water cooler, there is nothing to justify that title. "Cafe" is now apparently a necessary modifier of "Internet" in India.

The reason I'm hiding out is I overdid it yesterday. I walked too much and ate lunch too late. I had a plan for less walking, but I didn't follow it. So I'm am going to sit here and write for a while. Then I will eat lunch and take a nap and head out in the late afternoon. I might go to Safardung's tomb. I'm going to another concert tonight and that tomb (the last big Mughal tomb in Delhi) is near the concert hall.

So, my plan for this blog is to write on a variety of topics, all the stuff I've done and haven't written about yet.

THE GANDHI/NEHRU SITES

Yesterday, I visited Nehru's house, Indira Gandhi's house and Birla House, where Gandhi was assassinated. I did them in that order and enjoyed Nehru's house very much. It's a huge mansion set in an enormous garden. Several of the rooms are kept in their condition at Nehru's time. The entry hall is subdued art decco with cubist paintings on the wall. The rest of the house is devoted to a museum consisting of a lot of rooms with photographs, newspaper clippings and descriptive text. It's well done and then at the end there is a room made to look like the room in which Nehru declared the Independence of India. There is a figure of him that moves when he talks and figures of several other important figures sitting watching him. At the end of his speech. They applaud. It's old fashioned, sweet and moving. I brought my camera, but I had recharged it the night before and I forgot to reinsert the battery. There was one picture I regret missing. I was standing on the balcony and the large green lawn was dotted with school children wearing bright red sweaters. It was a great sight. It looked like one of those tourist pictures they publish in small features at the back of travel magazines. Human interest and lots of color. Well, I missed it.

Then I walked over to Indira Gandhi's house. It's in a typical New Delhi one story bungalow. The most interesting aspect to me was the three rooms that were maintained as they were when she lived there, a study, a dining room and a drawing room. 60's design, very tasteful. I know less about Indira Gandhi and the museum part was less interesting to me (and I was beginning to fade). Her son, Ravi Gandhi, lived in the back of the house. There was a gruesome exhibit of the clothes he was wearing when he was assassinated (by bomb). There was not much left. As you left the house, you passed the front walkway which is covered in waving glass except for a square of plain glass which marks the spot where she was gunned by by Sikh extremists.

At this point, I should have taken a three-wheeler over to Gandhi Smitri where Gandhi was assassinated, but I walked. It wasn't far, and the traffic wasn't bad but I should have let myself be driven. I was getting to tired, but I didn't like the Gandhi sight. The room where he lived at the end of his life is moving, as his the assassination sight, but the rest of the huge house is filled with a historical exhibit on the ground floor (and by this time I had seen all the photographs I could digest in one day) and a noisy art exhibit on the second floor. All of the sculptures made sound. I fled. Again, I should have taken a vehicle, but I walked because I was trying to find a bookstore I had been in eight years ago. I was directed to Khan Market which was not the right place, but I was glad to be there. I had lunch in a hip establishment surrounded by young, fashionable Delhi women and older, Sikh businessmen.

I poked around the market a little. It's in all the guidebooks. I has boutiques and restaurants fitted in between the usual Indian market chaos. Then I walked to Lodi Gardens, not far away, still trying without success to find the bookstore.

RECREATING LODI GARDENS

When I was in India for first time, eight years ago, Lodi Gardens was one of my favorite places. It is a large green area with several old tombs and mosques from the Lodi period in Delhi. My son and I were staying at the Taj Mahal hotel up the road and we discovered the gardens by ourselves. To get to it from the hotel, we passed this small shopping area with a bookstore and a tandoori chicken restaurant. We stood outside the restaurant for a long time before we were brave enough to go it. It was out first restaurant outside a hotel in India. The chicken was great and next door there was a great bookstore and then down the roads, the gardens. We were only in Delhi for two nights, and we were on a busy schedule but we went back to the gardens at least twice. It was a magical experience. Yesterday, I tried to rediscover the magic. The Gardens are still great. Middle-class Indian women go jogging there. The gardens are very well maintained. But something was missing. For one thing, I know know more about the tombs. The first time, they just loomed up out of the January mist. Except for the biggest, Sikander's tomb, you can walk in them, climb over them, get very close. But now I know history. History is good, but it can cramp the imagination. And, I am no longer seeing India for the first time. And I was overtired. I did have a good time watching some black and white birds with yellow beaks and legs who were on the ground nearby. They were very belligerent, always fighting. They were engage each other making a lot of noise, then one or both of them would rise up in the air about a foot and they would disengage, only to start all over again in different pairings.

So, Lodi Gardens is still my favorite place in Delhi, but I'm eight years older, my son's not with me and I had too much of the Nehru's earlier in the day (Indira Gandhi was Nehru's daughter -- Sonia is his granddaughter-in-law).

THE JAMA MASJID (THE FRIDAY MOSQUE, THE LARGEST MOSQUE IN DELHI)

Two days ago, I finally went to the Jama Masjid. It is the first mosque I have ever visited that was not attached to another sight and I was a little shy. I'm now over that. The mosque is basically a wall with a covered space in front of it, and then in front of that a very large open space where the people who cannot fit under the roof of the mosque prayer. I was not there at prayer time and everywhere in the open space and in the arcade around it, people were hanging out. Families, groups of men, groups of teenagers, and occasionally a solitary women. Most of the women and bare heads, some wore scarves, and a very few were in full, black burqahs. It was very relaxed. The same thing happens at Hindu temples. People worship, then they hang out. I didn't expect it at a mosque. It made me feel good about being there. Then I climbed the minaret. All the guidebooks warn single women about undue attention on the dark squares. They do not warn elderly gentlemen like me about the women in the dark. The men seemed to sidle past me without any problem, but the women's hands were all over me, and I me all over. I was trying to take up as little space as possible, but they insisted on turning me into a sex object or a handrail, I wasn't sure which. I suppose I'm flattering myself. It must have been a handrail.

WILLIAM DALRYMPLE

Last Tuesday night, I went to hear William Dalrymple. He has written the most accessible, enjoyable book about Delhi, The City of Djinns. He most recently wrote The Last Mughal, about the emperor who was deposed after the 1857 Uprising and who died in exile in Burma. (The deposed Burmese king was exiled to India by the British.) Dalrymple is an excellent speaker, very engaging. He has lived in Delhi part of the year for the last 20 years and is a Delhi institution. The room was packed to overflowing and they set up TV's in the lobby. I arrived early and had a good seat. The theme of his books about India seem to be in the loss of culture caused by Independence and Partition. I don't think it would state that baldly, but his works seem to me to be a long (and frequently very funny) lament for a lost age. His introducer objected at the end of the lecture and said that although things had changed all was not lost. And the lecture itself seemed an example of that. The evening set me to wondering if I have an overarching theme. I have begun to think that I do, that I am principally concerned with the process of being a tourist. What happens to me as I travel. What expectations do I bring with me? How do they color what I see? Can I avoid exoticizing India. What does it mean when I get irritated with one more tout on the street trying to get me to go to one more emporium? What is the point of it all?

I can now see after two weeks that I am entering a new phase. During the first week, I was by turns, excited and confused. Everything was very hard work. Now I am lest confused (although some of the work is still hard), but I am becoming homesick. I miss the familiar. I eat at only two or three restaurants because I want to feel as if I am at home. I take the same routes. This will change as I have been here longer and my friend Ben Teller arrives in a few days. Then I will definitely be more adventurous, at least about food.

THE END

For now.