India: unlike anything else
Monday, November 10th, 2008It’s funny how the mind and the memory play tricks on you. When we arrived in Kathmandu in mid-September, we thought it was just like India. The colour, the activity, the chaos, the religious fervour – it all brought back memories of our first trip to the subcontinent in 2004, and I remember we agreed that it was closer to India than Sri Lanka was. But crossing the border from Nepal into India two days ago made me realise how mistaken I had been. Somehow, someway, there’s infinitely more of everything – colour, activity, chaos, religious fervour, cows and people – and everything makes even less sense – in India than it did in Nepal. And if a few years away had tricked me into forgetting just how crazy this country is, there’s no escaping it now.
The lesson, not to be forgotten again: nothing is just like India – not Sri Lanka, not Pakistan, not the Gulf, and not Nepal, which, in hindsight, is ‘India light’ the way that Turkey is ‘Middle East light’.
Coming from a country of 26 million inhabitants to one of over a billion is overwhelming, even when you’ve been here before. It’s quite extraordinary how much more visible the population is in India compared with China, which has even more people. Sure, Beijing is monstrous and China has cities of seven million people that practically no one outside the country has ever heard of, but those seven million don’t show up at the train station at the same time you do trying to book a ticket. India is never not teaming with the masses; the various types of rickshaws, vendors, food stalls and trumpeters (yes, trumpeters) on the streets are still as active when you go to bed at night as they were at rush hour, and then at Lucknow Junction this morning locals sprawled across the floors of the waiting rooms and platforms in their thousands in a way that you simply can’t experience in any other country, not at 4:30am anyway. As Paul Theroux wrote, you don’t need to go to a village in India because the Indians bring their villages to the train stations.
Our first 48 hours in India consisted of 17 hours of daytime travel, accompanied by the unavoidable bombarding of the senses and the consequent reacquainting of ourselves with India. There was little in the way of actual sightseeing – aside from the interesting Muslim complex of Bara Imambara in Lucknow yesterday afternoon – while we were trying to get from the Nepali border to places of interest, but that phase is over now that we find ourselves in Delhi. Most travellers can’t wait to get out of India’s capital, and I can see why, but my first impressions were formed four-and-a-half years ago while overlooking the Jama Masjid from our hotel window and reading William Dalrymple’s fabulous City of Djinns (a must for anyone coming to Delhi), and I have a certain affection for Delhi as a result – more so than the other three large cities in India.
Last time we were here, we inexplicably did not visit the Qutb Minar, the 73m-high, AD 1192 tower that marked the eastern most point of Islam at the time (naturally, it has since spread further to Bangladesh, Malaysia and Indonesia), so a visit to the tower, the surrounding contemporary buildings and the nearby ruins of Tughlqabad are the focus of our short stay in Delhi this time around. Meanwhile, this visit’s version of the City of Djinns is Tim Mackintosh-Smith’s The Hall of a Thousand Columns, the second book in his journey following the 14th-century Moroccan traveller Ibn Battutah around the world. The titular building is in Delhi and not far from the Qutb Minar, but the author’s description of the hall these days as having become a de facto public lavatory, “booby-trapped with faeces,” makes it somewhat less appealing than I had hoped.
On a brighter note, after a failed country-wide search in Nepal, taking in at least six different restaurants, for a quality version of my favourite Indian dish, paneer butter masala, I’m happy to report that it only took about an hour in Delhi until I found an outstanding one. Walking through the filthy back streets of the capital on the way back from the restaurant, I realised how much more I like India after a really satisfying meal…
Nick