D-Day

At midnight in Delhi, surprisingly little stirs. The chaotic motion that overwhelms the eye by day is replaced by stillness. The cacophony of competing sounds are replaced by the single sound of endlessly honking rickshaws, the crickets of the Delhi night. Thus it was that in my first moments in India, I was able to remove myself from these senses and truly savor the smell.

Delhi smells awful. Let me say that there is smog. The atmosphere has a pungent odor I previously associated with trains passing through long, unventilated tunnels. Staying in Delhi is like being trapped in a giant elevator in which 13 million people have farted but don't notice because their pets are shitting on the floor.

Here I was, late at night and completely clueless, putting all my trust in the notion that this cabbie would in fact deliver me to the proper hotel in the Pahar Ganj bazaar district. I grew increasingly concerned as we went farther and farther from the main roads, until we were in a series of claustrophobic alleys. Hundreds of people slept in carts and wagons on the streets, and dozens of contemptuous, condescending cows milled about in the nighttime peace. The roads were potholed; the electrical wiring that crisscrossed between every window and balcony looked like an infrastructural plan devised by manic-depressive flocks of birds who had forsaken shiny objects for the haphazard collection of dusty black cables. Seeing the neon light of my hotel around the bend, I realized with both sadness and relief that this was the right place. I went to sleep.

My first real day in India was spent conducting errands and futilely attempting to evade the ever-present menace of tourist-targeting bullshit. It took the entire morning to purchase a mobile phone, which entailed going back and forth obtaining paperwork that surely existed solely to legitimize the "helpers" that follow one everywhere and to confound tourists, perhaps seeking in the numerous miniscule bribes and services required by any errand an effective system of reparations for colonialism. The highlight of this venture was the rare pleasure of bypassing public transportation in favor of being treacherously whisked around the people-congested back-alleys of the bazaar at high speeds and dangerously sudden turns on the back of a motorcycle, dodging rickshaws, pedestrians and fruit-laden bicycle-carts all along the way.

All day I was followed by people insisting I must visit "official tourist office" [not an official tourist office], purchase hashish from reputable gentlemen not Kashmiri liars [clearly liars themselves and probably Kashmiri], and the most ubiquitous of all "I want no money, just talk". This one is by far the worst because you must listen to their inane conversation, as their tourist-trailing feet tire no faster than their mouths, until eventually it is revealed that indeed they don't want money, they just want you to buy them things with money.

In Delhi, silence is worth its weight in gold.

Oh.....wait.