The Real Deal

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Well. India has succeeded in coaxing me from my crouching, pouting, worrying posture. This evening, Yuki, Chiara, and I took an auto-rickshaw to the end of the metro line and rode into the Chiandri Chouk district of Old Delhi. Both experiences were a complete surprise. The metro was bizarrely out-of-place: clean, new, and secure, you could have been fooled into thinking yourself in London or Vienna. This was very perplexing ("where are all the people?!") until after I had walked through a magnetically-operated turnstyle, frisked by a woman with a baton on her hip, and scanned my bag under an x-ray. It seems that this convenient, cool refuge was too well-guarded to admit anyone but the most confident. Then, we stepped above ground at the Chiandri Chouk market and met hot, wet, mayhem. No experience prior to this could have prepared me for the the shoulder-wide pathways snaking through gossamer buildings, bundles of exposed wires sagging into curry grease, open displays of urination, grubby hands fondling cucumber sandwiches, rubber sandals splayed outside shops lined with white cushions, melting blocks of ice propping up computer equipment, oozing smells supplanting eachother at every stall. Nor could I have been prepared for the ride on the bicycle-rickshaw, the old man bracing himself against the weight of three grown women and gear and navigating through a hopeless traffic tangle, traffic so bad that directions became meaningless, drivers of trucks, bicycles, autorickshaws jamming themselves in every available road space, pedestrians being squeezed through the gears of the bumping, grinding, honking machines. It was absolute madness. When I looked into street, or the overlooking apartments/temples/contruction sites, I found nothing comforting, nothing familiar, nothing that even made sense given my understanding of how life should be constructed. Yet, the scene was undoubtedly beautiful. We sat so high on the carriage that we were out of reach of from the madness below and could just watch it unfold.

Originally, I had suggested walking to our destination as I was chaffing predictably about moving slower than on foot and paying money to do it. But soon I realized that there was no better way of experiencing this novel moment than in the capable hands of our dogged rickshaw-wallah, and no better perspective than from above. When we were deposited at the wrong metro station, we thanked him enthusiastically and left a large tip. Only later did I reflect that he- a human being dutifully latched to a mechanical rig- was the craziest piece of our evening.

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