A Moment in Delhi

Only days before leaving for my big trip up north, I resigned to visit the health center on campus, despite my bad habit of ignoring my parents’ good advice.  I had made a decent recovery from that special time in the library, but I wasn’t able to fully shake the mystery sickness.  I tried eating Sunday night Chinese, and relapsed.  Laying awake late at night after finishing a paper, running to the bathroom every 3 minutes, I started feeling short of breath and a bit dizzy.  I hit up the infirmary instead of giving a presentation the next day, was admitted, and laid down next to a student with hideous burns all over his arm.  The health center was quite the contrast to the medical care I’m used to.  I staggered around for a while looking for a receptionist or something, and was eventually pointed into a curtained room where a woman recorded my woes and sent me into the emergency unit.  Picture a nurse in a white saree sticking an IV into you without gloves or handwashing, then being given pretty pills in the hand that you just had to make real use of in the Indian bathroom with no toilet paper or soap with the other hand out the door connected to the IV.  This is all a bit graphic, but trust me when I say I am omitting the worst of it. 

Arriving in Delhi, I hoped it wasn’t a poor life decision to be traveling for 9 days after the whole ordeal.  Luckily I started feeling much better after a day or two.  My friends and I had a real whirlwind tour of the major northern cities, and got a great taste of north Indian culture.  Instead of listing everything we did and saw, I’ll just give a description of a few of the most memorable moments from each place, starting with Delhi.

Delhi

After watching a huge parade travel down the main street, we lost ourselves in an amazing bazaar down an alleyway, which sold everything from beads to saree borders to festival decorations to felt jewelry displays.  There were fabrics upon fabrics, kitchen supplies, spices and perfumes.  Amid the bustle of the narrow alleys, bicycle rickshaws with large loads of goods were constantly yelling at us to get out of their way.  They really sneak up on you compared to the putting, beeping autorickshaws, known as “tuk-tuks” in some places because of these characteristic noises.  In the bazaar we happened upon the most beautiful street of tiny, stacked homes I have ever seen.  Like a solace in the center of a never-ending market of shouting and selling and squeezing past strangers, the street had three people walking down it.  Lined with pink and yellow and turquoise apartments with intricately carved and painted doorways and potted flowers and plants on every doorstep, the street gave us a chance to catch our breath and see the understated beauty that could be hidden anywhere here in India.

I ate at my first Indian McDonalds in Delhi.  It smelled exactly the same.  (Beefless, of course)

A pigeon found its way into the huge, silent Lotus temple, where everybody was meditating in the quiet cool.  The marble temple is shaped like a giant lotus flower, with high ceilings, large windows, and rafters curving down to the floor.  The pigeon had no place to land, and I followed it with my eyes as it flew in circles around and around, confused.  The temple workers were so strict about peacefulness, that they even asked parents with crying children to leave.  Their silence was disrupted, however, with the loud smack of the pigeon on one of the large glass windows.  The thud echoed throughout the airy temple, and I had to stifle a laugh.  The bird was okay, don’t worry.

I also bought a beard in Delhi, which would come in handy in making our Taj Mahal pictures a bit different from everyone else’s.

Our 6-hour bus from Delhi to Agra made a stop in the middle of the countryside at a small collection of food stands.  I needed to use the bathroom, and it took me a while to realize that the pink, roofless, concrete box was the ladies’ lav.  There were two-foot high partitions between the “stalls,” and everything just drained out a hole in the wall at the back, but the floor was basically flat.  An old woman came in with me, and chattered to me in Hindi while I tried to figure out how to not pee on my feet.  After all this time she made me wonder if I’ve been using Indian toilets backwards.  Maybe that’s what she was trying to tell me.  Unfortunately my Hindi’s not THAT good yet.

I’ve digressed again, however- Sorry!   Delhi was a neat old city, more metropolitan and complete than Hyderabad with its half-finished buildings.