Bludgeoned and Beaten By…Old Delhi In The Rain
Delhi, India
Old Delhi! A neighborhood packed to truly anarchic levels with fun, zest, scent, stink, spirit, and color. Any stay in Delhi would be incomplete without a visit here. This is, I swear to you, my firm belief. It is not, however, based on personal experience.
People be warned: when you go to Old Delhi, let the sun shine. Let it shine! Bright and true. Let there be not a grey cloud in sight, for if that cloud looms, my friends, you will risk finding yourself not in Old Delhi, but in… Old Delhi In The Rain!
Yes, Old Delhi In The Rain! The place to be if you want to get nearly run over multiple times by vehicles large enough to kill. Old Delhi In The Rain! The number one destination for tourists seeking to get mud deeply infused in their flesh. Old Delhi In The Rain! Year after year, ranked by Michelin India and Motor-wallah Magazine as the best place in Asia to buy a spare carburetor for your 82′ Renault coup.
Those marks up the sides of my pant leg: them’s rickshaw marks! Vimal and I ordered our food, then furtively smeared sanitizer onto our hands. The utensils were put on our table, and they didn’t look very clean. They were probably clean. I am certain they were clean. But they didn’t look it. We wanted to smear them too. (We did not.)
When the food came, it was, to our consternation, soupy, and not boiling hot. Rule #1 of eating in India: avoid anything soupy unless it is boiling hot, and even if it is boiling hot, avoid it. What would be the consequences of refusing the dish? Would an ayatollah charge out the kitchen doors and hack off our heads? I imagined my head hanging from the tops of the mighty minarets of the mosque, a warning to all Lonely Planet readers: this is Allah’s curry, praise be upon it.
We shoved the food down our throats and ran away.
Too proud to concede a defeat that was obvious, we continued trudging about the mud of Old Delhi In The Rain. We passed by several tourists flipping through Lonely Planets, fruitlessly querying maps Vimal and I had long since abandoned. They were looking for that sweets shop the book mentioned, but we’d abandoned that idea too. We’d even decided to skip the Jama Masjid, feeling it would be ridiculously disrespectful to walk in as we were, caked in mud and looking a touch like refugees.
Some time later, who knows how long, defeated, bludgeoned, irritated, and soaked, Vimal and I navigated our way out of the maze. The pleas and come-ons of the beggars and sellers did not reach our ears, so focused were we on finding our driver. Miraculously he found us. And then the sun came out.
