The Sun Never Sets on the British Empire

Part 10 – February 13, 2015.   Namaste (greetings and best wishes) from Delhi on our third day here.

If you are like me you may have wondered why sometimes you hear the city referred to as Delhi and at other times it’s New Delhi.  Well, New Delhi is situated within the metropolis of Delhi and is just one of the eleven districts of Delhi National Capital Territory.  New Delhi is the capital of India and is the seat of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of the government.  New Delhi has a population of about 11 million and Delhi overall has about 20 million.  Of the 11 million in New Delhi, 80% are Hindu, 13% are Muslim, 5% are Sikh, 1.1% are Jain, and the others are others.

We are staying Green Park in South Delhi in a lovely Airbnb room on the second (we would call it third) floor of a very big home in a residential neighborhood.  Our room is attached to the residence of the owners of the whole building and accessible to and through their residence but has a private entrance, private bath, and a share of the (same level) rooftop breakfast room, garden, and patio.  We love it and will return here for our last night India in about 10 days.

Me in our room

View from our rooftop garden

View from our rooftop garden

Rooftop garden

After our arrival in Delhi by plane on Wednesday we had a half day to get accustomed to our surroundings and rest after a very long trip that started on Tuesday afternoon in Nairobi and included a scheduled layover in the Dubai airport from 10:30 at night until 4:30 Wednesday morning.  But, even having lost 2.5 hours on the clock on our eastbound journey, we were in our room by about noon on Wednesday.   Our hosts, Vinita and Pradesh Gulati, met us, fed us, set us up in our digs, and Pradesh took us to get an Indian SIM card for our phone and then on a leisurely walk through Deer Park right next door.  It’s actually a park while Green Park is not.  The walk also included a visit to a large tomb of some unknown past Mughul which we can see from our rooftop garden.   This tomb came in handy the next day.

The British Empire theme was forgotten at dinner where we ate at a very good Italian restaurant called Amour in a hodge-podge assortment of a hundred or so shops and restaurants in a place called Hauz Khas Village just a short walk from our room.  Hauz Khas Village is composed of a hundred or more pop up shops and restaurants built around 13th century ruins.Of course we first had a glass of wine at a restaurant in the Village that advertised itself as having the “awesomest view” of Hauz Khas lake.  The lake is a reservoir covered with green algae and dates back many centuries.  It has lots of trash floating in it but it looks nice at night when they turn on the lighted fountains in it and light the perimeter.  At dusk, hundreds of local bats come out and fly right into the “awesomest view” to feast on the many mosquitoes harbored by the lake.  We thank the gods and goddesses for bats and DEET..

Thursday started with breakfast of Poha at 9 o’clock followed by a ride on a three wheeler (also called motor rickshaws or sometimes tuk-tuks) to the get the Hop On – Hop Off (Ho-Ho) tour bus of the city, with our first goal of that tour being a visit to the Red Fort.  Unfortunately, the tuk-tuk driver said he could not find the Ho-Ho building and he let us off at the small Delhi Tourism building where he said we could get the Ho-Ho bus.  The fellow at the Delhi Tourism office told us that no more buses were scheduled for the day.  It was now 11 AM and the last one for the day supposedly left at 10:30 (they are supposed to leave every 45 minutes) - but we could rent a car and driver for the rest of the day for just a little more than the cost of the bus.  We did so and now believe it was a rouse, but it did not cost us a bunch.  

The driver first took us to the burial place of the remains (ashes) of Muhatma Ghandi, a national shrine.  

Then we proceeded to the Red Fort where we spent a bit over two hours

before hiring a bicycle rickshaw at the gate to take us on a tour of the old market and residential streets of Old Delhi.  This was amazing (and included an opportunity for a guided “tour” of a Jain temple and a walk/ride through the Jain section of town).  Lunch on Thursday was two bananas apiece while on tour in the rickshaw.  Overall, the Red Fort was run down but impressive and the Old Delhi market area and surrounds were very run down but much more impressive. 

Clandestine of us taken by the Jain priest in the very dark temple

The taxi-for-the-day ride back to Green Park was uneventful other than that we needed to repeatedly insist that we did not want to stop at the driver’s favorite emporium to shop and he was unable to find the Green Park main market street without our help (and our fortunate sighting of the tomb near our house that Pradesh had taken us to on Wednesday).

Time to eat some real Indian food!  Dinner was supposed to be in a local vegetarian restaurant called Evergreen.  Our 5:45 arrival caught them off guard, and us too.  Turns out that nobody eats at that time.  Lunch ends at 3 o’clock and dinner starts at 7 o’clock.  And, in a land where pretty much everybody speaks English, it’s impossible to understand many of pretty much everybody – especially the local shop keepers and restaurant waiters.  So it took us a while of hemming and hawing and pointing at food and people eating food before they finally convinced us that Indian food was not being served at 5:45.  We felt pretty dumb. 

So, back to Amour again, this time for the early bird special of spaghetti, wine, and beer.  Even they don’t serve from the real menu until 7.  On the walk to Amour through our residential neighborhood we sighted a local Hindu temple that was lit both outside and inside with lots of pink floodlights.  It was also decorated head to toe inside and outside with hundreds of streamers and flowers.  We took our shoes off, climbed the steps, poked our heads in, asked if we could watch, asked if we could take photos, and wondered, without asking, what was going on.

After our early bird dinner we thought we’d stop to see if there was anything going on at the temple in keeping with all the decorations.  Indeed, there was.  Even more lights had been turned on – now strings of lights were apparent starting hanging from the top of the temple spires.  Loud music and chanting emanated from the sanctuary but we were at the bottom of the steps could not see the source.  So, Sandy being Sandy said, “let’s go in.”  And we did.

Once inside we found two chairs in the back row and sat and listened as unobtrusively as possible.  Soon a woman came by and tied a bracelet of bells around Sandy’s left wrist.  If Sandy had been unmarried, we were told, the bells would have gone on her right wrist.   In a short time a young man came by and put a red scarf around my neck just like those worn by every adult male in the room.  We still had no idea what was going on. 

We stayed and watched and listened for about an hour while the room filled, almost everybody sitting on the giant mats that covered the floor, with big orange pillows to lean on it they wished – men on the left side of the room and women on the right.  The “pundit” chanted and sang continuously with keyboard accompaniment and back up singing/chanting by two and sometimes three other men. The crown joined in occasionally with clapping and raising both hands in the air when summoned by the pundit to do so. Some hummed or chanted silently with the pundit as well.   All this time people came in, went to the altar in the front of the room, talked to one of the two/three priests(?), and got a red dot on their foreheads from one and either bells or a scarf depending on their gender from another.  We still had no idea what was going on.

We decided we would stay until 9 PM and sneak out.  Before that though, a man went through the whole congregation person by person with a bowl from which each person took a pinch of something and put it in their mouth.  What could this be?  Finally he came to us and others in the back row and offered the bowl.  We each took a pinch of what looked like rock salt from the bowl which contained a few nuts as well.  The rock salt was actually sugar.  We still had no idea what was going on.

Sneak out time came and we took the opportunity when a new chant started.  We were close to the door so we thought our exit might go unnoticed.  It did not.  Our shoes were at the bottom of the stairs outside.  We slipped them on and started to leave, only to be stopped by a young man who had a question for me, “Have you seen Breaking Bad?”

“Yes, we both have seen it on NetFlix.”

“You look just like Walter White (the main character).  Can I have my picture taken with you.”

Now that was a surprise that was.  Of course I explained that I did not have a meth lab and was not as rich, or as dead, as Walter White but I’d be happy to have my photo taken with this fellow, and as it turned out, with 3 or 4 of his buddies.

This gave us the opportunity to ask what about what we had just witnessed inside.  We were asking the right person, a cousin of the groom to be.  This was a celebration in the temple of the marriage that is scheduled to occur next week.  Friends, relatives, acquaintances, and anybody who wishes comes to celebrate the upcoming wedding by joining in prayers to the gods, one chant/prayer for each god.  The future bride and groom sit through the whole thing at the front of the room.  Presumably they were on the mats because there was nobody sitting in a conspicuous place at the front other than the “priests.”  It celebration take about 4 hours and still had quite a while to go.   Sweets are served after it is over but we declined an invitation to stay for them. If you are so lucky or unlucky we'll show you a video of some of the ceremony when we return to the US.

I am relieved to say that when we went by the temple last evening (Friday) at 5:30 the celebration was over and normal worship was underway.

Terry and Sandy