Anti-sightseeing with grandpa and grandson

Was it a misunderstanding, a scam, bad karma – but then whose? We’ll never know. A lousy day, that we do know. And further evidence of Vivek’s (an earlier guide) caution that “India is full of surprises.”

We had arranged with an auto-rickshaw driver (actually grandpa and his several year old grandson) to drive us to several museums and monuments spread across Delhi. We started by heading to the National Museum which our hotel tour agent has assured us is open today (‘I just called’). Turns out it is closed, as is every national museum and gallery, because it is Gandhi’s birthday – not, seemingly, a widely-known fact among hotel tour operators or auto-rickshaw drivers.

Disappointed, we ask to be driven to the quiet Lodi Gardens. Off we go, the four-five year old grandson steering through Delhi traffic while receiving grandfatherly auto-rickshaw driver lessons on the meaning of this street marker and that, that driver’s cunning and this driver’s bad habits, makes of cars, attractive girls glancing back from car windows. They’re having a great day together.

The gates of the Lodi Gardens (Yeh!! They’re open). Betty and I head off for a walk, a peaceful respite. 

Then the day really unravels. We tell grandpa that we want to visit two other sites in the city, neither of them far away. But we head south … and farther south (this is when we should have yelled STOP!) towards (we soon find out) the famous Qutb Minar where grandpa has been insisting we must go but where we have shown no interest in going, at least for now. Thirteen and counting kilometres through New Delhi city streets, then, our auto-rickshaw put-putting amidst Audis and buses, onto an eight-lane thoroughfare, us desperate to tell grandpa to pull off but there’s no room really, so on we continue until we are suddenly swallowed in a traffic jam we can’t see beyond. 

Seems everyone in Delhi has had a hankering to visit the Qutb Minar this very day. Sure, it’s one of Islam’s premier monuments in India, the ruins of a sandstone tower inscribed with Koranic text, although the remaining tower, according to historian John Keays, hints strongly of a factory chimney and brick kiln. No doubt worthy of a visit, too especially on some quiet sunset evening, several couples strolling the nearby parks, the scent of fragapani in the air … but not here and now in this throng, these horns, these clouds of dust and exhaust. 

We pull into a safe corner, try to explain the “misunderstanding,” get puzzled looks from grandpa, recruit a passing English-speaking Indian woman to help clarify things, which she does, then apologizes for not being able to extricate us from the mess. What to do? Go on to other sites? Cut our losses, say so long to grandpa and hop the Metro home? We decide to get back to the refuge of our hotel, grandpa at the steering handles, grandson in Betty’s arms soon asleep, an unplanned sightseeing journey of the streets of Delhi, a few hundred rupees out of pocket.

It is only now, a week later and far north of Delhi in quiet hill country, that I can remember another side of that day: having our first fleeting glances of the sprawling, many-sided Delhi itself …. How grandpa drove us out of the mazy congested Main Bazaar and Old Delhi’s back streets, south beyond Connaught Place and farther south and west from India Gate into the astonishingly (because so unexpected) wide-avenue, treed expanses of New Delhi – a golf course, a race track, and grand houses hardly visible behind high walls, iron gates and armed guards – then north and east past sackcloth and scrap metal human encampments under overpasses, between drainage ditches, on once vacant patches of refuse and weeds.

Along the way sellers take advantage of traffic stops and gridlock, moving from window to window, offering towels, magazines, a toy ball that pops out of a cone, 3-D images of gods and goddesses. A ragged family works the traffic lights, this time from the sidewalk, a man snap-beating a drum to catch our ear then eyes, a four or five year old girl going through a spiritless if agile routine of back-flips, headstands and tricks with a metal ring up and down her pencil-thin torso, a smaller brother in imitation. (The performers – we have seen others at railway stations – make me think of Daumier sketches of Paris street performers, faces fixed with a determined, desperate iron will, the mechanical movements of the children.) Then the same two emaciated children, hair straggly stiff, are at our auto-rickshaw, at our elbows, along with mother and babe, voices like whimpers and moans, the tap tap on the arm until we are rescued by the changing traffic light. I steel myself, trying to feel no natural feeling, making sure I don’t connect. We drive away. I feel rescued, relieved, but gut sick too.

The day, the city Delhi, is like India itself … many cities in one. 

Those open, wide clean avenues. Those fortress estates. Tree-lined suburban residential streets. The ruins of earlier times now mostly swallowed in newer mansions, glass towers, teeming markets, high-speed thruways and their overpasses, themselves scrap waste home to refugees from the countryside and villages; thruways that vanish into narrow canyon streets and lanes only navigable to the most local of ‘locals’, into vast rabbit warren markets, into a swirling sludge of cars, motorbikes, trishaws, auto-rickshaws, vans through which people seem to slip like fish in what feels to us like a terribly shrunken, teeming world.