Final Hours in Delhi

We flew out of Delhi Saturday night, and this post is coming to you courtesy of the wifi at Dubai's airport. I've got 4 blog posts in draft form waiting to be published once I collect a few photos from fellow IHP-ers to add to them, so worry not: more stories from India are on the way.

But like any good story, let's start this one at the end.

I spent my final hours out and about in Delhi at the spice market in the heart of the old city. There's a courtyard there that takes up a whole city block - vendors and carts and piles of dried fruits and nuts and herbs seem to crash into each other to produce that classic sense of chaos that I've gotten used to seeing in India's old cities. It's a kind of organized complexity that has grown organically over hundreds or even thousands of years, and which functions with a certain efficiency and resilience that leaves you feeling positively inspired...that is, once you start to understand the organization and get passed all the sensory information that's telling you it's a chaotic mess. That can sometimes be tricky to achieve.

One giant, connected rooftop surrounds the entire courtyard, and I took the recommendation of a fellow IHP-er to go and check it out for my independent research project. It didn't disappoint. Smells waft up from the market below, and you start to marvel at how even your nostrils can burn from heat and you start to understand why Columbus stumbled on a different continent because he was so intent on getting to India's spices as quickly as possible. You can hear sounds from all across the city wafting up, too, yet they are muffled and calmed by the roof's walls to create a sunny peaceful refuge from it all. And you see everything from a new angle - long straight roads (though these are few) become parallel rows of streetlights. Holy sites' peaks pop out over the homes and stores. The city is visually framed by its rooftops.

It felt like the ideal way to end my time in India: all the distinctive sensory stimuli that I have grown familiar with, have grown to take comfort in, were there in front of me as my shadow grew longer and I tried to scribble as many "research" notes as possible. But I had no idea how much more ideal things were about to get.

Because in classic IHP fashion, I then walk down the stairs and into the crowded spice market and run into (of the 19 million possibilities in this city) another student on this program.

We stroll around for now more than three minutes before we run into the professor who gave us a tour of the Old Delhi the very first time that we visited this place, our first week in India - when jet-lag still made everything hazy and those distinctive sensory stimuli were more confusing than comforting. Add onto that serendipity the fact that three hours earlier, I had sent an email introducing a friend from Yale (who did IHP last year and is leading a group of Yalies to Delhi next week) to our country coordinator in hopes of connecting him with the very professor that we had just encountered.

The professor gives me his email address and availability for next week, and some of what he said sparks a discussion between my friend and me about Walmart moving into India just six years ago, and the conflicts between that company and the powerful spice market union. And so naturally, when we scrunch ourselves into the packed little restaurant (established in 1876) where they serve delicious deep-fried parathnas, the man who scrunches into next to us and chats us up is no other than the guy in charge of establishing new Walmart stores in India.

Our parathnas come - picture a small tortilla stuffed with a thin layer of goodies and thrown frisbee-style into a boiling pot of oil on the side of the road, so scrumptious that multiple Prime Ministers of India have ordered them for takeout for visiting foreign dignitaries - and we snarf them down to race back to the hostel. One more Metro ride, one more auto-rickshaw ride, and one more taxi ride, and we are finally approaching the airport. The sun sets behind some new, anonymous construction site where a half-dozen ten-story buildings are going up. A woman in a flowing saree of brilliant red gracefully balances a six-foot slab of rock on her head and floats through the construction site as we float by, thinking. Processing.

We pull up in front of the airport, desperately shuffle around our baggage to meet Emirate's weight limits, and are on our way to Africa.