Return to Delhi

To enter a room and immediately forget what you’re looking for is how I feel, standing in the dusty Delhi winds.

 

Only 10 hours ago I might have come as close to death as I’ve ever experienced while on route here from Dharamsala (mom, skip this paragraph). The so-called Deluxe Bus was bulkily negotiating “S” curves at night on roads carved into Himalayan slopes. Coming down, the tires found gravel and slid with locked wheels towards a bend much greater than 90 degrees. The oncoming drop was recognizable only by the bus’s headlights reaching out into the nothingness of dark void we were approaching, with tiny city lights scattered unknown depths below. Oh, hello Doom. But we crackled to a stop, reversed back up the hill, and approached the turn again slower. The walk back would have taken hours and already it was night, but I considered it. In the seat directly behind me, a monk’s mumbling mantra turned into gurgling vomit which continued, off and on, until we reached the Indian plains four hours later.

From Dharamsala, the ride is advertized as being 12 hours, yet I’ve not yet arrived to or from without mechanical failure prolonging the trip by at least another 2.  God help you if you have the shits. Or the barfs. Something busted about 4 hours from our destination this time. We piled into another bus along the night-time highway.

Indian logistics: If one bus is nearly full and another bus is a little past its capacity, then it’s perfectly reasonable to combine the loads onto whichever bus happens to be working better at that time.

Good-bye seat…

We arrived and stepped out into the dawn and swarms of aggressive touts dancing in circles to stay in my Caucasian field of vision, all offering, over and over and over, ‘cheap’ transportation to my destination.

The truth was that I didn’t know where I was going; what I needed was a quiet moment to sort it out for myself.  

Why did I leave the paradise of Dharamsala for?  Surely I had a reason…

The only other white person on the bus was a woman who was doing her best to lose the touts. I asked her, “so, where you off to?” She gave me an answer I didn’t completely understand. Something about a famous hugging nun and her Nepalese friends around the corner.  It wasn’t much I could relate to but when she asked me if I’d like to join, I accepted. And this was my lucky break.

Where the bus had dropped us off was at a miniature Tibetan colony in north eastern corner of Delhi. It’s a labyrinth of narrow and shaded walkways with doors in the walls to where people live and holes in the wall from where people sell stuff. Her Nepalese friend lived here because he sold thungkas (Tibetan mandalas on cloth) and other spiritually significant trinkets for consumers of enlightenment. I was just going to ask him if he knew of any places where I could lodge for the night but he invited me in and served me the best meal I’ve had in a long time: curried water-buffalo (or ‘buff’—a reasonable alternative to beef), spiced spinach and long-grained rice with some sort of outstanding flavor in it.  Generally, the most generous people I’ve ever met are from Nepal—something I’ve heard from others, too.  After he fed me, he brought me to a room for rent, which is not only good enough but considerably cheaper than other places in the vicinity. Generosity to strangers is something I’m neither familiar nor even normally comfortable with, but being road-weary and lonely, it made my day.

The room is a lonely box to sleep in but that it’s in a mini village of Tibetan exiles makes it seem a bit familiar, which sooths me.

Looking at the map, the colony is called ‘Majnu-Ka-Tilla’, situated about 6~8 km north of Old Delhi, between the Yamuna River and a small highway called Hedgewar Marg road. The place of lodging appears to be nameless but the Tibetan-run restaurant on the ground floor is called ‘Himalayan café’. It is, I discovered, an odd place.

I sat at the table for some time before asking for a menu, which I then had to negotiate for through body language and broken English. The result was that I got not only the menu but also the impression that a menu was the last thing the waiter expected to be asked for. It took him a few minutes to find it. When I ordered my meal (chicken chilli!) he had to confirm, more than once, that this meal would be for me, despite the restaurant being otherwise empty.  I pointed at my face and belly and nodded.  What came was chicken chowmein. Close enough I guess, since it did have some chicken in it. It filled me up and cost half as much as the chilli. For this interesting (and fiscally responsible) dining experience, I tipped him 10 rupees.