Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
India. Land of contrasts.
That's what you're not supposed to write about India. But nobody can help it. Even the
most sophisticated people will write thoughtful, evocative prose that still amounts to
India,
land of contrasts.
What are they trying to say? Is there no contrast anywhere else in the
world? I think what they mean is
India, less tidy and homogenous than I'm used to.
I had loved Delhi when I'd lived here. Loved the noise, the smells, the energy of the
street. That's what I wrote home about. I had reveled even in the simple tumult of buying
a train ticket. But as the truism has it, a traveler's writings say more about the traveler than
about the place traveled to. Before, I had found dusty blossoms of curiosity and independ-
ence on every corner. Now, years later, I saw Delhi again and wondered if I could just sleep
through it. Through drab, mediocre Delhi.
But it wasn't just me. Delhi had changed in the past decade. At least, that's what people
told me.
“Oh!” they would say. “Delhi has changed so much!” Even the autorickshaw drivers,
if they spoke English, would tell me how bad the traffic had become, as if there were no
traffic jams in Delhi in 2002. And those same autorickshaw drivers still pouted when you
tried not to let them rip you off as fully as they wanted.
So Delhi was still recognizably Delhi. But it was true—there had been some restyling.
Its elite shopping malls more convincingly suggested that you might be in America. The
Evergreen Sweet House restaurant now had three floors, and air-conditioning. The city's
upscale neighborhoods were marginally tidier than before, and disappointingly free of
wildlife. Street animals used to be half the fun in Delhi, but now you've got to work to
bring your clichés to life, and you're down by Tughlaqabad before you can find a pair of
cows blocking the road.
The most obvious change was the Delhi Metro, whose routes had burrowed through the
city far more rapidly and effectively than anyone could have expected. It now ran all the
way down to the satellite city of Gurgaon, about ten miles to the southeast. A subway to
Gurgaon, imagine! The success of the Metro seemed to have taken the city by surprise. In
a land where public works are so often lumbering, ineffectual, and corrupt, the subway was
clean, efficient, and cheap.
As for the Yamuna, I had no idea if it had changed. Its banks lay only a few miles from
where I had lived, but at the time I had been only dimly aware that a river even existed
in Delhi. It was an appropriate ignorance, though. Delhi had long since turned its back on
