Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
But Delhi has few ghats. It is a city of sixteen million with barely any places, ghat or oth-
erwise, where people interact with the river. I went looking for any that were left.
At the south end of its Delhi segment, the Yamuna is again made to jump its channel.
The Okhla Barrage shunts it into the Agra Canal, through which it is destined to become
the Taj Mahal city's unenviable water supply. Just upstream of the barrage is the riverfront
park of Kalindi Kunj. Unlike many riverfront parks, though, Kalindi Kunj offers no actual
frontage to its river. A fence encloses the park, keeping visitors away from the actual river,
which sits quiet and littered with trash. Ill-disposed to climb an eight-foot-tall fence topped
with spikes, I resigned myself to wandering the leafy confines of the park.
The place was crawling with young couples in the throes of passionate hand-holding.
With every corner I turned, I almost stepped on a pair of sweethearts. In a city where young
couples have no apartments or cars of their own to disappear into, they go to the parks. It is
so common here for couples to meet each other in parks or at historical monuments that it
sometimes seems that these places have been designated by the city government as official
make-out spots.
It ought to have sent me into a lovelorn tailspin, like everything else did. Instead, it was
a respite. Since arriving in Delhi, I had been preoccupied with how Indian men and women
interacted in public—or how they didn't. It's safe to say that the vast majority of Indians
live under very conservative sexual mores, and it had been depressing the hell out of me.
Maybe it was the astounding numbers I had recently heard about child sexual abuse in
India. The country is home to more than four hundred million children, nearly a fifth of the
world's below-eighteen population, and according to the government more than half are
sexually abused. Incredible India, land of contrasts, awash in brutality.
I thought of this every time I boarded the Delhi Metro. There are separate cars for men
and women—which itself says something—and as we filed on, I would think of those chil-
dren growing up, of what my fellow male passengers must be carrying inside them, and of
what they must have done, and of hundreds of millions of lives distorted by such epidemic
violence and rape. By the time the train left the station, I'd have convinced myself that men
were born only for cruelty, and that no living person, woman or man, would ever escape
our planet-eating vortex of betrayal and isolation.
I was down.
In Kalindi Kunj, though, it was different. Maybe there was hope—just a little—for lov-
ing coexistence between the human species. Every second tree hosted a couple that sat at its
base, talking quietly, laughing, holding hands, kissing. Everyone was running their hands
through someone's hair. Everyone was cradling the head of their beloved in their lap. If the
woman wore a sari, she might drape its veil over both their heads. Who knows what went
