Delhi 6^th December 2016

I was woken gently this morning by somebody hammering nails into my hotel room door. I’m not exaggerating. A short while later a furtive Indian chap asked me if I had ordered tea. As I hadn’t I sent him away with a metaphorical boot up the bum. It turned out he had really come to take my breakfast order. They have no breakfast room in the hotel so they do a sort of room service. My guess is they cooked my omelette over a dried-cow-dung fire in the street.

Fortified by breakfast, a cold water shower and a Bollywood movie on the TV, I ventured out into the throbbing heart of the city. When I was last in Delhi, in 1978 with Tim, John and Jeff, I thought it couldn’t be possible for a city to become any more squalid, wretched and noisy. I was young and foolish and it is possible. A typical 100 metres of walking in Dehli involves stepping over for or five beggars and telling three or four tuk-tuk drivers that just because they’ve found out which country you’ve come from doesn’t mean they are going to be hired all day. On top of that, any kind of slowing down from a purposeful walk and looking up from the ground will immediately (I tested it and got an average of 2 seconds) get somebody telling you the street address where you are stood and that they don’t want any money. Sometimes this is true but mostly it’s not and violence or money is the only way to dislodge them. Sad really.

For those who don’t know, I have a problem with my voice these days which means I can only produce a quiet stage whisper even when shouting. Having to make myself quietly understood to uninvited people who have idiosyncratic English, in a background din of traffic noise and continuous horn honking, is not good karma.

I retraced some of the places I’d been to before in ’78, the Jantar Mantar observatory; the YMCA on Jay Singh Marg and the Laxminarayan Temple. I couldn’t find the grocers shop at Connaught Place where we dismally failed to buy sensible provisions for a mountaineering expedition. The shop probably sells jeans now.  I think packets of ‘Vesta Beef Curry’ were what we had in mind but we ended up with a big sack of rice and some mysterious herbs and spices that eventually got donated to a village on the Tibetan border. These foodstuffs were sold to us in true Victorian style by somebody taking the order at a counter; somebody else going up a ladder for the stuff and somebody else writing out an invoice so you can pay the book keeper. All this while yet another shop assistant wraps your stuff up into fancy parcels. I have to say they have now dispensed with all this nonsense by simply having no grocery stores on Connaught Place at all.

I got to the India Gate as well which I had not seen before. It was a bit misty but it’s a very striking WW1 monument. Well done, Mr. Lutyens!  It was a long walk so you can imagine how many tuk-tuk drivers had to be let down ever so gently. I got to the India Gate on the Rajpath by pushing my way through a big political demonstration on the Janpath. It seemed to be a call to join the fight against rioting. Made sense at the time.

I did get a tuk-tuk eventually as my feet were sore and went to “Burger Singh” for a veggie dinner. I then spent a couple of hours trying to shake off a self-appointed guide and road-crossing assistant. I did let him take me to half a dozen back-alley money changers but nobody had any rupee notes to sell even at inflated rates. I still had to pay my guide to go away. Not so well done, Mr Modi ! Your dream of a cashless society shouldn’t inconvenience tourists who bring foreign currency into the country and don’t personally hide it from the Indian taxman. Not being able to change money wouldn’t be so bad if the ATMs were accessible but there is no way I’m standing in line all day. It has become an instant tradition here for permanent lines around the block to form at all ATMs and when one of the banks inevitably runs out of cash a huge roar erupts from the linear crowd. I predict even more rioting. I will join in.

M