By Luke McCusker, 07/21/2019. Delhi is a city within a city: Old Delhi within New Delhi. Already there is an exterior and an interior–Delhi within the world–and an even deeper interior. This inwardness is in dialogue with time: as you go in, time deepens. The layers of time in Delhi are evidenced not only by the texts of recorded history, but visually. The road divides around Delhi Gate and when it reconverges, the city has changed. Streets narrow into alleys. You follow an alley past banana sellers to a cha stall ten feet wide and seven feet deep. This cha seller’s father was a cha seller and this nameless stall has been active in the family for more than fifty years. He heats cha over a burner and hands it to you in styrofoam. It is too hot to drink.
The streets of Delhi are dense with sound. The car horn is its own language and it is spoken incessantly. Men selling rugs, saris, cell phones. Rickshaw drivers offering you the best price for a ride, for a tour of Chandi Chowk, to be your driver for the day or the week. Ten thousand bodies pressing past one another, the soft ruffle of clothing and the sharp scuff of sandals on concrete. Sound fills every sidewalk crack and gap between the bricks, thickens around abandoned road construction, hangs from every onning, every minaret.
Twenty feet down the alley from the cha seller there is a sakan, a house in a traditional Islamic architectural style. The building itself is an arcade exterior surrounding an interior courtyard or sahn. You go inside. A man passes and hushes you. An old woman owns this sakan and she hates loud noises. He removes a chain from the door silently, delicately, and takes cha up the darkened stairwell to her room. The sounds of horns stretch so thin here they are almost gentle, almost musical. Sound unspools into silence. The gardens of the Sri Laxmi temple are the same. Sacred spaces: the temple and the home. The sacred and the everyday are interdependent in every way in Delhi, but when you enter the temple you remove your shoes. There is no scuff of sandals. In the courtyard you sip your cha slowly, still hot. Time isn’t just deeper in these places; as the sound thins into silence, time widens.
The people who live and work in Delhi feel the city’s tempo in their bodies. The average pace of the pedestrian is neither rushed nor slothful. Those in a hurry navigate the crowd as dancers navigate a crowded floor. Everyone has something to offer and something to ask for. Everyone knows where they are woven into the social fabric, what they have to give and what they have to receive. Local dogs, cats, cows, pigeons, and monkeys are treated as part of this same fabric, woven in amongst the dense fiber of Delhi.
The austerity of Jama Masjid, Lal Qila, the remnants of Mughal rule, hails from the sands of the Middle East. But the saturated oranges, yellows, and blues of Sri Laxmi emerge from the forest. Delhi is ancient, deep with time and overflowing with lives, narratives, memory, effort. It is an interior within an interior. It is silence pressed under an endless horizon of sound. But in all its complexity, all its movement, all its effort, it is far from exhausted. As the forest, it is youthful, earnest, ever-flowering, ever-becoming.
Across the old city from the cha seller and the old woman’s sakan there is another sakan. The wholesale spice market at Chandi Chowk. You climb four narrow flights of stairs to the roof. Breathing fennel, cumin, and turmeric, you look out over the city. Lal Qila to the east beside the Yamuna River. The minarets of Jama Masjid on the hill to the west. Homes and stores stacked, rising, reaching up and pressing down, an accumulation of time. The sound of the street reverberating into an empty sky. Surely there is an abundance of grief here. There is much that has been discarded and lost that has not yet been gathered up. There is, also, just abundance.
I spend the next three days in Bangalore before meeting Dr. Kaul in Manipal.
