Coming home
on REM Zoe Lara (in India) (India), 03/Apr/2011 07:36, 34 days ago
Now that I have been in Delhi for six months, I'm starting to take comfort in some elements of routine. My walk home from work takes an hour each day and is divided into five stages and five slices of life in the city:First, the March of the Cows– a section of main road that mainly involves inhaling traffic pollution while dodging bulls, cows and goats, as well as traffic. As I hop and skip and avoid pavement potholes, autorickshaw drivers sometimes hassle me with horns because they cannot understand why a white woman would choose to walk. This stretch ends at the 'Indian Man Peeing Roundabout'. I have no idea why the Delhi Municipal Authority put a public toilet on a roundabout corner, or why they don't build a higher urinal wall for the modesty of the men whose eyes, on occasion, collide unavoidably with mine as I speed past the other side of the wall where they're peeing.Stage two is the Six Lane Motorway of Death, which initially I thought had no pedestrian crossing and took me up to twenty minutes of fear and hesitation to cross: waiting for a gap in a three-lane sea of moving traffic, frantically sprinting forward three lanes to the island in the middle of the motorway (this sprint sometimes involves an eastward drift, driven by vehicles whose drivers' persistence I have miscalculated); reachind the island; panting from adrealine, checking I still have my fingers and toes; then sprinting again.After that is God and the Slums: a serene white temple with sprinklers and manicured lawns, followed by a slum area, where barefoot children run out and beam "how are you ma'am" at me in heart-melting English, and gangs of slum teenagers eye me up and sometimes follow for a few metres. There's a metro station closeby with crowds moving in and out; and by the side of the road, peddlers peddle garlands of orange flowers to temple-goers, adding to the chaos of colour in Delhi season in, season out.After I have passed the slum corner, I reach a garden-on-a-hill-point– a little breather for a country girl who frequently finds herself lost in a big city. It's next to the famous lotus-shaped temple in Delhi and littered by tramps, drunken men sleeping, dead-looking dogs, definitely-not-dead, barking-tail-wagging, wild, possibly rabid-looking dogs, and...litter.The green ends with two jagged towers of another temple, which is pink and white and looks like Princess Jasmine's in Aladdin. Every time I pass, I see an old lady in a bright orange sari sittng outside. She has one tooth, which sticks out from her top lip at a right angle; and when I walk past withmy laptop and shoulder bag and heart still pounding from my encounter with The Motorway of Death, she always says hello to me in the traditional Indian way: palms touched together andNamaste, uttered with eyes facing down to the floor. Sometimes I buy her peanuts from the peanut vendor who peddles his trade just next to her; on occasion when I have, she has sniffed in a gesture designed to make me realise she would have preferred to have been given the change.Finally, I cross a littler road and hit "The Market Mudslide" - a 1km section of market street almost entirely submerged under mud and sludge, with men selling muddy apples on the corner, buzzing flies, bazaars peddling business from fruit to trade in plastic to things you find in dark and suspicious alleyways; and children nearby who are knee-deep in black dirt, and usually grinning and adding to the noise. During the weeks leading up to Holi, India's festival of colour, I also had to duck water balloons pelted from high-up balconies here, since Holi is the time when throwing water is a free-for all and foreigners are anyone's game. I hop and slide and skid across the Market Mudslide, trying not to slip or get wet or rub up against the odd (usually male) stranger who attempts squeeze up against me in the narrow muddy alley........and, via children I play badminton in the the street with from time-to-time, snaking around cars and low-hanging cables in our neighbourhood.......I'm home!