Delhi: marigolds, Humayun’s Tomb, India Gate, cows
A few more bits and pieces:
Leis of marigolds are seen everywhere: hanging from rearview mirrors; draped over small Ganesh statues on the hotel desks; looped in drying brown garlands over certain limbs of certain trees. Offerings; invocations of good luck; something like that.
Cows amble along the streets, inured to traffic and pavement and noise, and lie down on the dusty sidewalks wherever they feel like. They have humps and curvy horns and are dusty shades of grayish brown. Every once in a while I’ll see one tied with a frayed rope to the side of a building or a streetside tree, but most appear to be fully free-range. I’ve seen them eat garbage; I’m not sure what else they survive on, here in the cities.
On my second day in Delhi (Wednesday) we hired some cars to take our group (at that point about 15 people) to city sights. For those of you following along in the textbook, these included: Humayun’s Tomb; India Gate & the nearby government buildings; the mosque of Jamanashtub; and Red Fort.
Humayun’s Tomb complex: This monument featured an array of half-crumbled arches, a mosque and outbuildings connected by red gravel paths and flat lawns shaded by banyon trees. The centerpiece is the huge symmetrically graceful domed tomb structure, smaller side chambers pierced with stone screens, built of red sandstone and predating the Taj Mahal by something like 20 or 40 years, if I remember aright. I was still quite jet-lagged. My favorite parts: kites, black-faced corvids, and parakeets flew everywhere. The parakeets spent quite a bit of time alighting picturesquely on bits of red carved masonry, preening and climbing in and out of holes. Needless to say I took pictures. Two men stood around the gravel paths gazing at the heavy roller they were evidently planning to pull across the rocks.
We were told that the actual tombs of Hamayun & associates were in the basement, no longer accessible to the public, while mock empty tombs filled their spots in the main building above. But then a man involved in some kind of monument sidewalk restoration project hurried over with an offer to take us through some construction in the dank underground cellar to get a look at the actual tombs, so our guide paid him some rupees and we followed them into a dark, damp, chalky underground chamber (reminded me of the insides of pyramids) to a room with pooled water underfoot and some lumpish stone shapes in the middle. Then the construction man turned on a spotlight and we could see the drippy domed ceiling of the cellar was absolutely paved with bats. Thousands of small brown bats, sidling and squeaking in the light, their little pig faces seeming scrunched up in dismay. It’s possible there were also tombs in the room (the stone shapes?) but we didn’t think to look for them until we’d already been hustled from the Chamber of Bats. Everyone agreed: the bats were awesome.
India Gate is a monumental arch built along what we were told was a long governmental mall, a la the mall in D.C. Lalit was actually quite dismayed that the long, impressive vista of government buildings he remembered from childhood visits to Delhi was completely obscured by the yellowish smoke haze. However the India Gate itself was perfectly nice and I took a picture with Toot in it. Vendors surrounded us selling postcards and small twirly helicopter toys, of which one member of our party purchased 10 for 40 rupees and another purchased 36 for the same price.
Whoops, 2nd half hour is up already!
Love all around,
Deborah, off to purchase the correct accessories for my new outfit (shiny shoes, shiny bracelets, shiny scarf…)
