Muslim Quarter, New Delhi
After ascending and descending the tower of the Jama Masjid (attendant wanted backsheesh as I was 5 minutes after closing, damn him) I wandered into the Muslim quarter of the city, tight noisy always as usual, and here I was rewarded.
Because it was a neighborhood. People sitting in their shops cross legged. Kids lounging against walls. Busy restaurants spilling out into the street. The fruit vendors and juice vendors and meat vendors (muslims have so much more meat!) and all those little white caps, and just as in Dubai I really got a sense of life at street level… which I don’t on most Indian streets, they seem just too crazy too fast too commercial too desperate or something.
A man in the middle of an intersection was selling small succulent red pear-shaped fruits about the size of a thumb. He’d pick each one up from the pile, cut the ends off, and slice it lengthwise. I gestured for a few and he covered it with the “salt” mixture before I could stop him, that strange yellow sulfur-smelling salt they put on fruit and in drinks here. But he added sugar too, and I decided to give it a try, chewing on the sweet fruit with its pungent overtaste. Good. Sort of like a prickly pear fruit. I’m glad there are still delicious fruits that I don’t know the names of.
Overhead, vast tangles of thick cables snaked and loped through the air. Really big ones, poorly hung from the racks and oft-tilted poles. Like elephant’s trunks, occasionally looping down to within touching height. Everywhere signboards advertising money exchange (but which currency?) and, simultaneously, seemingly without fail at every money changer, Pakistan visa application forms. And I thought: right. Pakistan didn’t used to be a separate country. There must be a lot of Muslim families in India with relatives across that border.
I walked down the street on a cloud and smelled roasing meat again. Stopped at a chicken grilling shop. Gestured-spoke to the cashier, a spectacled young man who turned out to have some English.
“You want a chicken leg.”
“Yes! How did you know?”
“Because I know your heart.” (huge grin)
“You do? Do you know my future too?”
“Yes. You will eat this and you will like this.”
And I laughed all the more because it was just the joke I was hoping he would make.
The afternoon was grey and occasionally splattered with rain, forming dalmations on the pavement. While I was eating my (delicious!) chicken, the wind picked up and suddenly the street was in the air. Small objects flew sideways just outside the door, an additional element of pandemonium. I dipped my chapatti in the mustard-butter sauce and stared at the blue tiles and the rickshaws and carts and the oven-heat sky with its menacing grey promise of rain, stared at all of it, the signboards and the little white hats and the beggars and the carpet sellers and the men drinking tea and everything, everything, all that texture that I am years away from getting into words, if ever.
