Delhirious and Defeated

We were processed like cattle, shuffling through a sterile hall of endless immigration forms and thumb-print scanners, watched by military men armed with AKs beneath signage riddled with typos. At arrivals, we bought SIM cards from the world's most nihilistic seller and marvelled at our Indian rupees, each banknote printed with a slightly different angle of Mahatma Gandhi. The metro, too, was surgically clean, blissfully silent, and humming with an artificially cool breeze. We sat in the sleek carriage, watching the city pass in deforested chunks, almost fooled at how chill it all appeared to be. Then the doors hissed open at New Delhi station and we climbed the steps to the street above.

The stench hit me first, thick and greasy, a sticky barrage of rot, sewage, and spices that clung to the humid air, surging upwards in the baking heat and violating my wrinkling nostrils. I tried to hold my breath but the atmosphere was persistent, burning my throat with concentrated ammonia from public urination mixed with the heavy, stomach-turning rancidity of festering excrement. Beneath that was the smell of stagnant, grey water and the sickly, cloying honk of garbage that had been liquefying in the sun for weeks. Every breath felt like inhaling poison amid a relentless, screeching cacophony: the insane, constant blaring of tuktuk horns, the hollow drone of "chicken biryani" ringing over a tannoy, and the abrasive clamour that seemed to erupt from everywhere at once, as tuktuk drivers chased us for business, like a swarm of blood-hungry sharks in a feeding frenzy to a pair of sorry sardines.

Our walk toward Hotel Ajanta took us through streets choked with people, gaping with deep potholes, and obstructed by open drains, utility cables, and encroaching vehicles. At our hotel, a secure, air-conditioned refuge, we took a second to acknowledge our overwhelm, attempted to reframe our outlook, and ventured back out toward the Red Fort. As it turned out, our tuktuk driver had actually dropped us off at Jama Masjid, a Mughal mosque where we mounted the minaret and were badgered with selfie requests. But between there and a stop at India Gate, we were plunged back into the carnage.

Chandni Chowk is the densest market of Old Delhi, and it honestly shocked me. We saw people driven to horrifying extremes. A group brawled in dirt, rocks in hand, while others with awful disabilities were begging for their lives. The squalor was undeniable.

When it was time to leave, Indira Gandhi Airport felt like a hallucination of normalcy. The quiet luxury of the airport felt ironic compared to the mayhem of the streets. At least India has its humour, the food court had a restaurant that called itself 'Burger Singh'. At McDonalds, I had a "Maharajah Mac", Thomas had the grilled paneer burger. We felt very grateful.

That said, Delhi was no disaster. We expected mayhem and we got, well, what we asked for. India is rich in colour and flavour, and to witness such a wildly different culture from our own where risk is just so accepted and newborn babies travel by hanging off the back of mopeds is a real living experience.Read more