Passage to India

About five hours after flying out of Istanbul approaching New Delhi at 200 feet the cabin was suddenly immersed in humidity and an odor, not particularly unpleasant, but definitely an odor. I can only guess it to be humanity. It being 4:45 am, I expected the airport to be empty and was wrong. There were throngs (literally thousands) of people in the terminal building. Surprisingly, I got my luggage and went through passport control and customs quickly and without incident. Once into the public section, I immediately found Mehechand who was holding a Melvin Newman sign. Into his car we got and within a half hour I was registering at the Oberoi Hotel. It now being 5:30 am (1:30 am Istanbul time) I made a beeline to my room, quickly undressed and engaged the bed. And then I lay there listening to the traffic , mostly horns, for the next two hours. Resort to a sleeping pill proved effective, rewarding me with uninterrupted sleep until 2 P.M. Sunday morning.

The next early afternoon (it was still Sunday) I fearfully ventured into the hotel restaurant, knowing I was about to have my first meal in India. Ignoring a huge beautifully presented buffet and heeding the warnings about Delhi-belly, I at last settled on a pot of coffee and a toasted baguette with melted highly spiced cheese. Not particularly satisfying, but very safe.

Not three minutes after I left the hotel lobby for a short walk, I was accosted by Tito, a turbaned Sikh, who did his best to try to persuade me to take a ride with him to see the city. My overt resistance did nothing to repel him and, sure enough, after ten minutes of further selling, I agreed to go with him for an hour. Leading me to his vehicle, I was somewhat taken aback when he invited me into his rickshaw, not a Chinese human powered pullcart, but a three wheeled motorized open air vehicle powered, I was told, by liquid natural gas. I quickly overcame the culture shock when my attention was diverted to the fire extinguisher mounted on the dashboard.

Tito, a man with considerable charm, and I then tooled around the new city (as opposed to Old Delhi)and particularly the governmental section. The new city was built during the last 60 years adjacent to the old city which has been around, in one form or another, for over 1000 years. During our time together I learned much about the Sikh (a people , Tito assured me, of much superior level than that of the Hindus, from whom Sikhism grew, and certainly than that of the Muslims. I also learned of Indian driving habits (one must blow his horn incessantly, without reason and never when an accident is imminent), the incredible amount of traffic that can clog a single street and how difficult it is to find a sealed bottle of water for sale when you need it. Our tour, after about a hour, came to an abrupt end when Tito's rickshaw refused to move and we were forced to push it down the street for three blocks, targets of opportunity for all passing vehicles, to a safe parking place. From there we took another rickshaw back to my hotel.

Had a good night's sleep, had breakfast again limited to bread, cheese and coffee, and met my pre arranged guide, Nittin, at 10 am who came accompanied by a air conditioned car and driver. Nittin is 29 years old, married with a daughter and well educated. He is trained to be an attorney but has chosen to serve as a guide because he likes it. Nittin and I became friends fast, particularly when I told him I was not interested in seeing mosques, monuments and old forts, but prefer exposure to people, culture and history. During the next four hours, I learned more about India than two months of intense pre-trip reading had brought me. We spent the whole four hour day in the old city riding in a man-peddled bicycle vehicle behind which Nittin and I sat. We talked of Hinduism, the Mugal invasion and predominance, Kashmir, the political attiudes of Indians towards Pakistan and Bangladesh, Hindu marriages, the place of woman, the cost of housing, Rama, Krishna and Sheeva, three of the eight avatars of Lord Vishnu, the importance of education, special aspects of Hinduism, the significance of Holi (a nation wide festival to be celebrated on March 15) how to choose food, appropriate courtesies in everyday life and the difficulty for Hindus to obtain visas to visit the U.S. Did you know that you can always tell the difference between a Hindu section and Muslin section of the city? Birds fly over the Muslim section but not over the Hindu section as Muslims display meat and fowl in their stands where Hindus never do. We visited a wonderful Kashmiri carpet shop whose proprietor was visibly disappointed to learn that I had bought carpets in Istanbul before having a wonderful Indian lunch. It was a day well spent