Delhi in the Dark
We’re wheeling through the streets of the city as the panels on the side of the tuk tuk start to shake, the windshield vibrates, wooden beads hanging from the mirror rattle. When we finally get up to speed — the Vishnu idol glued to the dashboard quivering violently — I start to realize that the good price the driver gave us for a ride to the Red Fort was probably too good. His tuk tuk is as tired and old as he is. The cracks are starting to show as we break 60 kph and I start to worry the whole thing will come apart at the seams, leaving pieces strewn across streets whose names I can’t pronounce.
The shaking all stops as the driver slams on his breaks, nearly kissing the bumper of the truck in front of us. The tail gate reads “keep distence” in hand-painted script — I could reach out and touch it if I wanted.
The street is a vortex of traffic. Everything is car horns and headlights as we follow that same pattern of rapid speed and sudden brakes. Time and again we accelerate headlong into what looks to be certain impact, but never is.
Cement barriers, it seems, are the only thing to keep oncoming traffic to their side of the road. Any street without them runs like a nonsensical river with opposing currents, swirling into any space in any direction it can.
My wife turns to me and whispers in my ear, “Mad Max: Curry Road.”
This is Delhi at night. It’s much like Delhi during the day, just a few degrees cooler and dark enough to hide the pollution that hangs heavy in the sky. Some may see it as a city of maddening chaos, but it’s a system that more or less works, despite my Western sensibilities thinking it shouldn’t.
It would be lying to say that our first full day in Delhi wasn’t a frustrating one, but Delhi, it seems, can be a frustrating city. It’s loud, it’s hot, and it’s culturally rich — so rich, in fact, it can be hard to approach and penetrate. But it’s not impossible to navigate and the rewards are there for those willing to brave it.
It’s a city as chaotic as its past. Delhi is a patchwork of history. From early Mughal lords to the more recent British Colonials, each former ruler left something behind for the inhabitants to assimilate, appropriate, and refurbish. Go far enough in any direction and a traveler will find a cross section of the world’s timeline. Street to street the architecture changes, with imposing fortresses overlooking bustling markets, next to rows of old barracks and streets lit with neon. And like veins, the busy streets weave through all of it.
Despite those foreign powers trying to cut up and claim the country, there’s a sense that India has always been India, making sense of its own world in its own way. It has persisted, it has endured, it has survived. It’s in the chaos that I begin to appreciate their resilience and it occurs to me that if the rest of the world ended tomorrow, I’m put money on India still being there, sticking it out.
Our tired, little tuk tuk coughs and wheezes, weaving in between buses and cars and motorcycles, skirting past rival tuk tuks. Driving here is a game for the bold, the brave, and the opportunistic. Half a second’s pause is chance enough for another car to weasel past as the city, history’s Frankenstein creation, flashes by.
As we return home, tired from a day of intense heat and new, draining experiences, I feel the warm night air on my face and relish the commotion. We cross an intersection, our driver plowing ahead, weaving through three lanes of traffic on a two-lane road.
“Diversion ahead,” reads a sign. What’s the point of that? I wonder. Everything here is a diversion, and yet everyone is always moving forward anyway. They’ll adapt and respond and the flow will continue onward, forever, unceasing.
This is Delhi, the City of Djinns, magical and maniacal.
