Yesterday the rain cleared and I was desperate to get out of the house and out into the city. BJ was not feeling as desperate, but I managed to convince him that a visit to Old Delhi would be a nice change of pace from hurdling in autorickshaws from one modern(ish) neighborhood to another in South Delhi. So, we got in a rickshaw and hurdled north.
Chandni Chowk is Hindi for 'Moonlight Square', which evokes images, in my mind at least, of a European central square made of polished marble glinting under a full moon with maybe a clock tower for good measure. In reality, there is nothing square, celestial, or like a romantic meeting spot about Chandni Chowk. It is a medival warrenlike circulatory system of narrow, muddy unpaved roads clogged not only with the usual fare of autorickshaws, trucks that somehow have only three wheels but are driving, cars, and people, but also carts pulled by horses, men pulling carts filled with sacks of spices, and lots and lots of pedestrians.
Getting out of the rickshaw, which, due to the traffic, had been moving at a maximum speed of 2 mph for at least a mile before Chandni Chowk actually starts evoked a sensation I imagine a neanderthal (or a Mainer, sorry Mainers) would experience if they were to be unthawed from a glacier and plopped in the middle of Times Square. Actually, for all I know a white lady in Chacos arriving in Chandni Chowk may be the Indian cinematic equivalent of Encino Man.
But despite my immediate apprehensions about electrocution (a lot more on that in a minute), stepping in human feces, or being stampeded by the crowd, Chandni Chowk and its neighbor the spice market Khari Baouli ended up being both charming and fascinating.
In many ways, sections like this of Old Delhi are a perfect cross-section of the paradigm that is India. On one street, women in brocade saris shop for gold jewelry and compact cars of families with iPods and cell phones fill the road. Step literally five feet into the heart of the market, and tiny barefoot men in dirty white tunics carry disproportionately gigantic loads of lumber, straw, and sacks of tea on their backs like ants on a march, even tinier babies play in the dirt, and Muslim women clad entirely in black shop for fruit in a scene that seems likely unchanged from one hundred years ago. You could also fully construct, furnish, and stock a thatched roof hut, medival mansion, Victorian hill station, modern apartment, Staten Island Italianate villa, livestock farm, and metropolitan subway system based on the variety of objects on offer in the neighborhood. It is a tangible and colorful example of a phenomena economists call clustering, where specific goods or services are tightly geographically grouped (aren't you glad I don't know anything else except that about economics and can't bore you with a real explanation?). Except here, instead of software in Silicon Valley or vague financial services in New York, there are streets that sell only pipes. And a million types of gramaphones (don't argue, you know you'll need more than one), antique telephones, door hinges, chandeliers, locks, scaffolding--all apparently made of bamboo, well known to be earth's most resiliant building material, not to mention the hundreds of shops selling rice, tea, spices, nuts, marigolds, frangipani, halwa, day-glo yellow melons and sweets. The streets also all lead into one another, are not marked, and begin to feel like a maze--miss the exit and you're faced with a future of wandering down alleyways selling giant woks until the end of time.
But we made it out, with only one big toe (mine, unfortunately) covered in a brown substance of dubious origin, eventually reaching the end of a dirt path populated with stray dogs and descended into the fully modern, mostly air-conditioned Delhi subway, which is allegedly modeled after the Tube. It was like wandering out of the Invasion of 1066 and into the R train , if the R train were fast, on time, not disgusting, filled with people wearing saris and polyester bell bottoms, and had reliable air conditioning. You get the idea I'm sure.
II. Electrophobia
Another interesting aspect of this Indian paradigm is that though our apartment is "modern" and has marble floors and heavy, extraordinarily ugly but probably costly molding, it does not have grounded wiring. This means that in the humidity, electrical appliances give off a charge and zap you when you touch them. The toaster, which acted as an omen of things to come, nearly took my arm off three days ago. Now the iron, desk lamp, and laptops give off a buzz. BJ does not seem to be particularly bothered or concerned about this, but I feel like a rat in an experiment designed to demonstrate the dumbness of rats by shocking them regardless of what they do. Much to BJ's amusement, I am afraid of the iron. And the kitchen, because it houses the toaster. And the desk lamp. Plus all sockets, wires, the laptop when it's charging---the list goes on to include most surfaces of our house. Lately, my paranoia has reached a new level and I have begun to imagine non-electrified things like rugs and keys in my hand while I am walking down the street are zapping me--the response to which is to jump like I am being stung by a bee/having a seizure and fling the keys in the air while BJ laughs hysterically and Indian men stare. I have even been having dreams about touching things and being zapped.
I guess that is an improvement from feeling like a rat in an experiment regarding the effects of nuclear laxatives, which is what last week felt like, but it's not amazing. Hopefully the dry season will bring some relief....
Less yappin, more zappin.
ReplyDeleteI hope that you're referencing the 'hit' 1992 comedy 'Encino Man', starring Brendan Frasier and Paulie Shore: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104187/. It won an award for best movie ever made.
Find me the finest gramaphone in Chandni Chowk, won't you?