You know the feeling you get when your airplane is speeding down the runway and adrenaline is making love to your heartbeat? The lit seatbelt sign side-glaring from afar and you’re trying to balance the fear of dying with the fear of touching the arm-hair of the stranger next to you. You’ve got an inkling of dread that the plane is really going to stop foreplay with the ground below any second now. It’s all very climatic, though perhaps that’s just me. But I do know this, the dread no doubt outweighs every other component when you realise you really did like the city you’re leaving behind. It’s an infatuation you’ll have to attempt to formulate simple words for back home: great, awesome, sick and inspiring, none of which cut it, but what else can you say to the heinous three word phrase ‘how was it?’ without going full Kerouac.
Accelerating speed along a slab of tar just fits the criteria for my memory’s perfect date, alas begins the film roll of fond recalls. Somewhere between remembering a glistening smile and a grand monsoon afternoon stuck inside with a shisha and great company, the wheels have spat out their last ‘later suckers’ to the ground below. And before you know it, there you are, just a little heartbroken somewhere above the clouds.
Now how to describe India to the Australian audience? The media’s ravished it as rape central, a place where feminism is crippled beyond repair. Corruption reigns supreme and extreme poverty is your balcony view. I suppose you’ll make your own judgements, and I won’t say India isn’t a place free of certain despairs, but if we never surpass this stupid exercise we play where we blacklist whole countries simply because the media (or even acquaintances) have constructed this singular view about them, we will undoubtedly miss out on the truth. No, it’s not a place of lavish yoga mats and complete sanctity, but it never pretended to be. Neither is it a place void of everyday revolutionaries. It’s a living community that verges on madness, but in this culture you will meet the most determined and the most inspiring, and you’ll see things that you wish you could ignore and no longer can’t.
You don’t go to India for relaxation, you go to India for lessons on living. So don’t tell me you’ve seen the world when you might have seen several mountains and passed time across several European summers, but you haven’t seen the human being, in all its glory and all its weakness, in the middle of India. It is by far the most incredible view.
So here are three lessons I learnt in Delhi, India.
I am not alone.
Despite the grandiose poetry you might read, the scholarly pedestal reserved for these poor sods who glorify being alone is bullshit. Simply because your mind is not connecting to another’s at this given moment does not mean that you are living in this space alone at a different frequency. Often it’s hard to realise this because the western world breed an observer population where we observe others to the point of scrutiny, yet find it socially awkward to communicate too openly. Then maybe we talk about it on Tumblr and someone will appropriate it into a novel-worthy quote, and as we reblog to the heavens above, the tension we have with ourselves and the outside world simply becomes lionized. You don’t even have time to stimulate your brain with such a wet rag, because Delhi has a honking problem. Truly.
A city’s traffic tells you a lot about that particular city. We scroll Asos for leisure while Delhi’s motorists enjoy a casual nap on their horn. Looking back on the hundreds of exasperated fucks I let loose as a horn blared past, the mild headache did lessen. It was Delhi’s grand gesture of putting its hand up and screaming ‘PRESENT’. It’s only after being wedged between a cow and a motorcycle carrying a family of five that you fully realise that you are sharing a city with 22 million other human beings, but further you’re sharing with absolutely every deathly aromatic, breathing thing on the planet. Though I won’t exaggerate and say every person does come to this realisation, as Delhi has their fair share of elites sitting in their tinted cars who do not look up from their Iphones even once.
When the disorientation relents and you do acknowledge the sheer number of people you share this world with, you find yourself questioning the scarcity of resources and the inequality we ourselves contribute to. Yet, you also feel more connected to more than just your circle of friends or your own country, and when you actually feel something, the decisions you make when you’re someone with power, which you are from the day you learn to write, speak and love, it will take into consideration more than what you can see with your eyes alone. It’s not an easy feat to care, and that’s what world travel’s about; if you do it right, you just do, even before you know it yourself.
How deep is your love?
Travel in itself offers up the risk to give in, to make mistakes or to destabilise everything you held previously close. My own revelations on love were scaffolded over several moments which involved architecture, conversations with taxi drivers and someone I can only describe as a pure genius at work. But I will only describe the first, because the power of architecture is something that seems to be lost on the minds of the modern youth. Although outside Delhi, I for one did not premeditate how overbearing the beauty of the Taj Mahal would be. I always convince myself into thinking a place as touristy as Agra has drained itself of authentic emotion, yet as I continually circled its main attraction, I could not keep my mouth from not falling ajar at the detail. Every single surface adorned, from the ground to the tip of the spire. White marble inlays and calligraphies detailing adoration up to the ceiling resulted in complete delirium. It is a rarity to see something in your life without a flaw, and when it hits you that it was done solely out of love, you truly comprehend the ability your own heart has.
India gives you perspective on more than just population; it gives you a view into what you both deserve and can give. So here on my return I have seen the bittersweet end of a relationship, but I also see new-found clarity in a vision of being in love, a comfort learned in India, and one I will thank it for in the years to come.
Sunset and sunrise are eternal times.
Delhi, I love you in the mornings when you’re still strung out. I love you in the evenings when you’re completely doused in that saturated grapefruit hue. There is not much to say on this lesson, only that I learned too late that the image of a city at sunrise and sunset is the memory that will stay most vivid. The two special times we can measure the sun’s position relative to the stars are also the two special times I’ll pass counting my lucky stars. Now back at home, I refuse to deny Sydney’s skies the perve they so thoroughly deserve. Sitting on my driveway right now, watching the trailing edge disappear below the horizon, I think fondly of Delhi and memories of the monsoon season a part of my youth drowned in.
If I could carry on a romance with a city and speak lush words to its worn ears, I’d say, ‘Delhi, there is nothing quite like you.’ I imagine it’d whisper back ‘I know’ with a trademark grin.
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Mridula Amin works for the ABC and writes great articles about topics you love to hate. You can read her back catalogue here.
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