At some point, I'm assuming I will get sick with Delhi belly and lose two or three pounds. Today I gained at least two or three. We walked down the lane with Kim's youngest daughter, Zola, and the girls nanny, Maria, avoiding puddles left from last night's rain to a small shopping area, a black woman and a white woman, drawing stares from everyone, which seemed to be mostly men. Kim in black long-sleeved top and skirt, hair in a turban and me in an ankle-length black skirt, t-shirt and my hair wrapped in a scarf (bad hair day, curling iron melted and curled itself when I forgot to use the right adapter. Whole trip will be bad hair. Except for the day I spent at Pittsburgh airport. Hair nice then.)
Fruit vendors, water vendors, barbers. Lots full of motorbikes and shacks made of corrugated metal.
We met Nadia Miranda, who teaches Kim's oldest daughter, Leilah, and her husband, Emanuel, a power plant IT manager, both French. The plan was for me to stay for a bit and then Kim's driver would take me to India gate. Unfortunately, but the time I was ready to go, it was pouring rain, so we dallied a bit longer. The brunch was delicious and the restaurant's owner, Varun Tuli, a young childless man of 26, has hit on a winning formula. A fixed price brunch on Sundays with a separate, glassed off play area for kids where the staff oversees art classes for the kids. The wine list was extensive and inexpensive (as it seems is most everything in India). We had dumplings, sea bass, sticky rice, seared tuna (not me) California rolls, spicy prawns and I don't know what else.
Finally after the rain stopped, Kim and I got in her car and she directed Suresh to India Gate. It's a huge red sandstone monument in the center of a traffic circle, with an eternal flame as a memorial to the soldiers of the British Indian Army who died in World War I and the third Afghan War of the early 19th century. It reminded me a bit of l'Arc de Triomphe in Paris.
I think I know a bit more of world history than the average American. China from the early 20th century to now is fascinating. I know enough to be aware that some places, or some foes, as in the Viet Cong, can be impossible for a conventional army to fight to a conventional victory. I know that 19th-century Western colonialism in India and Africa, built in large measure on arrogance of empire and race, has by and large left legacies that are not the finest. I know that Afghanistan has been called the graveyard of empires and is home to entrenched tribal cultures; but past that, nothing.
There is this one bit, though, which I read earlier this year as an introduction to an article in the New York Times Book Review. It's a quotation from Rudyard Kipling's poem, "The Young British Soldier," the whole of which is a series of cautions for the young soldier off to fight in a strange land. There is this verse at the end:
"When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
An' go to your Gawd like a soldier."
So I can only imagine that the third Afghan War of the late 19th century, commemorated at India Gate, was horrifying in every sense. Learning more is now on my list.
Present day, India Gate has an expansive, grassy, if a bit muddy considering the recent weather, mall where people gather to stroll, picnic, sing, play cricket and have their pictures taken. There are vendors selling little gadgets that shoot off rubber bands. A little girl approached us with a tray full of some treat or another. A group of uniformed schoolkids marched past at one point. Balloon sellers. Dogs. Kids hanging out with their iPods. Cricket. There is a tower behind the gate that looks like a free-standing minaret and a beautiful red sandstone fountain. I would not get into that water for all the world, but kids play in it.
This site, and many others in what is New Delhi, are part of what was built by the British during the early 20th century. The neighborhood Kim lives in, New Friends Colony, was built by the Quakers in the 1950s. You wouldn't know it to look at it today. We'll be seeing parts of Old Delhi, which was old when Christopher Columbus was discovering America, later in the week. I love the idea of seeing the how a built environment reflects the ebb and flow of invasion and assimilation. Over the centuries, that happened in Delhi. Maybe that's why all of it seems so old.
