India, oh, India

Everything about India blurred together for most of the 24 hours, with just a few images crystalizing. I arrived at almost midnight, collected bags, paired up with another woman headed into town and split a taxi. She’d even invited me to take the second twin bed in her room at the guesthouse she’d booked. Having had visions of wandering the streets of downtown Dehli, homeless and contemplating sleeping in the train station, I said yes.

The taxi ride from the airport was a blur—or maybe that was the streak of the red lights we blew through because those, apparently, are optional. Even after midnight, the city is busy constructing itself. Dump trucks moved along in trios, marching like soldiers toward progress. Rows of rickshaws were stacked together like grocery carts. Fires burned in sheet metal shelters. The nicer places look like Anasazi cliff dwellings, stacked, cement squares with ladders to access them on the outside. The alley to the guest house Victoria had booked was narrow and dark, with a stream of water running down the center. We ducked under a metal gate and walked down a hallway to a door with a sign on it that read “No room.” But they know her—Victoria has volunteered with Tibetan refugees in India for six years, and stays at this guest house in the Tibetan corner of Dehli every time she passes through town—and, literally, had a key with her name on it.

The neighborhood was buzzing before I was out of bed, the sounds an overlay of American music, Tibetan drumming, which has a metal ring, people shouting, and men spitting. Oh yeah, you can hear spitting from the second floor.

My first glimpse of Dehli by daylight was from the rooftop of our guesthouse. The neighboring rooftops were strung with Tibetan prayer flags, some of them wind-flapped to rags, their colors gone and only traces of the black dye of their inscribed prayers.

It’s quite cold, and I hugged into my morning coffee at a table beside monks and friends of monks. The restaurant looks out on the Yamuna River, silver to match the gray morning sky, and a row of small garden plots and riverside shacks. Women in saris topped with long shawls attend to their business walk among the shacks, and children play in empty garden plots. The occasional cow strolled through.

I’ve got nothing in the way of cold-weather clothes, so we went out scouting the markets, but they’ve got little in the way of cold-weather clothes either. The hawkers work ceaselessly. They try to call you into sari shops as if the words coming out of their mouths will be the first you’ve heard of the possibility of buying a sari. As if you didn’t see the mannequins in window after window draped in fabrics so heavily jeweled they could drag an ordinary Indian woman to the ground. A man selling USB sticks approached Victoria and me, and seemed to think that our “No, I don’t need that,” was just our fierce bargaining technique. As he followed us down the street, the cost of 32GB of memory dropped from 1,000 rupees to 250 rupees (it’s about 45 rupees to 1 USD), at which point he declared that was his last, best price. When we laughed and shook our heads, he vanished.

The press of people is constant. Try to slow down or stop without stepping far enough to the side—shoving yourself into a doorway or into an alley—and they will push right through you. Stand at a counter without knowing what you want to order and they’ll do the same. And yes, they stare like they’ve never seen a white person before, which is impossible because there are literally busloads of them moving around the city.

We were searching for a thick pashmina for me, something to wrap around my shoulders to stay warm, but had no luck. My only purchase was a couple of Indian sweets, one flavored vaguely of nutmeg and the other trying for, I think, lime and chocolate, topped with a layer of thin silver flake.

And after all that, I did my buying in Majnu-ka-Tilla, the Tibetan area, where I found a thick, yak’s wool shawl (No, Mom, my nose isn’t cold anymore), and spun my first prayer wheel. Each spin sends thousands of rounds of “Om Mani Padme Hum” toward the heavens, invoking the blessings of Chenrezig, embodiment of compassion.