It may be snowing and subzero in the UK, but winter has hit Delhi too – ie. the temperature has plummeted below 20C. Heaps of winter coats have appeared on pavement stalls, and people are wrapping up – ladies in lovely shawls and men in an odd array of garments from waxed jackets to blankets to fluffy chenille tank tops. A whole page of the Hindustan Times was given over the other day to pictures of Delhi socialites in wraps and cardigans, holding forth on the change of season (apparently now is the time for polo matches, private views and catered picnics).
The cooler weather has also brought some winter rain, which turns the streets into muddy, gritty, waterlogged obstacle courses – I can’t imagine what they’re like in the monsoon. I splashed out of my hotel on Wednesday expecting the city to look drab – and stumbled straight into the middle of an enormous street festival. Pretty much the whole month has been taken up with celebrations – first Diwali, then Eid al-Adha – and this was the Sikhs’ turn.
The festival was a nagar kirtan commemorating the martyrdom of Guru Teg Bahadur, who was beheaded in Old Delhi in 1675 on the orders of the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb. But it was anything but a sombre occasion. The streets were lined with brightly coloured tents decorated with streamers, garlands and pictures of the guru, all serving all kinds of food, for free, to passersby. Happy, drenched crowds (no one seems to use umbrellas) filled the bazaar, eating paper plates of daal and sweets and kulfi handed off the back of hymn-broadcasting decorated vans. A family insisted I take a bowl of suji halwa – a semolina sweet with the consistency of stewed apple – not the easiest thing for an unpractised westerner to eat with their hands, but delicious!
Today the sun finally emerged to dry up the pavements. I ventured out to the Lodhi Gardens, a beautiful park left by the urban planners of New Delhi around some tombs & mosques of the Lodhi sultans – who were eventually defeated by Babur, founder of the Mughal dynasty.
As you travel about Delhi, the history of its Muslim dynasties begins to fit together – these tombs are a link between Firoz Shah Kotla and the Jama Masjid and Red Fort, while the Qutub Minar is older than all of them. Yesterday I was in the Mughals’ Old City (near the site of the execution of Guru Teg Bahadur) in a gridlocked chaos of cyclerickshaws, motorbikes, three-wheeler goods vans, bullock carts and pedestrians packed so tightly the only way to escape was by climbing and vaulting over the vehicles around you. Today it was pleasant to sit in the wide green spaces around the Lodhis’ tombs, amid a few late roses, watching birds bathing in the overflow from irrigation pipes.
