An historical sex shop, the Metro ride from hell and surviving Delhi day one (Delhi)

While waiting in the Munich airport for my third and final leg to bring me to India, I noticed an intriguing storefront with red velvet curtains and the name “Private”.  After casually strolling by about four times I decided to venture in.  It was a full-on, extensively stocked sex shop, complete with naughty nurse

Munich airport history-making sex shop

outfits, giant purple dildos and a wide and imaginative selection of DVDs. The young man working there was very friendly and proudly told me that this was the first and only truly international sex shop in the world. Outside some young Chinese tourists were leaning against the glass, submerged in Gucci and Louis Vuitton bags and oblivious to their surroundings.  I felt like shaking them: “Don’t you realize you’re in the presence of history?! You may have the Great Wall, but this is the only no-man’s-land pornography in the world!”  I resisted.

My plane was delayed. I offered to upgrade myself to first class if business class was overbooked. I’ve never seen an airline employee laugh so hard.

Not that I’m complaining – my business class seat was very comfortable. It’s just too bad that the guy in the next row didn’t shut up the entire flight.  Every time I leapt over my poor seatmate to go to the bathroom I was stunned to see this magpie’s arms flailing to the beat of his endless patter. My earplugs couldn’t drown him out.  I threw myself intensely into Bride Wars, at loud volume.

When the plane touched down in Delhi and the door opened I was punched in the face by an immense force of heat, the heady smell of garbage and the bug-eyed curiosity of a team of small brown people.  Ah, yes. The Famous Indian Stare. Welcome to India.

Even with having to complete the extra forms for swine flu, arrival and bag collection was exceptionally fast. Having arranged a prior transfer, I confidently strode to the exit, ready to sail above the sea of touts, taxi drivers and scam artists.

My driver was not there.

In fact, as I stood there quietly seething, it occurred to me that I almost never have smooth arrivals, so why would India be any different?  Besides, this obstacle presented the agreeable opportunity to try the patience of airport security guards and to experience the germ-infested joys of the Airtel public phone kiosk.

Six rupees (about 15 cents CAD) and countless microorganisms later I found my driver at the other exit (why when travelling do we so often overlook the obvious?). Nandu was a short, moustached man of about 40 years who was difficult to understand but had a great sense of humour. (I would eventually learn that it didn’t matter what I said – he would laugh. I could have declared, “My heart has stopped beating and I’m going into cardiac arrest,” and he undoubtedly would have chuckled heartily.)  As he briskly pushed the cart we passed a sea of motorcycles to arrive at a white Tata sedan. It reminded me of my own car at home, “the marshmallow”. I smiled.

The road was forced to snake around the massive construction of the new Metro link to the airport, a project I presumed would be underway for the next five years. I was shocked to learn that they were trying to get this and other new Metro lines ready for the Commonwealth games… in 2010? Next year?! Who did they think they were – China?

View from my hotel room of beautiful Karol Bagh

I found the Delhi arrival experience underwhelming. I expected to see a city teeming with infamous Indian street life, but it was mostly construction hoardings or forest. And lots and lots of traffic.  It reminded me of Cairo.

The hotel was not what I was expecting based on the web site; pretty common for India, apparently. It was small and dark, but friendly. My bedroom had a fan that sounded like a helicopter – good for drowning out the construction noises – and a bathroom fan that opened directly to the outside air. I turned it on immediately to discourage inquisitive mosquitoes. After washing some clothes I put in earplugs, slipped on my Bose noise-cancelling headphones and, with all respect to Chris Anderson, listened to his audiobook “Free” to lull me into a delicious post-travel slumber.

When I awoke I was driven about four blocks to the travel agency. Then, the fun began. With explicit instructions how to return to the hotel, I was let loose into Karol Bagh, one of India’s largest market neighbourhoods and target of terrorist bombings in September 2008 (a discovery made fortunately after I returned home and a fact thankfully still unknown to my family). I made it to the McDonald’s, a guiding light of blessed familiarity for the directionally

Best name for an Indian coach company

challenged, and then went the wrong way. The wide, busy streets became an even busier network of narrow alleys with evil-looking wires dangling from above, piles of garbage underfoot, and unfathomable numbers of men. I was serially assaulted by the smells of incense, urine, rotting food and jasmine. There were no other Westerners to be found – for that matter, there were no other women in sight! Backtracking my steps, I eventually found my way back to the McDonald’s and, after two more false starts, went down the right street to my hotel.

Now a veteran of Indian street life, it was time to try out Delhi’s relatively new Metro. I walked the three large blocks from the hotel (and didn’t get lost!), and for 8 rupees (less than two cents) purchased a featherweight, light blue plastic token.  I walked through the women’s metal detector and was patted down as my bag glided through the security belt.  Instinctively I knew which direction to go, but forgetting that the tracks were reversed (India is left-hand drive like the UK) I chose the wrong side.  But given that the next train was still 11 minutes, my margin of error was large enough to be corrected.

I tried to stand close to other women, but eleven minutes in a city of 15 million people is a long time to wait for a train, so the open-air platform was soon full, of men.  When the train arrived my heart filled with dread. It was packed.  But given that I was only going three stops and couldn’t bear another eleven minutes on the platform, I charged forward.

In the car my closest neighbour was a rather hirsute and sweaty man. I mustered every muscle to try to keep a paper’s width of space between me and his robust beard. At the next stop even more people pushed on – how was it possible? As the train moved out of the station into the sunshine I visualized how I looked to the outside world: a white woman in a sea of brown, face smushed against the glass door, doing a full body press against a human orangutan while the hair from the shorter man in front of her crawls up her nostrils, her knuckles chafing while trying to hold her zippered pant pocket closed and thinking she feels probing fingers on her thigh but she can’t tell because they may be her own hands, laughing at the ridiculousness of it all.  However, when even more people crammed on at the next stop I wasn’t laughing anymore because I began imagining things like fire, bombings, derailment, lice, leprosy, hepatitis. When I arrived at Connaught Place I was shot out of the train like a ruptured aneurism. And that was the end of my Delhi Metro career.

During my wanderings around Connaught Place I saw a Hindu temple with monkeys, Sadhus (Hindu ascetics) dressed in ochre with paste-covered faces, and market with entry by metal detector. After relaxing by the Jantar Mantar, a park filled with large astronomical instruments built in the early 1700s, I decided to try my first auto rickshaw, the three-wheeled ubiquitous Indian tuk tuk. A turbaned, bespectacled Sikh driver caught my wave.

“How much to Karol Bagh?” I asked.

He looked me over. “I’m on my last shift of the day. You pay what you want.”

In hindsight the right response would have been, “Ok. I don’t want to pay anything. So, now you tell me what you want to be paid,” but I just shrugged. I had a plan.

His subsequent conversation was relentlessly money focused. “You have tour for tomorrow? How much you pay? How much you pay for your trip to Ladakh? How much does a sari cost in the market? 400 rupees?? Not possible!” and on and on. We went out of our way to stop by the “House of Textiles”, the best place in Delhi to by clothes, of course. What a surprise! I didn’t bite.

He didn’t want to stop in front of the hotel, preferring to turn left at the corner, but I asked him to drop me off in front. Then I said, “Please wait one moment,” and ran inside before he could reply. I asked Reception the appropriate payment and, when I returned to my driver with 50 rupees, he said that he was hurt that I didn’t trust him, that he might have charged me less.  “Then you should have given me a price,” I responded. Too bad.

That evening Nandu took me to India Gate,

Evening at India Gate

a large arch commemorating India’s war efforts in the Afghan wars and World War I. A popular gathering spot for Delhi-ites in the evening, India Gate had a festive air, with family picnics, fluorescent blue comets launched by erstwhile vendors and bright pink candy floss.

I was taken to Pindi Restaurant on Pandara Road, a popular place for tourists. Despite my coaxing Nandu stayed with the car. My first official Indian meal began with strong pickle, mint sauce and marinated onions that tasted like the hallways of Lincoln Avenue, the multi-ethnic Montreal apartment building in which I lived during second-year university. I really enjoyed my paneer tika masala, aloo nan, lime soda and pineapple  raita, even if the latter had an unfamiliar dairy taste.  I shared my leftovers with Nandu and, feeling quite full and happy I survived my first day in India, returned to my hotel.

First dinner