Out of the Closets, Into the Streets: Week Twenty Five: Exploring Delhi, Getting Settled

On Sunday I moved into my new home (for a week) in CR Park, another neighborhood in South Delhi. I found Suparna's house on AirBnb, and she is also a host for a local language school, so I had a few really nice housemates.

My room at Suparna's was great, decorated with fish and a Bing Bang Theory poster that I assume came from her son. One of my favorite things about staying at her house was the community breakfast and dinner. Corinne and Elena, who were both attending the school, had breakfast before leaving, and it was a nice way to schedule my day. In the evenings we had dinner together. Traveling so often and living in such a variety of spaces, a regular meal time and set of people with whom to eat has been a rarity, and I really appreciated the conversations and community feel that came with these meals.

Another nice thing about Suparna's was that she always had the paper in the morning, so I could keep up with the news, especially interesting as Delhi elections rolled around on Wednesday. I got used to a cup of coffee and the paper every morning, a routine which I doubt will last as my schedule changes and I move around the city, but which has been a great treat.

I spent the week doing a variety of things to get to know the neighborhood and to set up a regular schedule within my project.

On Monday, an older couple who had stayed with Suparna before my arrival came back for a visit and showed me around the neighborhood markets; they were looking for firework poppers to take home to their grandson, so we explored all three of the bigger markets in CR Park, only to find that the poppers are banned outside of the celebration of Diwali because of the smoke noise. Determined, Phillipe, the man, went to Old Delhi to find one of the few stalls where they are sold year round for things like weddings.

CR Park is in South Delhi, close to Nehru Place on the purple line of the metro. Lotus Temple and ISKCON Temple are both visible from Nehru Place.

It was good to get my bearings and to see a new part of the city.

On Tuesday I headed to the Qutub Minar, which is a remnant of Islamic rule and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The ruins date back, in some parts, to the 12th century. The Minar was finished in the 14th century.

There is a whole complex filled with ruins and tombs, and I spent qutie a while walking around and enjoying the change in color as the sun began to set. The stones in the Minar are red and when the light changes, they become brighter and the inscriptions shine in a particularly beautiful way.

The Minar

Walking through the ruins

Some of the style and the red stone

The bottom levels of the Minar

It is 238 feet high

Through one of the crumbled gates around the Minar

Inside the ruins

From the hillside, the Alai Darwaza, main gateway from one side of the mosque

Mixed in the with pigeons

Outside the Alai Darwaza

The base of the Alai Minar, which was supposed to be even larger than the Qutub Minar, but which was abandoned after the death of the original planner

Tomb

Within the Tomb

As the sunlight started to change

One more time

The Iron Pillar, which dates back several hundred years before the complex, was moved to its current location in the 10th century and is especially cool because it is composed of materials that have protected it against the Delhi climate for such a long time.

Inside the mosque

Detais on the columns

That evening, I went to Shahpur Jat to have dinner with Tannis, whom I had met at Thanksgiving. Shahpur Jat is a really cool, developing neighborhood with a variety of shops and restaurants. We ate at the Pot Belly Cafe, and the food was delicious, although as is sometimes the case when I am eating without Indian friends, I ordered without a whole lot of knowledge about what I would be eating. It generally works out well as there are few ways to go wrong with Indian food. It was great to chat with Tannis and see a new part of the city.

Wednesday was election day, so Corinne and Elena had the day off from school. We decided to go to Swaminarayan Ashkardham, which is a Hindu complex containing a massive number of displays and features, including a food court, and which contains a huge and beautiful temple.

There are no pictures or cameras or phones allowed inside the complex. You enter, essentially, with your cash and, for foreigners, any passport or id that might be essential. The rest of your things are photographed and put into a storage locker where you can retrieve them after your visit.

On the one hand, the no camera rule is frustrating because the complex is amazingly beautiful. There is so much to see and at one point, as the sun was setting through the arches of the temple, it was almost painful not to be able to capture the moment.

On the other hand, it was really nice to have to look without the lens and to have to interact without any kind of distraction. Nobody was talking on a cell phone, only with each other, and if a view was blocked, it was because people were looking and wanted to keep looking, not because they wanted a great angle.

We walked around the complex, which is huge, and around the gardens. In the gardens there are monuments to India's great men and women. Here I was disappointed in the women that they selected because there was so much less variety than in the group of men. All the great Indian women were pious or faithful to their husbands or great mothers. The problem being that their commonalities suggested that this was the epitome of an Indian woman and that her accomplishments outside of these areas meant less, if anything.

On a somewhat related note, the kind of sexism that I have experienced in India is different than what I experienced in Argentina or experience at home. While scantily clad, airbrushed bodies are not displayed in the same way (in my experience), it is not entirely uncommon for a man to "brush" by you in an uncomfortable way on the subway. Of course, a gay man did this to me once at a community meeting when he thought I was a man (as 80% of the popuation does), but the expectation that it will happen to women is different. The women's only car thins at night to the point where I know I will get a seat, whereas the men's car may be overflowing. This is because the hours at which women and may walk around, especially alone, are very different. There are expectations about an escort, although it should not be just any man. I am exempt from many of these standards as a tourist, but my friends have still told me after being out at a certain point, "Don't walk home after the metro. Take an auto. It won't be safe for you." I have never felt unsafe but I understand that there is a standard to which they adhere because I am their friend and a woman. Anyway, all that is to say, it has been interesting to adjust to gender expectations for many reasons, and looking at the monument in the Akshardham made me consider the messages being sent about what it means to be an Indian woman in a new way.

We headed back to Suparna's for dinner after sunset and tried, along with almost everyone else leaving the complex, to get a good picture from outside the gates. In a very Delhi situation, the temple sits just next to the metro line and a massive parking lot.

The Akshardham from a distance

On Thursday, some information about the elections came out. There was record voter turnout in Delhi, even in the wealthier neighborhoods, where people often avoid the voting booths. The BJP, a party very much to the right but promising change was predicted to win quite a lot of votes, and the AAP, a new reform party, had a great showing, although it was not predicted to do as well outside the city in the votes that will come next year as most of its funds and efforts were concentrated here.

Indian politics is very interesting and according to a lot of people, very corrupt, at the local level but also beyond that. The AAP especially talks a lot about sweeping out the corruption, and no matter what, it seems like Congress, which has held power for quite a long time, is going to have to get it together in order to maintain their influence. Anyway, I am in no way qualified to comment but reading and listening to friends talk about what has happened and what they want to happen has taught me a lot and made me want to learn more.

That afternoon, I went back to Lodhi Gardens, where the Pride placard making meeting had been, to read and look at more of the monuments. I spent a lot of the day there, working a little and walking a lot. The Gardens are often used by young couples for dates and there was more than once when I felt like an intruder. I found a spot in the open next to the mosque and read on the grass until it was time to go meet Spiros, another friend from Pride, and see the Sufis sing at Nizamuddin, a mosque in the neighborhood where he lived.

The mosques, tombs, and gardens at Lodhi Garden:

Spiros and I walked from the metro to the mosque, which is a large complex and is full of tourists on Thursdays because of the music. After taking off our shoes and covering our heads, we headed inside through a series of hallways to the center of the complex. Seated in a large group were the Sufis and around them were those who had come to pray and those who had come to listen. The music went on for about an hour, a series of songs that blended together while the crowd came to give money and pray.

The architecture is beautiful and so was the singing, and it was a great experience.

On Friday, I went to the TARSHI offices and met with Ankit and Shruti about a volunteer schedule and what I might be able to do to help around the office. It was a fantastic meeting, and we planned for me to start work the next week. I am really looking forward to working there. TARSHI (Talking about Reproductive and Sexual Health Issues) covers a wide variety of issues and seeks to educate and advocate. Their work includes the LGBTQ community, and their offices are full of resources.

The office is just across from ISCKON Temple, the Hare Krishna temple, so after the meeting, I went to explore. After taking off my shoes and washing my feet and hands, I walked through the complex, which has several large buildings and a cafeteria. There was a light and sound show on the Bhagavad Gita, so I obviously checked that out. I was the only one on the tour, probably due to the strange time of day, so an attendant went with me the whole way. The exhibit is a series of life-size dioramas that tell the story of the conversation between Lord Krishna and Arjuna, which is the focus of the Gita, but the story is interspersed with Hare Krishna philosophy exhiibits, including one terrifying room where a series of sculptures are lit by a strobe light and terrifying evil laughter plays in the background to demonstrate the chaos of life. Apparently the life-size figurines are common to Indian museum displays, and it was an interesting walk-through, even though I didn't leave feeling very enlightened. The temple is very pretty so I walked around for a bit before heading home.

Later that afternoon I was back in Shahpur Jat to have coffee with Jasneet, who hosted Thanksgiving and who is generally awesome. We walked around for a while before settling in a juice bar to talk about research and life generally. Jasneet is a Fulbright researching women in leadership roles in Punjab and Rajasthan and also doing preliminary research for her graduate work, which will focus in part on the Partition. It was really nice to sit and chat and explore the neighborhood in the daylight. After saying bye to Jasneet and making plans to meet again soon, I headed back to CR Park to meet Bismay.

He took me to one of his favorite restaurants, across from where he went to university, but not before stopping at a market to pick up some rasgulla, a traditional Bengali sweet made of fried bread and cheese marinated and eaten in a sweet syrup. He was appalled that I hadn't yet tried it, especially given that CR Park is largely Bengali and has lots of food native to the region and different from what might normally be found in a Delhi restaurant. We ate butter chicken and paneer and naan, and it was all delicious and the conversation was great.

I have found community and people faster in Delhi than anywhere else I have been so far, and I am so grateful for the wonderful people who have welcomed me here. While it has been the biggest cultural transition, it has been the easiest social transition, and I am really, really looking forward to the rest of my time here and getting to know these awesome people better.

On Saturday, my last day at Suparna's, I had a technological issue when my keyboard broke, but after buying a new one and grabbing some lunch, Corinne and I took it easy and then went out to see a movie at Select City Walk, a big mall in Saket in South Delhi. I really do love the movies, and going to different theatres is an experience. Like In Buenos Aires, the seats in the theatre are numbered and reserved, so we picked an area to the front. Like everywhere else in Delhi, security is tight, and I had to leave my camera battery and gum in a locker outside the theater before I was permitted to enter. The snacks are sort of the same and sort of different, with flavored corn (not popped) being a favorite along with masala popcorn. The seats lean all the way back and if you pay for a gold standard ticket, you get a waiter to bring you food, etc. There is also an intermission. We saw Catching Fire, and the large group of teenage girls in front of us sighed and groaned as the movie cut for intermission as Peeta and Katniss cuddled.

Select City, in all its commercial glory, also decorates for Christmas, and it was really exciting to walk outside and see lights and trees and candy cane ornaments.