Instead, we have come with the hope of taking advantage of what India
perhaps uniquely offers: regular encounters with the self and the other,
across almost every dimension of experience. India at its best is both
confrontational and abundantly flowing with experiences. It challenges and feeds the
heart and the intellect at once. It is an excellent place to learn to
pay attention, if one can afford it. But more about this as it comes;
here I am about first impressions.

   Wild peacock in a New Delhi park

We were prepared for the heat, but it was much hotter than our previous two summers in Delhi. During our first month here, temperatures daily exceeded 105º F, up to 115º F. So we relished the monsoons when they came, increasing in frequency and itensity through July and August. Breezes would rise, the clouds mercifully block the glaring sun, and the rain arrive with riveting thunder. Afterward, the air would be clear and charged and brilliant. Often, too, the roads would flood, causing traffic to tangle and slosh over new potholes and old mud.

I’m sure I’ve never seen a city with more birds. Mynahs and parrots, sparrows and crows. Pigeons, of course, and many other species I can’t name. They sing constantly and enliven the streets with their color and movement. They also leave their crap on every surface.

Our neighborhood from above

Their plentiful presence here might have something to do with the amount of greenery that gushes up exuberantly throughout the city, even in the dry season. Not only compared to other metros in India, but compared to any of the overlarge cities in the world, I’d wager greater Delhi is among the prettiest for its verdure. And in our little enclave, most neighbors are devoted to their trees or their balconies and lots crowded with potted plants, haphazard and lush. But plants grow even where one wishes they wouldn’t, from the cracks in a rooftop or the side of a building. 

Then of course, there are the monkeys, amusing and adorable (from a safe distance). They move through every few weeks in large bands, ranging about the rooftops in the mornings and evenings in search of food or adventure, it’s not clear what. As they pass, they wreak havoc as a matter of course, flinging pots or clothes or whatever catches their momentary interest, tearing open trash bags, uncovering rooftop water tanks. For the most part, people have learned not to leave things on the rooftops and batten down their water tank lids, but one can’t always be careful. And sometimes the monkeys come down even to individual balconies and compound walls.

         Monkeys on our street

All the plants, the birds, the monkeys, the loitering cows, stray dogs, wild boars, and feral cats, preserve a whiff of wilderness, a remembrance of disorderly nature within this fully urbanized zone. This is something completely absent in the ordered cities of the West. Here is a daily exchange with chaos, as its tentacles seek to pull apart all that you have built, to muck up all that you have neatly tended. Here is a constant conciliation with uncivilizable agents. Traffic cannot flow smoothly not only because people drive disastrously, but because one must make way for the animals, who take no heed of safe crossings or the difference between the middle of the road and the side of it, when divining the perfect spot for a nap. For the most part, these animals are not sweet and compliant pets, but executors of their own agendas, having no regard for ours. Yet there is no cultural idea that this nature will be finally conquered, rather that space must be left for it, that this negotiation will always continue. And while nature can be exasperating and even dangerous, it’s also completely enchanting; it not only enlivens the urban environment but purposefully contradicts it, like Shiva wagging his finger at young Murugan, full of his own power.

Cows on our walk to the mall

But there seems another side to this urban disorderliness, which is the trash and rubble that invariably clot Indian pavements and open spaces. Though no one dares to say it, I suspect India is the filthiest country in the world in terms of on-the-ground waste, and this is among the first things a foreign visitor will notice. While there has been some improvement in this regard over the past two decades—and this despite a whopping increase (nearly 25%) in the population—there is no discernible change to the essential dynamics of the way it happens, the way it does or does not figure into urban sensibilities.

Yet just when one shakes their head with hopelessness about the matter, a clean space appears! Many gardens and parks are reasonably free of waste. In the Metro, no one drops anything, nor even spits. It’s as though, being in a clean space, people behave with care, but once on the grimy streets, everyone returns to their most careless selves. Perhaps it is another face of this uniquely Indian negotiation with chaos that allows Indians to tolerate disorder and disruption from the human horde (including themselves) the same way they tolerate it from natural agents. If that is so, it is a sad thing, for to change one might require the other to change also.

In any case, for now I am trying not to look down at the trash, but to look up at the flowering trees and soaring raptors, at the green flash of parrots against the red sandstone and the simians leaping about the skyline.

Parrot on a ruin by the Qutub Minar