A DAY IN DELHI
My unexpected last day in Delhi I went in the morning to Chandni Chowk and walked down narrow streets around the main road. All the stores are wholesale and the narrow streets were full of men pulling carts or pushing bicycles that were heavily loaded with huge bundles wrapped in white cloth. There was little effort to make the shops look inviting. It was all in and out of huge quantities of goods.
The other interesting thing was that all of the shops retailing each type of good would be in the same place. There would be 50 shops selling kitchen equipment and then 50 paint stores and then 50 airconditioning stores all on dingy narrow alleys. Scattered through this were a few schools and Hindu temples and Moslem mosques. Many of the people were Moslems with the women in purdah or with at least covered faces and the men wearing long white shirts with black vests and circular hats. I took several long videos and realized as I was doing this that while I am very attracted to the bright colors and smells of India, that one of the things that I like most is the mad rush of things both in the traffic and on the sidewalks. Still photography can’t catch this, but videos can and I think that spatial videos with their immersive 3D and surround sound will do this even better. Already I can hear the surround sound on my AirPods.
https://share.icloud.com/photos/0cd8hGlkogCfFyO0MqngEwzLA
Just when I was enjoying myself I decided to stop at an ATM and to get money enough to pay for 3 nights at the Master Guest House because Uschi won’t take a card. I took out my card wallet and was surprised to find my debit card wasn’t there. I looked through every pocket and my backpack, the only place it could have been, and it wasn’t. I checked my bank account on line and nothing was charge. I locked the card. But as anyone who has traveled knows, a debit card is the way you can get cash in another country. Not too long ago, just yesterday for old folks, the way you got money exchanged was through cash dollars or, much safer, through traveler’s American Express traveler’s cheques. But American Express abandoned traveler’s checks and went into the credit card business because now you pay for everything you can with a card and if you have to have cash you go to an ATM and are astonished to discover that the ATM know exactly what you have in your account in rupees.
But if your debit card disappears or is cancelled and you need cash you are stuck. I was stuck, not yet panicking, but stuck with no cash to pay my guest house bill. So I got in a rickshaw and asked to be taken to Rajinder Nagar to the bank where yesterday I had gotten cash from an ATM with the faint hope that I left the card in the machine and that someone would have turned it in. But I picked the wrong motorcycle rickshaw. I picked a 4 seater with two opposing seats rather than a three seater. When we hit the first spine jarring pothole I realized my mistake. Apparently the rickshaw had a rigid frame and no springs. I tried lifting my self with my hands so that I would soften the jolts, but with little success. Another thing I learned the hard way was that apparently the three seaters could drive anywhere while the four seaters seemed restricted to certain areas of Delhi. So instead of sailing around Chandni Chowk we went straight through, and at a snails pace, often caught in jams at crossings where everyone crossed in both directions at the same time. Suddenly I realized that the bank didn’t matter, because I would never get to my final dentist’s appointment on time. So I bailed. I was only half way to Rajinder Nagar, paid the full fare, shifted to a three seater that shifted from the crowded streets of Chandni Chowk to the wide avenues of New Delhi.
I was late but this time, with a newly made crown, what painfully yesterday took 40 minutes, took today only five painless minutes. When I offered to pay for the rail ticket that the dentist’s wife had paid for yesterday, he said, sure, if you want to. And then I suggested since I was going to pay for the train ticket with a charge card that we add 10,000 rupees cash to it which I would pay for with the credit card so that I could at least pay for my hotel room. He agreed and I was relieved.
Then, now with cash in hand, I was off to the ATM I used yesterday. When I went into the bank the first person I approached didn’t even look up to me. I mentioned my quixotic hope that someone had turned in my debit card. He asked my name, took out a thick stack of abandoned debit cards, and there, the second one, was my bright red Bank of America debit card. A second feeling of great relief washed over me.
At the Master Guest House I paid my bill, was offered a light dinner of omelette, tea and toast (I hadn’t eaten all day, first because I was running so far behind and then because the dentist told me not to use my new teeth for two hours) and then left for the railway station.
Again I ended up in a four seater and found out that they are all alike. The jolts were just as bad and the driver seemed unwilling to drive on a wide road or to enter the train station, leaving me off across the road of rushing traffic from the station. But as you have noticed if you have looked at my videos, the way for a slow moving 86 year old to cross a very busy road is to do what a cow would do, slowly, steadily, without leaping around, walk directly into the traffic with the assumption that the cars and rickshaws will either stop for you or swerve around you.
Now I am on the train, just leaving Delhi for a ten hour overnight ride to Palanpur. The flat padded berth where I am sitting with others will become a comfortable bed. It is chilly outside, but 2nd class air conditioned means that in the winter it is comfortably heated. I have a warm wool blanket and a pillow. It is 9 p.m. now and at some point we will all decide to sleep and retire to our berths, with two berths up above, that luckily I don’t have to climb a ladder to.
So that was how I made it through the day with again little happening as I had imagined it would.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 