In the crowd of Old Delhi
You can't see the sky in Old Delhi, it's somewhere above the shop tents leaning against each other in the narrow streets. You can barely see it among the tangles of electric cables hanging over the heads of passers-by. Spanning from one building to another, on opposite sides of the street, like a wide weave mesh that serves as a playground for monkeys.
The monkeys jump from one building to another on the upper floors, where the street is just a little wider than a fruit cart, or they meet halfway along the cable jumble, and chat with each other, perhaps nibbling on a fruit stolen from some stall on the street, throwing the peelings on passers-by a few meters down.
The passers-by get stuck together in the tunnels under the quagmire of electric cables. Narrow alleys snake through the fabrics and jewellery shops. Sometimes you have the space to walk in one direction only, climbing over stacks of sarees or piles of flowers crossing the street. When you are almost stuck between the huge sacks and boxes that supply the shops, you come to a wider street. People disperse a little bit, but the free space is immediately filled with bikes, tuk tuk, hand-drawn carts full of jute sacks, garments carrying improbably bulky objects over their heads. The streets are a dense anthill enriched by dust, an incessant voice, and deafening horn noise.
The horns are the soundtrack of Old Delhi. Deafening and penetrating, an uninterrupted symphony that begins to fade only when you enter the maze of (almost) pedestrian streets of the shops. Careless of the crowd of pedestrians, scooters and heavy vehicles, tuk tuk and bicycles, they proceed by grazing their elbows and bumping into passers-by. After some time you start desiring a moment of silence, a concept that does not exist between these arteries full of life.
The streets are a repetition of shops all equal to each other, and one wonders how one can choose where to buy. The street of fabrics, the street of clothes, the street of kitchen supplies, the street of jewellers, the street of bijoux shops, the crossroads of spices, the street of fruit and vegetable sellers and the street of dried fruit.
Stacks of cashews and chickpeas in the shape of a pyramid. Walnuts, dates, cloves, dried fig necklaces hanging from the ceiling, cinnamon sticks with oriental aromas. Tea jars in endless rows. Steel basins arranged on large coloured carpets laid out on the sidewalks full of red carrots or okra. Necklaces of flowers threaded with needle and ready to be offered to the gods in the little temples at the crossroads. Trays overflowing with spherical laddu carefully stacked, next to warbling pots of oil in which they fry the sweet jalebi. Large forms of paneer or ghee that give off an acrid smell.
Smells, perfumes, noises. A cloud of smoke and smog envelops the air among the precariously abandoned buildings, the crumbling houses full of air conditioners and the faded shop signs.
