Nepal

As my first venture out of India to explore another South Asian country, Nepal seemed an easy choice. Hence, me and Meg packed our backpacks and headed to Pokhara to chill by the beautiful Phewa lake, to stalk on wildlife in Chitwan national park and check out the hustle and bustle of Kathmandu. Here's the trip in pictures.

Boaters on the Phewa lake in Pokhara.

The Phewa lake

A kid upto some shenanigans.

One night in Pokhara we stumbled upon a group of British gurkha troops who had come to Pokhara for a meeting. Any further details they refused to disclose, but turned out to be a right laugh. The evening turned into an all nighter. The British-run elite military unit known as the Gurkhas are one of Nepal's best known exports and it's still many a young Nepali man's dream to become part of this reputable force.

Sunset at the Phewa lake.

A vehicle straight out of Mad Max.

Nepali Thali - according to my Bengali companion, very closely resemblant of Bengali food in flavour and level of spice.  Nepal generally seemed to have fairly close links to Bengal in terms of cultural influences.

Laundry.

Taking a ride on one of the local minibuses, the man in the front is the cashier whose job is also to announce the stop and the destination in the same speed and volume of auctioneers. 

Still 50 years to go before the grand opening!

The landscapes between Kathmandu and Pokhara reminded me slightly of Assam with their green hills and abundant rice fields. 

Most of the time in Pokhara the Annapurna mountain range  was obscured by either clouds or the afternoon haze of smog. Typically, the day we were leaving the weather was clear enough to enjoy the range in its full glory.

A lady harvesting rice, near the Kathmandu - Pokhara highway.

The Boudhanath stupa is one of the most important pilgrimage sites of Tibetan buddhism. The dome itself is claimed to contain some remains of the Buddha but nobody knows for sure as it has been sealed for aeons.

Bindis on sale at Pashupatinath, the most important pilgrimage site of Hinduism in Nepal.

Pre-assembled sets of offerings on sale - spirituality made convenient.

Kumkum stall at Pashupatinath, surrounded by the usual Hindu gods and a new unrecognized one(?)

Outraged by the rip-off prices at the roadside eatery our busdriver chose, we walked further down the road and found this young man running a fine establishment with his mother. He served us an exotic local delicacy called Maggi. 

Elephant rider takes five before loading another group of tourists...

...such as these.

The Chitwan national park is one of the most famous national parks in Asia and one of the best sites to spot the endangered one-horned rhino. This guy seemed unfazed by being surrounded by elephants loaded with Korean tourists incessantly documenting its movements with an iPad.

Sun sets over Chitwan while local boys try to catch some fish.

As our budget was getting tighter towards the end of the trip , we had to locate the cheapest dinner in town. At the very end of the Chitwan downtown main strip, this guy gladly made us some delicious momos from scratch. 

The bundle of chilis, garlic and lime can usually be found at the doorways of South Asian houses  to ward off evil spirits.

This door on one of the narrow streets of old Kathmandu will not only ward of evil spirits but probably most other guests as well.

Rickshawallahs seem to be the same everywhere you go. You stand on one corner and they holler at you every five minutes, just in case you change your mind. "Rickshaw?" "No thanks"..."how about now?"..."Now? No?"..."What about now?"

A kid waiting for his Jhalmuri. 

Authentic Experiences

My neighbourhood has a significant population of western people. There are a lot of big cars with blue "CD" and "UN" plates parked in front of the swankiest looking houses in the area. Whenever I go to my market for daily groceries, I'm bound to see at least one white face over there, either walking around with a determined swagger of perfect ethnic adaptation or looking lost and awkward like a kid separated from his parents in an amusement park.

Every now and then I bump into them in one of the stores on the main strip. It usually ends up being a very awkward encounter. It happens more often than not around here when two white people meet in a setting other than an expat party. They eye each other askance and try to ignore the other gora in the room as if they were the only white person in Delhi. The other white person scans the shelves and tries to chat the errand boys in broken Hindi, because he's the one who's blending in, whoever this other white impostor is, must be a spoiled "UN" or "Embassy" type who had to come down to the cornershop only because the organic home delivery was not available today. The other one is the one must be the one who's living the "authentic Indian" lifestyle. Meanwhile, the Indian shopkeeper watches the show with puzzlement. He might sincerely expect a friendly exchange between the westerners of "where are you from" and "what are you doing in India", but no, they quickly pick up their groceries, pay, and leave the shop in hurried manner, leaving the small change on the counter.

There is strange psychology about this behaviour, which seems to be a mix of a subtly colonial attitude mixed with romanticed expectations of the "ethnic" and "authentic" experieces that they are going to have with the "locals" in the foreign country. Then they can go back and their ordeal in harsh conditions can be added to their CV of "unique experiences" that the person has had. The satirical "Stuff Expat Aid Workers Like" - blog quite fantastically summarizes this phenomenon (the comments are worth reading too). The anecdote is set in Central America, but could might as well be in India. A white person bumps into another in a small local café:

So it’s no wonder that she’ll look away or stare straight through that American dude that shows up at the little market at the same time. ”Oh, your husband?” the corn lady might say. “No no,” the EAW will struggle to explain aloud, “I don’t know him. I’ve never seen him. I don’t know what he might be doing here….” We have nothing to do with one another, nothing at all in common…she will continue in her head… I’m a long-timer. I’ve got field cred. He’s probably a short-term volunteer or a tourist or a consultant, here for a short trip. He probably knows none of your customs. I bet you don’t wave at him when he goes by. He’s likely one of those typical Expat Aid Workers types, tromping around, clueless, feeling uncomfortable and superior to the locals. I’d bet he doesn’t even speak the language or really know any local people except for his driver. I’m the one who’s locally integrated. I’m the one who belongs here, not him!

Humph. These other foreigners, trespassing on the EAW’s own individual and patented experience of adventure and local living. Who do they think they are? Why do the locals assume all white people know each other, or might want to greet one another with smiles and handshakes, treat each other to a portion of roasted corn and explain where they are from and what they are doing there at the roadside market? Really. These locals don’t understand EAWs at all.

Some of this hard-wired antisocial behaviour might be explained by the fact that the aid-worker/UN/NGO racket is a very competitive game of whoever speaks the most languages, feels more comfortable in various settings and has established their field cred by living in "harsh" conditions, i.e. the way local people in that country normally live in.


I was in an afterparty invited by my friends who I had met in the bar the same night and everybody was enjoying themselves with some drinks on a rooftop on a hot Delhi night. The bubbling discussion diverted into work and somebody casually asked me what I was doing. When I told them that I work in the embassy it was as if the you could've heard the sound of the needle skipping on a record, they looked at me with mixed faces of contempt and ridicule, "oh so you're one of those people, Embassy heads, huh?". They never bothered to explain what they meant by this, but instead continued on lecturing how this little NGO where they were doing a 3-month unpaid internship, was the most important humanitarian endeavour in the history of development work. A spoiled "Embassy head" would never understand such things, though.


Another explanation why western people can be very awkward with their kind abroad has to do with the whole industry of "authentic experiences", a form of tourism really, which is a result of a kind of a post-consumerist culture, where many young western find themselves in these days. Buying things from a store has lost its novelty value and is more like a necessity, even going to a package holiday with the family is comparable to eating at McDonald's, it's almost embarrassing in it's mundanity - therefore one must do something that nobody else has done, something unique, like going to the most obscure place they can find in the map, hell-bent on understanding the local culture, living with the people, to have a true ethnic experience! So they quit their job and take a gap year:

But much to their consternation, after smoking hash with the sadhus while riding a rabid camel in Rajasthan and hangliding with the buddhist monks in Bhutan while doing cocaine or getting accidentally married to the village chief's daughter in Laos drunk on the local spirits or whatever other compromising situation they get themselves in, they realize that no matter how hard they've tried, someone else has been there already, or worse yet, is ruining their authentic ethnic experience by being there right now. There's a loud group of Israelis on post-military service holiday, a German couple of rat-race dropouts in their early forties and a bunch of 21-year old French girls who just finished their NGO-internship and are now backpacking before going home and they are all waiting for their turn for the unique ethnic experience.

Constant Rave

It's ubiquitous; the steady thump of the 4/4 bassdrum the autotuned vocalization of a current or a recycled hit song and the following frantic synthesizer loop penetrate the soundscape everywhere. Delhi's public space seems to have fallen victim by a militant spoon-feeding marketing campaign conspiracy of house music producers, where no public space is left without a sound system blasting top 40 house remixes, making your daily activities into a constant rave party, whether you want it or not. Every single public space is filled with loud, abrasive, commercial electronic music.

The other day I went to a mall to catch a new Hindi-film. As I was being frisked by the jaded security guard at the door, one couldn't help feeling as if I was on the queue to a night club. Passing throught the marbled hallways of retail, I had to traipse through the food court, where obese punjabi kids were franticly stuffing their faces with various forms of deep fried matter to the beat of the inhouse DJ. Elbows sharpened I ventured on to the movie hall, hoping to enter a different aural space, only to realize that the soundsystem of the mall seemed to be connected to every single room in the complex, making the party inescapable. Come intermission (it is common in Indian movie halls to have a mid-film break), Mr DJ was immediately back at the decks. Feeling slightly nauseous, I had to seek comfort in the soothing atmosphere of the washroom, only to find myself in boogie wonderland. The volume of the music did not drop a single bar.

A lone toilet attendant, a small man in his late 50s maybe, was standing at the corner waiting to hand out paper tissues to people. The look on his face was resemblant of a thousand yard stare, "a limp, unfocused gaze of a battle-weary soldier" who has either seen too many piles of dead bodies or been subjected to severe torture. The man's aura was oozing with nihilistic detachment, barely concealed with a token smile.
He had been exposed to this rave party too long to care anymore.

It gets worse in bars. South Delhi sees new bars emerging these days quicker than ever, yet the concept seems to always remain the same. Every bar has to be a "lounge bar" where the amount of staff is usually manifold compared to the clientele, but one still has to make a real effort to get any service. An army of jaded staff is leaning against the counter while the house music party keeps blaring in the back. Any kind of attempt of conversation with your company is systematically terminated by the sheer volume of the music and the spontanious flow of conversation is often reduced to loud bursts of monosyllabic sentences which deliver the maximum amount of information. This needs to be done, because the music is so loud that every sentence must be carefully thought through to avoid wastage of vocal chords.

After two and a half years in Delhi, I have still yet to find a watering hole where one can have a quiet drink alone or a relaxed conversation with a friend or a partner after work over a beer. This seems to be too much to ask in the city of constant rave. Quiet pubs and bars where most of the noise is created by the bubbling conversations of customers is an integral part of the social fabric of western culture. The cliched euphenism "extension of living room" summarizes the way bars and pubs are seen in many western countries. They are welcome to people in suits, coctail dresses, working overalls as well as sweatpants and crocs. They are places where you can have a raging party or where you can sit quietly and wallow in your sorrow. Coming from Finland, where being sad and quiet is your general state of being, it is especially of vital importance to have spaces where one can sit in silence and stare at the bottom of your pint, comfortably basking in your wistful melancholia.

Having tried to market the concept of opening a cozy no-frills pub with only quiet music or no background music somewhere in south Delhi has only resulted in somewhat tepid interest and shrugs among Delhiites. One explanation that has been offered to me is that indians generally are uncomfortable with silence, hence in case of premature death of conversation in company, the silent spaces can be quickly filled by Mr.DJ. Also, the concept of going to a bar for a casual drink whenever generally seems to be still a bit of an alien concept, rather it is always more of a remarkable social event for which one needs to dress up and make an extra effort, perhaps the loud techno and house music is seen as a part of the desired atmosphere. Be it as it may, there is certainly a market in Delhi for a cosy corner with an extensive bar menu, comfy chairs and no music but the ripples of conversations in the background.

Snapshots pt.4

Pigeons at Humayun's tomb.

One man's livelihood.

A barber takes five, while son is keeping an eye on the shop.

Indian IKEA

Fresh tandoori rotis at the Nizamuddin village.

A man takes a nap with his goats as the wife supervises.

"So this is where your chicken tikka comes from, my friend."

Graffiti on the way to my house. These buildings were marauded soon after. The plot is waiting for new construction to emerge, as is typical in Delhi, where land is much sought after.

A goat herder was tending his flock near Tughlaqabad fort, the big goat was called Basanti.

The cornershop in my area sells anything from sim card recharge to fresh samosas.

The other night on our way to a party Meg parked her car in front of a house next to the venue, the owner of the house punctured all tires as soon as we turned our backs. We tried driving, but soon had to leave the car to a random spot and take an auto back home. The next morning we realized we had parked right in front of a tire shop. 

Vernacular

As I have to take the rickshaw every morning to go to work, I have slowly, mostly by immersion, begun to become conversant in a daily variety of Hindi, which, in fact is no single language, but a bundle of Hindi, English, Urdu, Punjabi and the language of whatever state you are from all combined into a sort of common linguistic masala. Every time I encounter a word I need to use but don't know I immediately look up the Hindi equivalent, usually with the result of being told by my Indian companion that nobody would understand me if I actually used that word on the street.

The other day I wanted to calm down a short-tempered rickshaw driver but did not know the word for "impatient", the dictionary offered the word adhīra, which I figured sounded simple enough. My attempt at using the word only resulted in a blank stare by my driver. Before using Hindi words, I usually test them on Meg just to be sure they are words that people actually use daily, this proved to be another word that nobody uses, unless you're trying to be Premchand or Tagore. It might have been a better idea to just use "impatient" in between a Hindi sentence.

A similar anecdote was told by a journalist who had returned to Delhi after many years and spoke Hindi the way it was taught to him at school. While trying to buy a box of matches with his cigarettes, he casually tried to address the cigarette vendor with an appropriately courteous manner: Mujhe ek diyasalai dijiye. 
After nothing but blank stares, he finally blurted "ek matches do yaar!" with instant desired results.

There is a linguistic polar shift taking place in India where English is forced to make way for Hindi in new domains. One manifestation of it is the language used in media. In the December 2012 issue of Caravan Magazine, Krishn Kaushik in his long reportage paints a picture of the current state of the Indian English-language news media. The general observation of the article is that TV-news in English is in fact a losing game and a marginal segment amongst a largely Hindi- and local language dominated viewing public:


According to TAM (Television Audience Measurement), the healthiest segments of Indian television are Hindi and regional general entertainment, which each capture at least 35 percent of overall television viewership.

...contrary to popular perception, English-language news is a fringe genre of Indian broadcasting. TAM’s data indicate that, for the first six months of this year, English-language news was watched by only 0.21 percent of the television audience in TAM markets. That amounts to one viewer for every 500 television-watching people, watching English-language news for less than five minutes per day.

Television news in Hindi or Hinglish and regional languages reached a public that ranges from the street sweeper and rickshaw driver all the way to company CEO's and the members of parliament. English, on the other hand, only reaches the educated few. It is often said that the vast majority of the Indian public are in fact not big readers and therefore TV will reach a much wider audience than any book. Vast majority of the people who watch TV on a daily basis are most comfortable with Hindi or Hinglish. Meanwhile, English remains a stalwart of the printed word, in books as well as in newspapers.

There is no intimacy attributed to English as a language, it remains a language of instruction in elite schools and the lingo of white collar jobs. It is mostly seen as a tool of a sort - an emblem of professional aspiration. Rural and small-town India craves to learn English to get ahead in life, but seems to only value it due to its material benefits and certain lexical borrowings. For some, it has become a stepping stone away from caste-bound roots: BBC Radio 4 reported on a group of former untouchables, who had started worshiping the English language as their liberator from caste-based socio-economic boundaries. It had even inspired them to create new gods into Indian mythology: Their saviour from caste oppression is personified as a goddess, modelled on the Statue of Liberty, in a sari and mounted on a computer.

Meanwhile, Hindi, in various colloquial forms, remains a language of the common man that everybody speaks and understands, but nobody really studies. Learning Hindi at school stops at 8th grade for most people and anything more complex than that will be patched up with English vocabulary. For many, it remains a "kitchen" language, but also a de facto language used most in everyday communication. Beyond a certain point, Hindi as a language becomes too complex for most Indians and too cut off from today with it's sanskritized artificial vocabulary. The national language of India thus seems to be a sort of a bundle of different languages in a basic Hindi frame, not least with the aid of Bollywood and advertising and made nation-wide after the arrival of satellite television.

There is a young generation in Delhi, as well as other big cities in India, that seems to exist in a sort of a linguistic limbo, where a colloquial variety of Hindi heavily laden with English vocabulary as well as expressions of the speaker's local language has become the mother tongue. Meanwhile 100% "pure" forms of either have remained in very confined domains and generally deemed as pretentious, artificial or just too difficult. Many young people reminisce on their Hindi classes at school with horror.

Hindi as a literary language is commonly deemed to be a 20th century political construct and the mother tongue of none. As coexistance of various languages had been the norm for most Indians and Pakistanis, linguistic purism and zealous efforts to eradicate any foreign influences from language on both sides after the partition resulted in a comical situation where nobody actually understood their own national language. Robert D.King in his book on Nehru's language politics illustrates this situation with an anecdote:

Hindi-speaking Indians frequently say that they cannot understand the Urdu of Radio Pakistan, Urdu-speaking Pakistanis say the same of the Hindi heard on All-India Radio. Nehru himself complained that he could not understand the increasingly Sanskritized Hindi language promulgated by All-India Radio. He frequently commented on this in his letters, and on at least one occasion he rose in the Lok Sabha to complain that he could not understand Hindi broadcasts of his own speeches.

Decades later, the situation remains more or less the same. Rashmi Sadana in her article "Managing Hindi", visits the Deparment of Official Language in Delhi and encounters a government office that time seems to have forgotten. Although Hindi in many states is the de facto language of administration, which since Nehru has been according to national language policy, the national capital region encounters a different reality:

In the neighbouring states of Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Bihar, Uttarakhand, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and Haryana, the state governments used Hindi “about 100 percent of the time”, and the version they spoke was a “chaste” Hindi, a Hindi laden with Sanskrit vocabulary. But in Delhi this vocabulary became “burdensome”. “When it comes to the capital, Hindi has a very subordinate role to play. The language in the offices and ministries is English.” No one speaks of “difficult” English, but people speak of “difficult” Hindi. “While there is an impetus to learn English, a craze in semi-urban and rural areas, there is a sense that you don’t need Hindi to do well in life.

Another BBC article argues that Hinglish is a pure construct of Indian linguistic innovation, which has become the everyday lingo of a new younger elite as well. The problem, according to the writer, is that for many it has become the mother tongue which lacks variation in different social settings:

The trouble with dysfunctional Hinglish is that it can cause havoc when clear and precise communication is required, whether on a simple taxi ride or in more serious situations like hospitals and law-courts. Young Indians still need better quality, standardised English teaching if they want to access the global knowledge economy and stay ahead of eager new English-speakers in China or Argentina.

For many Indians, especially middle-class, being multilingual is a norm and there is very little differentiation between languages in spoken interaction. As most Indians speak at least two to three languages, jumping between languages is but normal and you might hear a person using for example English, Hindi an Bengali in a single sentence, without it sounding awkward or strange at all. Rather, saying a complete sentence in a single language seems to be actually more rare.

Linguistic purism has its political implications as well. By speaking a Sanskrit-heavy form of "proper" Hindi, one risks of being labelled as a zealot Hindu nationalist and speaking only in English sans Hindi might be seen as snobbery and would only make you able to communicate with a limited stratum of society.

Therefore, the linguistic scene of middle class India seems to be that sticking to one language only is almost as if to make a statement of a kind. As Mrinal Pande in her book "The Other Country: Dispatches from the Mofussil" aptly summarises:

Actually, India's fabled middle class cuts through the rural and urban divides and converses in multiple Indian languages increasingly laced with English words.

A Hinglish McDonald's flyer: The ad roughly reads: "Our treat, arrived at McDonald's for you to enjoy."

Jadu Tona - Black Magic

Last week, as the festivities were at full swing on Diwali night and Nizamuddin East colony had for one night turned into a full war zone, as it is customary this time of the year. The seemingly incessant ratatat made sure no-one was sleeping in the colony and made the local street dogs run around for cover in panic, ears tightly against their heads.

Eventually the youngsters had shot their pocket money to the sky in bright colors and peace was restored. The colony was falling asleep again. As I peeked outside to inspect the mess of shredded paper and gunpowder, something else had appeared  in front of my house. In the crossroads next to the house, someone had poured what appeared to be mustard oil in a circular shape and had carefully placed a packet of Kurkure chips, a diya-light and a packet of biscuits.

My immediate secular western rationalist brain figured that someone had littered outside my house, but I was quickly corrected by my girlfriend Meg that there are dark forces at play here and one should tread carefully, this was a display of jadu tona, i.e. black magic, a spell to wish ill or curse someone else either out of envy or anger. The spell is apparently to be placed in a spot where four roads cross and whoever unfortunate soul happens to walk or drive over it, will be infected with a horrible curse with a long list of various ill effects.
You might be driving across an intersection completely unaware and the next thing you know, your boss texts you that you're fired, your wife has a miscarriage and you drive off a bridge.

Intrigued as I was, I fetched my camera to go and document this display of sorcery. Photographing was still acceptable but walking across the spell could have had catastrophic effects to my life in the future. Needless to say, it was better to be safe than sorry.

The spell is supposed to be placed in a spot where 4 roads meet.

The circle of mustard oil has a crushed diya-light, a packet of Kurkure crisps and a packet of biscuits placed inside it.

The next day at work I was recounting my fascinating discovery to my Indian colleague. Having heard my description of the spell, her face immediately turned several shades paler and she froze and almost dropped the folder she was carrying: "You...didn't step over it, did you?"

Another colleague recalled that her husband had been cursed by someone, as a result of which he was in a total of 17 bike accidents in a span of roughly two years, always a close call. After a while, his mother turned to a holy man, who managed to sort it out. It's been a safe ride ever since. Similar experiences seem to be very common to most Indians and very few seem to have even the slightest hue of sarcasm in their tone when describing their supernatural experiences with practitioners of magic. Dealing with forces of the spirit world here is no laughing matter or something to make fun of. Belief in the existence of some kind of a supernatural realm is quite common in the world view of Indians and there is no need to risk it, so might as well play it safe and not conjure any evil spirits.

Of course, for a reasonable fee, an experienced spiritual consultant, such as Baba Nur-e-Ilahi can remove all spells cast on you in no time. Also, Baba Sidh Guru Ji is your man in case of any spiritual trouble:

The Strange Smashed Car Lady

Delhi, as one may guess, is a city filled with ghosts and spirits and all manner of spooky things. The setting is ripe for ghost stories, as the city consists of layers and layers of history built and accumulated on top of each other. Repeated tales of haunted houses, restless Sufi Saints and women in white saris in the middle of the Ridge forest abound and many are familiar of the headless British horseman of Old Delhi and other stories of epic apparitions. This spooky incident, however, happened quite recently. 

One evening around 10pm, my girlfriend Meg was getting fuel at the Safdarjung service station near Safdarjung's tomb, a station I pass every day on my way to work. As she was ready to head out back to the road, her headlights hit the face of the car coming in. Her eyes met with those of a woman in her mid 50's, hair entangled all over, pitch black kajal all over her face and a ghoulishly penetrating gaze which would discourage anyone to try and maintain eye contact with her. The car looked like it was about to collapse any second; both ends completely crushed, dents and scratches everywhere, headlights smashed as well as all windows save for the wind screen. It was as if she had just miraculously survived an otherwise deadly car crash and with her remaining strength she was trying to make it to the service station.

The gas station attendants seemed unafazed by the sight. Instead, one routinely wiped her windscreen, the only window left in the car, while another filled up her tank. After tanking up, the car started perfectly with one try and headed off to the night. Freaked out by the driver's gaze and the general eerieness of the incident, Meg had left immediately after snapping a photo with her phone camera.

A few days later, me and Meg returned to the station and thought we might catch one or two of

the attendants who were serving this strange car crash victim so nonchalantly and ask a few questions. None of the boys were on shift that afternoon, but the other attendants teamed around us after hearing what we were talking about. Intrigued and visibly bemused by our interviewing, all of them knew exactly who were talking about. It appeared that this was no car crash survivor, rather a regular patron of the station for years. Nobody knows who she is, where she comes from or what happened to her and her car. All they knew was that twice a week, always precisely at the same time, this lady with a completely maimed automobile with plates registered for Chandigarh comes to Safdarjung station and always buys gasoline worth exactly 500 rupees and gets the windscreen cleaned. She is very curt and unpredictable in her demeanor and always insists to be served by the same attendants, no one else is allowed. 

From inside, the car is equally trashed, filled with garbage and in the backseat she is always carrying two empty 20 liter bottles of mineral water, always the same ones as if they've never been touched. It remains unclear where the car is coming from and where it's going but due to it's consistently unaltered state, it seems the car does not stop at all.

The car disappears as quickly as it appears and none of the attendants knew where she was from. All they could tell us that she would always come from the direction of the big temple next to Safdarjung's tomb around the corner. Lately, it seems, however, she had stopped coming. The attendants said they were already missing her and wondering what had happened to her. ”After all, we want to take care of our customer relations”, one of the older employees added without a hint of sarcasm in his tone.

The mysterious smashed car, as captured by Meg