Desi Dixon: City of Djinns

Delhi. The Phoenix City. Considered one of the oldest cities in the world, continuously inhabited since 3500BC. I started reading this book prior to arriving in Delhi and found myself glued to it the weekend we went to Neemrana, about 2 hours south of Delhi, sipping tea on a charpoy in a room overlooking gardens with mughal windows and arches. I could not be persuaded to sit by the pool or leave for lunch.

Though it had been burned by invaders time and time again, millennium after millennium, still the city was rebuilt; each time it rose like a phoenix from the fire. Just as the Hindus believe that a body will be reincarnated over and over again until it becomes perfect, so it seemed Delhi was destined to appear in a new incarnation century after century. The reason for this....was that the djinns loved Delhi so much they could never bear to see it empty or deserted.

I went to Delhi in early November with a girlfriend who lived there for a year when she worked for the Commonwealth Games held there in 2010. It was indulgent to be in someone else's capable hands to navigate us through the morass of humanity and numerous eating and shopping choices. Below are some snaps of our week together during the Eid Al-Adha break.

We arrived at 4am and I could smell the smoke as we were descending, a couple thousand feet before landing. The onset of the colder months means that the poor generate heat with open fires in addition to the cooking fires, contributing to the haze of pollution that hovers constantly over the city. By the end of our 8 days, my lungs felt heavy and tired and by the time I returned to the Arab Gulf, I had escaped "Delhi Belly" but come down with a horrid cold. Getting out to the bucolic countryside and the resort coastlines is the tonic but we did not make time for that. No, I did not see the Taj. I lived in NYC 15 years and never went to the Statue of Liberty and have been to Paris a dozen times without managing to get to the Eiffel Tower (arrived as it closed on the first visit in 2004). I am just not one of those tourists.

Here's our first outing at the Delhi Golf Club, with only 400 members. It's a marvel of a course in that archeological ruins of Mughal structures and tombs were not disturbed when the course was originally laid in the 1930's. We had lunch with a prominent member who was formerly the Mayor of the 2010 Commonwealth Games.

We went to Hauz Khas, the next day where we encountered all-day shopping and eating in the midst of an archeological site.

This is the view of the archeological sites from a rooftop Nepalese cafe where we took a break.

My dear friend, Alla, born in Siberia, educated in Kiev, married to a Palestinian, holding an Australian passport, living and working in the Arab Gulf and posing in Delhi with marigolds in advance of the Festival of Lights.