Indian getaway

A version of this article first appeared in The Irish Times in 2010. It was updated May 28, 2017

THE MARGOSA tree lines just about every street in Delhi — and appears to be endlessly useful. “Part of it can be used as a spermicide, other bits are used as toothbrushes,” said our guide Manjeet, before somewhat predictably adding "best not to get the two mixed up".

Manjeet was a first class guide, and was certainly correct about the margosa's ubiquity and multitasking qualities – part of the mahogany family, its foliage provides welcome shade on days when the mercury can nudge 45 degrees.

The Margosa also provides shelter for the langur monkeys who leap from the trees onto the roofs of the makeshift stalls equally ubiquitous in the Indian capital.

We were passing through Chandni Chowk, the teeming market area of Old Delhi, along dusty, sun-baked streets towards the Gurudwara Sisgang Sikh temple. En route we negotiated past vendors selling everything from bling to blessings. Hairdressers and dentists plied their trade on the pavement, religious men sold charms and prayers, and dozens of typists clattered away under the shade of the trees. The langur monkeys looked on with interest.

The typists, a tribute to India’s many layers of officialdom, are a remnant of the Raj. “The British invented bureaucracy, but the Indians perfected it,” according to Manjeet.

Here, in one of the world’s last redoubts of the Remington and the Olivetti, you can get just about all of your paperwork done – and if it’s official business, you may be sure it will be required in triplicate. One huge advantage of the typewriters, aside from the fact that they're cheaper than computers, is that they're impervious to the regular power outages of Delhi — although not the acquisitiveness of monkey muggers. These al fresco clerks don't just have to put up with the dense weight of officialdom; they live in danger of having their paperwork stolen by a passing langur.

Old Delhi

ALTHOUGH not universally popular, langur monkeys are welcomed in some quarters.

In Delhi it has long been the practice to school these primates in the dangerous art of scaring off the more aggressive rhesus monkeys, and indeed affording protection to humans from some seriously wild, indigenous animals – leopards and snakes.

Both are found in the Greater Delhi area — and you thought midges were a bit of a problem.

We pressed on past the theatrical confusion of Old Dehli's market place; a whirlpool of rickshaws, monkeys, sacred cows, beeping SUVs, the odd camel and frantically scurrying human beings.

Our bicycle rickshaws yawed through the airless, furnace heat - that’s right, we weren't walking. For goodness sake, it was touching 40 degrees Celsius.

We reached Gurudwara Sisgang, a Sikh temple. Inside, it wasn’t much cooler; and almost as busy as out on the street. Worshippers had come to say their devotions on the site where the ninth Sikh guru Tegh Bahadur was executed for not accepting Islam.

Shoes must be removed before entering such a holy place. However you do get a pair of orange covered flip flops – which apparently the gods are fine with. 

Sikh Temple Guru Tegh Bahadur

GURUDWARA SISGANG, the holy temple to Guru Tegh Bahadur was an unbelievable mélange of colour, smell, noise, commotion. A band played – brass, keyboards, percussion – while incense, chanting and ululating filled every corner of the temple.

Manjeet told us that one spate of wailing and keening was from a non-stop relay team chanting a dead holy man’s name. His name has been recited continuously since he died about three decades ago. We nodded in thoughtful admiration.

The temple also provides food for the poor of Delhi, churning out chapattis and curry for anyone in need. 

Gurudwara Sisgang is for Sikh devotees; India’s other religions - Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Jains, Zoroastrians and Christians – all have their taboos, temples and ceremonies. Speaking as an infidel who may well be going to hell in every religion (and with a very limited supply of people likely to chant my name once I'm gone) I could only stand back and watch in wonder at the displays of piety, and yes, charity.

Religion pervades Indian society. The most obvious manifestation of this are the sacred cows that wander unconcerned along streets, round traffic roundabouts, through market stalls. There are even sacred cow ambulances, ready to rush to the aid of any bovine involved in a road traffic accident.

It is generally accepted in contemporary anthropological circles that large scale human cooperation — the joint enterprise that brought us from hunter gatherers to our present complex society — required the adoption of lies, untruths, imagined realities. Humans need myths to band together, whether legend, local gods, monotheistic religions, nationalism. In Delhi you can see most of this enacted in front of you in just one street — whether it's sacred cows on the loose, Sikh temples catering for the poor, or acts of devotion that defy all logic.

Incident in the temple

At the Swaminarayan Akshardham Temple, with its thousands of years of traditional Indian and Hindu culture on show a sizeable proportion of tourists were Indians. This was a noticeable phenomenon — loads of Indian tourists. 

Here, amidst the splendours of the temple’s architecture, a gentleman in his forties approached me and shook hands. He was a visitor from the town of Srinigar, a town in the Kashmir Valley.

After explaining the intricacies of the religious ceremony taking place, the gentleman introduced me to his mother, a beautiful woman in her seventies, dressed gracefully in a green sari. She knelt down in front of me and kissed my bare feet, and, according to her son, offered me her respect. Blimey. It was the finest, if also the strangest, encounter I’d ever had with a fellow tourist.

New Delhi — the centre of the Raj

History clings to you like burrs in Delhi – New Delhi as much as in the old city. A hundred years ago the silk-robed maharajas with their bejewelled concubines would have arrived in grand style for the Delhi “Durber” of 1911 – the state occasion to anoint King George V Emperor of India. To the assembled dignitaries the king announced that Calcutta was no longer the capital of India – it was to be Delhi. Soon after, Sir Edwin Lutyens arrived from England with plans to construct a new Delhi. It is Lutyens we have to thank for the broad, tree-lined boulevards of the new city, the swagger of the former imperial buildings.

"God created the maharajas," wrote Kipling, "so that mankind could have the spectacle of jewels and marble palaces.” The palaces still stand, along with minarets, temples, domes, forts, shrines – as well as skyscrapers, flyovers, and of course the Indian railways, one of the biggest utility employers in the world. The trains – yes, every bit as crowded as you imagined. And everywhere the remnants of the old Raj – not least, the imposing India Gate, now the war memorial to the Indian Army’s dead.

The President's Palace, the Rashtrapati Bhawan, sitting atop Raisina Hill, was where the Viceroy entertained the indigenous princely rulers of the vast land mass. Without them Britain would have struggled to govern a land that stretched from the Himalayas in the north to the tip of Tamil Nadu washed by the southerly Indian Ocean.

Delhi is often used merely as a stopover for those journeying to the Taj Mahal and Rajasthan, or north towards the Golden Temple of Amritsar and on to the Himalayas. But no visitor to India should miss out on this grand old city – one of the most complex, effervescent and enthralling in the world. The people are unfailingly friendly, the atmosphere is unthreatening, and the sights are endless. On top of that there's art and architecture both ancient and modern, and then of course there's the whole British thing.

Ah, the Raj. Weird altogether. I dunno, there’s probably a book in it.

The case of the missing police station

The statue of Brigadier General John Nicholson, a pupil at Dungannon Royal School, no longer adorns New Delhi. Nicholson, probably Dungannon’s most famous citizen aside from Bulmer Hobson and Darren Clarke (respective areas of interest: sedition, golf), was killed during the Indian Mutiny in 1841. His statue was moved home to Co. Tyrone  in 1960 - which may have given rise to one of Dungannon's abiding urban legends, concerning the town's former RUC barracks.

Now a PSNI (Police Service of Northern Ireland) station, it is a most curious architectural folly - turrets, battlements and towers - and owes its existence to the Raj, or so the story goes.

At the turn of the 19th century a department of the British civil service was assigned to furnish plans for municipal buildings throughout the Empire. At one point the department was simultaneously working on plans for both a fort in Delhi and a police barracks for Dungannon. Somehow the plans got mixed up, and the Indian fort ended up in Co. Tyrone where it stands to this day – and somewhere in New Delhi stands a building originally destined to be an RUC station.

It would be fair to point out that forms of this urban legend exist elsewhere in Ireland and beyond. Nonetheless I kept my eyes open for a likely Co. Tyrone police station the while I was in the Indian capital. I have to tell you I had no luck. 

Where to stay

The Suryaa

 New Friends Colony, New Delhi, 00-91-112-6835070, www.thesuryaanewdelhi.com In the heart of New Delhi, teeming markets and historical monuments are all in close vicinity of the hotel. Double rooms from €400.

The Cabana Hotel

R23, Greater Kailash 1,New Delhi,00-91-11-40747474 www.hotelcabanadelhi.com Clean rooms, hot water, stiff drinks in this funky place. €75 for double rooms.

Crowne Plaza

Plot No. 1, Community Centre Phase-1, Okhla, New Delhi, 00- 91-11-46462000 www.crowneplaza.hotelsgroup.in/crowne-plaza-new-delhi-okhla.html

Reliably upmarket hotel with terrific views over the Tughlaqabad Fort. Double rooms from €140 per night

Where to eat

Legend of Connaught

K-21, Connaught Place, New Delhi, 2341-8632. Connaught Place is the Piccadilly Circus of New Delhi: over-crowded, sometimes over-priced, touristy, yet full of locals. In a city with more eating places than traffic meters, it’s hard to recommend any above the rest. But The Legend of Connaught is one of the more laid-back eating establishments, with a wide range of Indian dishes.

Zambar

3rd Floor, Ambience Mall, Nelson Mandela Marg, Vasant Kunj, New Delhi, 408-70109

Authentic south Indian cuisine. Inside the glass-walled show kitchens chefs prepare specialities ranging from Hindu Nair delicacies to Syrian Christian dishes (from Kerala). Elevated cooking.

Punjabi by Nature

Basant Lok, Munirka, Delhi, 461-17000 www.punjabibynature.in

One of Delhi’s best regarded Punjabi restaurants, ask for a window near the display kitchen. Try masala quail (bataear masaledar) or fresh tandoori pomfret, accompanied or preceded by the house specialty, a "golguppa" shot: a tiny puri (fried puffed bread) filled with spicy vodka, which you pop into your mouth whole.

Spiced Water Trail

Raghu Karnad, M-24, M-Block Market, 981-16-74764 Specialises in the delicacies of coastal South India. Try an Andhra prawn fry, tossed in a mild curd and coriander masala, or the Pandi curry, the national pork dish of Coorg, from the south west of the country. With a meal for two around the thirty euro mark, this is the place to try some of India’s more unusual dishes

Malabar

33-B, Sarei Julena (opposite Escorts Hospital) 6502 6147. A good selection of Maliyali dishes, including fish curries and fries, puttu and kadala (black gram curry) and special roasted seasoned chicken biryanii. The sambar or vegetable stew here is as good as it gets.

* MAL ROGERS was a guest of the Travel Department. He flew Aer Lingus from Dublin to London Heathrow, and British Airways from Heathrow to New Delhi.

* The Travel Department www.traveldepartment.ie 00-353 1-6371600