The third leg of my journey took me to the nation’s capital, Delhi. We arrived here just before the spring festival of Holi and a friend invited us to her house to experience this riotous explosion of colour, food and drink. My friend and I had been at school and university together, then gone our separate ways and countries to grow up and raise our own.  And in her high-rise apartment, watching the festivities below, we remembered our younger selves tenderly. Our daughters are now older than we were in that time.                      

As I write this piece, Indians have just voted in their big, noisy, democratic general election. Everyone had a political opinion, usually a savvy one, about the state of the nation. A woman on the train said to me that Rahul Gandhi, whose father, grandmother and great grandfather had all been Prime Ministers of India, was a joke. ‘And we don’t need a comedian to run the country,’ she said. ‘What about Modi?’ I asked. ‘Oh, he’s scary,’ she replied, ‘and we don’t need a villain either.’ And there it was – the complexities of deciding between a weak secular-minded leader and a strong right-wing nationalist leader, reduced to the simple binary of a Bollywood movie. There were other characters in the cast too – an actress from the south of India, a man who wore a cap and had ink thrown at him at rallies, the incumbent Prime Minister who had disappointed a nation for too long and the Italian born mother of the latest hopeful from the Gandhi-Nehru dynasty.

‘I am a Muslim,’ the cab driver on my first morning in Delhi said when I asked him who he would vote for. ‘For the first time I’m scared. It doesn’t matter who I vote for. Modi will become Prime Minister.’ On a different cab ride, this time to the 12th century Victory Tower built by a Muslim king, another driver switched off the engine impatiently in a traffic jam and blamed ‘immigrants’ for the state of his city. ‘I grew up here,’ he said, pointing to the ugly flyover to the right of us and the decrepit buildings staggering to the left of us. ‘There were fields here, flowers, trees – peacocks roamed here – then the immigrants came in from other states and ruined my city.’

I looked out at the Islamic buildings we rolled past, Qutub Minar, Jama Masjid, Red Fort, Humayan’s Tomb and wondered what Delhi would look like without its Muslim heritage and the tourist dollars those buildings brought in. ‘It’s good you don’t live here,’ the driver said, twisting around to flash me an unexpected smile. ‘It would break your heart.’        

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Red Fort

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Qutub Minar

 

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Humayun’s Tomb