streetlife – Meera Subramanian

I arrived to Delhi to begin five months of research and reporting on Elemental India, with the support of USIEF’s Fulbright–Nehru fellowship. They set me up at the lovely Vandana B&B in Safdarjung Enclave, where I sit on a balcony as the sun goes down, the sky clearing after a day sprinkled with rains that brought the temp down. The birds are raucous, parrots having a cocktail party overhead and the kites catching the last of the day’s thermals. Crows find their stations on bare branches in the tree among a park’s trees across the street, plucking and grooming and stretching into the sunset. A chipmunk war breaks out in the treetops. Delhi is lush from a long summer and heavy monsoon rains. It is a jungle with a dead river flowing through it, inhabited by 22 million people. [Read more…]

It’s late in the evening and I return with my friend in her car, driving through the night streets of Delhi. The congestion of the daytime, or even the evening not so long ago, are gone, and the action consolidates around stoplights. At a red light we stop, and a man wipes a rag over our windshield as my friend waves him away. He steps in front of the car, arms up, as another vender selling colorful whirligigs atop sticks passes behind him, bonks him playfully on the head with one of the whirligigs and continues on. To our left, I see a shadow of a woman from the corner of my eye, holding a baby in her arms, just on the other side of my rolled up window. I’ll always wrestle with these moments of naked asking, of naked refusal. [Read more…]

Dilli, for a start

a nighttime dance