Letter from New Delhi ( India) 1980

 

 

 

The courtyard with a water pump and area to sleep  and rest in a hot day 

 

I arrived in New Delhi on 22nd December 1980 and my plan was to stay in India for a year before returning home to England. I was here in 1975 for a short stay and loved every minute of my time then. However, it did not take me long to confess to myself that a year seemed  like a life time away when all my friends and immediate family were back in England. I was missing England already in my first week of my arrival in India!!!

 I arrived few days before Christmas and though whole of India had a day off on 25th December, in a non Christian home, like the one I was staying in, nothing really happened, no turkey, no Xmas tree and no festive trimmings which I was so used to in England. The Christmas day came and went quietly and then came the New Year day, again the whole of India had a day off from work but nothing really happened to celebrate the coming of Western new year!! Another ordinary day off work in Delhi for most of the population and me too; getting use to the Indian way of life was not going to be as easy as I thought it would be !!

New Delhi is the capital of India and it is divided into the 'old Delhi' where most of the Muslim live and New Delhi, created by the British and contains many embassies and government buildings, plus my uncles and aunties home in very run down part of the city.  After only few weeks in Delhi, the city life started to get me down, the noisy crowded buses, dusty roads, the music blaring from every where. The  family I was staying with and whole of the neighbourhood, all seem to be screaming and shouting at each other , that was the only way I  found they communicated with each other. My sleeping bed had to be shared in a room full of 4 other members of the extended family. Morning life began at 4 am with hundreds of birds singing, water being pumped for a bucket wash, throats cleared by all men around the neighbourhood, the smell of fire wood burning, the smell of breakfast, made it all very difficult for me to go back to sleep after four in the morning.

 I needed a change of environment, I thought it was time for me to move on to a place where there was peace and tranquillity and the only place I could think of was the idyllic village of Bajawara, I was there in 1975 with my mother and love it.......