Everything in Delhi is monumental — the broad roads, big cars, large forts, and the people. With the air now clean and a blue sky, its greenery and largeness is best taken in when you ‘shrink’ yourself.
The lockdown is sure to lift in parts, and before we’re overwhelmed with the traffic and pollution, I would rise to the mullah’s call to prayer at dawn, take my very neglected bicycle out, and ride around a part of the city I most familiar with and have missed.
Bicycle rides in Delhi are either out of necessity or for training for a sporting event. It may be just a short duration when we can use them to cycle around the city in the way that RV Smith, our Delhi chronicler of people, spaces, and gossip, did, in the 1950s and 1960s.
My first stop early in the morning would be Vasant Kunj, a seven-km ride from where I live, in the Hauz Khas area. It would also be a good time to ride down the Ring Road (hopefully) unharried by otherwise daunting traffic. Taking a turn onto Nelson Mandela Road that in pre-Coronavirus times held the now-abandoned malls, I will rise and fall with the road.
Vasant Kunj is the one of the spaces in Delhi where birds and butterflies came even when pollution levels were high. It’s also where I spent many years waking up to greenery, and where no doubt the trees have begun to breathe deeply again, with leaves washed with the intermittent rain. Tea at an old friend’s, and then hopefully a friend from Gurugram will join me to ride to a place I have shamefully never been: Jamali Kamali, a park with a monument that has the promise of djinns! Well, perhaps not in the morning, but it’s a nice place to order ‘in’ a masala dosa breakfast from Sagar Ratna.
At about 10.30 am, when the sun is up and the world comes to life, we would ride to Dastkar. The craftspeople may not be in yet, but the organisation does have a few shops permanently open. A chai there, and then the ride back home, past the Qutub Minar in the distance.
