Delhi in the Morning

The other night I got a frantic call from my editor at the paper.

"We need you to attend a speech tomorrow morning at 11," he said. He gave me the address - somewhere in the heart of Delhi, a good several miles from where I was - and a quick dossier on the person giving the speech, a prominent Nobel-prize winner.

I started to stress about how I was going to get from here to there, which is a negative thought pattern I've been trying to avoid the past few days because, after all, I'm trying to embrace the current unpredictability of my life. So instead I got up the next morning at 6, gamely put on the T-shirt and jeans I'd brought with me, and convinced my hosts to drop me at the Metro station.

The train was thankfully less crowded than it had been the night before. On Friday night I had traveled away from the Rajiv Chowk station, welded against the people to either side, barely able to draw a breath. I don't know how claustrophobics travel on these trains. Perhaps they don't. But at 7 am on Saturday morning the train was thankfully empty. I escaped into the gleaming marble Metro station at Rajiv Chowk, headed up a nearly flight of stairs, and stopped short.

I was at the wrong exit. The exits from Rajiv Chowk dot the massive circle of Connaught Place, in downtown Delhi. Exit at the wrong point and it can take hours to get to the right place. For a few moments I struggled, then I saw my office tower, looming over the nearby monuments. Sometimes it's nice to work in an eyesore.

The autos were barely running, so I began to walk. I guided myself along CP's outer ring, checking my position against the sun and whatever sliver of my building was currently in view. It was abnormally quiet. No cars honked. The streets of Delhi were at their best - broad, beautiful, open - not congested with pedestrians or drivers but serene and rich with leaves. The full heat of the day had not yet started, and as I gamely crossed intersections that in a few hours would be made murderous by traffic, I felt like I was in the presence of greatness. On one side, the white arches of CP. On the other, the wide streets peopled with occasional autos.

There is no way to describe what I felt at that moment, except to say that for the first time since I came here I felt I was in the presence of something that belonged to me. This is how I used to feel when I went running at 7 am in Washington DC. My route took me up past the run-down green rectangle of the Mall, abandoned except for men sleeping on benches and occasional joggers. I went up to the National Archives, circled around the lonely white spire of the Washington Monument, past the road closures that blocked off the White House from passing cars. Unnoticed by the guards I felt like I was alone in the city. I felt like a ghost, moving in a world that had not yet started to exist. Unwitnessed in a place that was normally heavy with witnesses.