We took the rickshaw tour this morning with our guide, Taruna. Where Druh concentrated on a very small corner of Old Delhi, Taruna gave a better overall picture of the place. She explained that Old Delhi had been first built by Shah Jahan, the same man who built the Taj Mahal for his third wife, Mumtaz Mahal. He first saw Mumtaz as a boy of 13 without a veil in a haram where he should not have been. He declared his love for her to his father only to be dismissed because she was not of noble birth. After two arranged marriages, he still declared his love for her so his father finally agreed thinking that the marriage would be short lived. She died giving birth to her fourteenth child.
Shah Jahan built Shahjahanabad with a wide central street with a canal that ran through the centre of it. In the middle was a large fountain which is gone now along with the central canal. The once beautiful city is now a thriving chaos of shops and markets where commerce proceeds to a degree perhaps unknown in the rest of the world. Taruna showed us a shop that the owner could not afford on his own so on the upper level is the drink shop and seated below in a type of crawl space is the guy who sells food. At the spice market, we stopped to purchase spices not available or at least, not nearly as affordable in Canada, saffron being a major one, vanilla another. Our final stop was to eat at a restaurant that's supposed to be a local jewel. The locals don't want tourists to find out because they don't want groups taking it over. We had the same lassis of the previous day served in disposable clay cups as well as the flat bread and spicy dishes from the day before.
Probably the highlight for all of us was the visit to the Hindu temple. Taruna did an excellent job of explaining what I'm probably not very capable of retelling. Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva are the holy trinity for the Hindu religion. Brahma is the creator, Vishnu the preserver and Shiva the destroyer. Ironically the most revered and worshipped of the gods is Vishnu. Taruna told us that this is because he is the most accepting of the gods and also the one responsible for sending us onto the next life. She also told us that Hinduism is a religion of idolatry. The explanation for this is that it is easier for people to worship a thing than an idea. When we entered the temple, we were ushered off to this de of the worshipping area to where we had to take off our shoes and give them to this dude who kept them safe in a locker. The main worshipping area has a large sculpture of Shiva against the back wall and just in front of him is a platform where two priests squat, one interacting with the congregation and the other reading the newspaper. The supplicants are all gathered around a large box like object on the floor where they are placing their offerings and saying their prayers and generally being excited. Just in front of these people, on the street side of the temple, is a screen where a choir is singing and chanting very loudly and boisterously. Behind the main temple area is another large sculpture of Shiva with a small sculpture of the goddess Yamuna above his head. The Yamuna River runs through Delhi and is one of the holy rivers of India. Shiva is using his head to easy the power of Yamuna's flow so that she doesn't wash away everything in her path. In front of this pictorial the sculpture of a cow with very large ears. The ears are large so that the gods can hear the people's messages as they pray.
On the return trip to our taxi, we passed wedding shops with variously priced saris, shops for bicycle repairs, fresh food vendors, faucet stores, shoe stores, restaurant alley that only allows oneway foot traffic. The list goes on. All similar types of stores located next to each other.
Dinner that night was incredible. We had the chef's tasting menu which included a variety of small dishes, which I can't really name. There were many appetizers with very fancy presentations which included one that was wrapped in a banana leaf held together with a teeny tiny clothes pin. We mistakenly ordered a cocktail thinking that it would take a while to prepare our meal however we weren't left alone for a minute.
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