Delhi Stories: Relax, say the traffic lights, but watch out for...

[Originally Published in Independent on Sunday, The, Feb 27, 2005 by Justin Huggler]

Every Thursday night in Nizamuddin, the Sufi suburb of Delhi where I live, traditional Qawwali singers gather at the tomb of the mystic after whom the suburb is named and perform. The weekly performances gather huge crowds who throng the narrow lanes around the tomb, jostling each other and bumping into the food vendors frying traditional snacks on primuses outside their stores.

The streets become almost impossible to negotiate, with the occasional cycle-rickshaw trying to plunge through the melee and scattering pedestrians in all directions. Hundreds of beggars line the streets, pouncing on any Westerner who ventures through.

Try to hand them a few coins and the beggars will pull at your fingers as they grab the money from you. They're trying to slip off any rings you might be wearing, and pocket them too.
But it's difficult entirely to begrudge them. Many are in a woeful state. Less easy to forgive are the shysters who have set up a profitable little racket making a commission off them. As you enter the warren of lanes, they approach you with books of tickets. The idea is you then hand a ticket to each beggar, which entitles them to free food from the shop that sold you the tickets.
It seems like the perfect system. The ticket-sellers will even tell you it was set up by the Muslim religious authorities here. Except it wasn't. Not according to the chief imam, who says it's a scam. The ticket-sellers take their own cut on every ticket they sell. It's a business for profit, and the beggars are being exploited.

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I love Delhi traffic lights. They have the word "Relax" written across the middle of the red light, where old-fashioned British ones used to have "Stop". It's very Indian, an unexpectedly human touch in an official context. Because for all India's addiction to bureaucracy, it's also a place that revels in those little touches of originality, like the anti-drink-driving signs that say: "Whisky is risky on the road".

But the Delhi traffic lights are also providing some much-needed advice to the city's drivers. Delhi driving is so dangerous that the municipal Blue Line buses have become notorious for the shocking number of pedestrians killed by their drivers every year.

Delhi is not the only city I've been where drivers sneak through a petrol station forecourt to avoid stopping at a red light. But it is the only city I've been where so many do it that they cause a traffic jam inside the petrol station.

Mind you, there are sometimes some odd obstacles to manoeuvre around on Delhi's roads. Driving home late at night, you might suddenly see a huge, dark shape looming through the winter fogs. It's the city authorities, trimming back the grand old trees that line the city's roads, on elephant- back.

Using elephants for this is perfectly sensible. They have the height easily to reach the highest branches and, with their colossal appetites, they devour all the trimmed leaves and branches, doing away with the need for clearing them up.

It makes sense, too, for this to happen late at night. After all, an elephant in the road by day would cause huge traffic jams (actually this often happens). But it would perhaps be wiser if the authorities found some way of lighting the elephant.

But that's not the strangest of Delhi's animal paradoxes. The one I can't work out is why Delhi zoo bothers to exhibit monkeys, when the streets of the city are filled with the self-same monkeys living wild, and making a nuisance of themselves.

But the zoo has several cages of monkeys, round which visitors eagerly congregate. Once, I saw the surreal scene of a crowd staring at a monkey through the bars, while an identical monkey picked its way through the grass behind them unnoticed.