The spice market

You would think you would smell it coming. Oh no! Not in India with its many competing smells with which I will not regale you at the moment. The day is Christmas Day and it is not like any other Christmas I have spent. After o lovely breakfast high atop the main square of Pahar Ganj at the Mt Everest restaurant, we wander through the parade of frenzied followers of the Baba Somebody. First there is the ever present uniformed brass band followed by glaze eyed dancers who seem to have identified a drum beat different than the band they follow. The disciples follow carrying the portable shrine, which is covered with marigolds and showers of rose petals collected along the way. The women dressed colourfully as always bring up the rear with impatient but respectful rickshaws close on their tail. Then we go to the crazy neighbourhoods of old Delhi.

It turns out this is a big day for a lot of Baba Somebodies. On the Chandni Chowk Road there are the sounds of chant and prayer screamed into a sound system worthy of Madison Square Garden. When finally we come across the high holy Baba, there is a tiny crowd of skinny young men in filthy clothes staring uninterestedly at the three screamers taking turns yelling their part of the chant in a round robin and the seated Baba himself looking like my Uncle Harry, bored and not nearly as enlightened looking as the fancy poster below him in which his head is freshly shaved and sparkling with oil and he looks like he is about to be beatified.

Just as the shouting is becoming a more distant thrum in the background we are confronted with a three way fork in the road and absolutely no indication which way to go to find the spice market. It turns out that my traveling companion Rossi, does NOT have an app for that. We take a chance and at the third dogdy looking corridor—no more than two feet wide and darkening to blackness, we decide to dive in since telltale street stalls with nuts and some spices have started to appear. Good move!!! The claustrophobia of the spice dust laden atmosphere is more than a reward and gives a feeling that only the most brazen of tourists have the nerve to enter here.