The view from Tooti Chowk

It’s amazing how much light streams in through the window of my new room – my new home, if I could call it that – here at this run-down, somehow functioning, hotel in Paharganj. I stayed in this very room when I was in Delhi a month ago, and its window really did make an impression: I can look through one of the many panes down on Tooti Chowk, where loaded carts, loaded people, cows, dogs, and cycle-rickshaws form a constant hustle and bustle. From where I stand on the second floor up, it almost looks like no one leaves the little street, and that they just shift places constantly: a perfectly conserved ecosystem of people and animals going about their lives. The other selling point of this window is that I can not only watch everyone and everything two stories below, but that I can watch people watching them. Chowk-spying seems to be the favorite pastime of the residents of Tooti’s second stories: we lean our bodies into the railings, or press our noses against the windows, and gaze at the organized chaos below. Housewives come out on their balconies to collect the laundry and stay there mesmerized by the moving picture on the street, still cradling bundles of clothes in their arms, until the spell is broken and they return inside.

My favorite sight is this. Forgive me if I’ve mentioned it before. From my perch on the second floor, I can see straight down not only to the street below, but directly into the courtyard of (what appears to be) a school for Muslim boys. These boys of all ages, in their white skullcaps and white cotton salwar kameez, are the greatest reality T.V. show I could have imagined. In the morning they line up to wash their faces at a line of basins. Then they assemble into an elaborate formation in which they make large, fresh chapatis: one boy mixes the dough, another two knead it, another forms it into little balls, another rolls them out, one has the special job of tossing the rolled dough in between his palms, another two or three take care of the stove, and another organizes the cooked bread into tall, neat piles on sheets of newsprint. Throughout the day they pray there, study there, eat there, and, of course, play there. It’s utterly fascinating. “I wonder what the boys are doing right now,” I think when I come back from shopping on the street; “What are they doing this morning?” I muse when I wake up. (Does this make me some sort of stalker, "Rear Window"-style? Oh dear.)

So I do love this room, and all of the sights to which it has already opened my eyes. Delhi, especially in the sunshine of that sweet time in between winter and the hot season (you can’t really call it spring), is starting to welcome me. Or perhaps I’m crazy for feeling that – but somewhere in myself, I still insist on believing that this city has always spoken to me, ever since that first evening walk in the Lodi Gardens nine years ago and that first morning being pulled down Chandni Chowk in a cycle-rickshaw. I’m keen to listen to her murmurs again.

Now it’s off to drive in the nuts and bolts for my job, which starts on Monday, and to run a million errands before the sun sets and it’s time to come back to this already-beloved little room of mine.