In Delhi

Delhi's Qutab Road is choked with hand-carts, ox-carts with teetering loads of bales and boxes, cycle and auto-rickshaws, scooters, motor bikes, and hundreds of people - women in bright saris, men in turbans, men in pressed shirts and trousers or in shalwar qamiz or in T shirts, trousers and jandals. Skinny brown dogs run underfoot, and cattle move slowly, unaffected by the throng and the noise and shrill horns of the auto-rickshaws. Even the pedestrians are at a standstill.

It rains, in large warm drops, and the dust and dung on the road run together into a thin bacterial soup. I jump from one uneven paving stone to another over the slush, trying to pass in front of the patient cows and retreating to the narrow footpath where it is free of piled goods or parked scooters. It becomes dark, and I give up and struggle back the way I came.

We are staying in a quarter called Paharganj, of which the last syllable is pronounced, perhaps appropriately, "gunge." Near our hotel is a mobile public toilet, past which the women walk holding folds of sari over their noses. In the nearby bazaar, neatly uniformed children ride to school in cycle rickshaws pedalled by men standing on their insteps. Auto-rickshaws drivers polish their tiny green and yellow vehicles (powered, like Delhi's buses, by CNG to limit air pollution). Hump-backed cows search for banana peels in the rubbish. Appetising food, which I fear to touch, is cooked on the street. Dhobi-wallahs press clothes with huge irons glowing with charcoal. Money changers, grubby restaurateurs and stallholders call "Hello!" in hope of sales to back-packers in shorts and singlets, clutching Lonely Planet guides.

We soon meet the "helpfulness" for which Delhi is renowned. At the foot of the stairs to the tourist booking office in the North Delhi railway station, a man says "It is closed for painting," and directs us to a private tourist agent nearby. When we return later he tries the same scam. I push past, saying "Yes, and I'm a painter!" He grins.

As we make for Connaught Place, built by the British as the grand commercial hub of New Delhi, a fellow attaches himself to us, saying he wants only to practise his English. We seek the Delhi Tourism & Transport Development Corporation, so he takes us to an office displaying that name; but it is in a side alley, and we smell a rat. Later, when we are approaching the right place, a passer-by suggests I should hide my camera to prevent it being snatched. At an entrance labelled DTTDC the man, his bona fides established, warns “That's a private office" and offers to show us the right place. The entrance really is to the government office; but the other means a commission for our companion.

In the Bank of India, a maze of corridors and stairs, employees drink tea in cubicles under sagging aluminium ceilings while squatting turbaned men sort piles of computer print-outs. It is lunch time, says an official at a desk. He gives us forms for cashing our travellers' cheques, but says we must wait till 2.30 pm. The man in the cash booth, with nothing to do, spins the blades of his broken electric fan with a pen. At 2.45 the foreign currency man appears, takes our form and sends it on a circuit of the office. Within twenty minutes fan-spinner man receives a hand-delivered approval and issues our rupees.

This over-peopled city is the only world most of its fifteen million people will ever know. Pal, who took us across town in his auto-rickshaw the other day, speaks Hindi and English, lives with his 29-year old son and works seven days a week. "I have to eat" he says.

Our auto-rickshaw trip was to a hospital, and I'm now repeating it daily by bike. Ann, who was unwell before we left home, has fallen victim to a virulent form of the ailment that takes its name from Delhi. So each day Dudra, our hotelier's young son, helps me unbolt the store-room door and lift out the long bike. Two bearded Sikhs squatting outside move aside and greet me with palms pressed. I wave to Dudra and go in low gear through the crowded lanes to Panchkuian Marg and the excavations for the new Metro and the helpless traffic policemen. Past St Thomas's Church and Birla Temple, then left, sneaking a free turn against the lights, into Kali Bari Marg, where the jhuggies live under sheets of iron and plastic.

Ashoka Marg, a green tunnel of trees, takes me speeding into its roundabouts to play dodgems with thundering buses, auto-rickshaws and helmeted men on scooters with sari-ed, helmet-less women wedged behind side-saddle, like gorgeous captive butterflies. Around India Gate, a huge hexagonal round-about nearly a kilometre across with a great stone war memorial arch at its centre. The auto-rickshaw drivers lean out as they pass, staring at Apollo's emptily twirling rear pedals. Past the electric crematorium and the immense floodlight towers of Nehru Stadium and a trickle of a river overlooked by crumbling tenements with cows grazing on its banks. On the fly-over ramps sinewy men strain at hand-carts and tricycles loaded with steel and building materials.

And so to the hospital, where if Ann has her air conditioning on the temperature may be an Arctic 24 degrees. Her Sikh doctor reminds me inescapably of Peter Sellers with Sophia Loren. Ann's nurse, Sunni, works fourteen hours a day and is married to an engineer working in Kuwait.

The day we arrived here in Delhi we had a long talk with Avnish Puri about religion, spirituality and the one-ness of it all. India's Mahatma Gandhi, who lived by ideals that many would claim for Christianity, has been compared with Jesus. Avnish received Catholic schooling, has explored other faiths including his native Hinduism, and has studied widely. "Spiritualism starts where religion ends" he said. While tiny squirrels ran in the tree outside, he spoke of the strange and wonderful people who have stayed in the guest-house he runs with his wife Ushi, and who have led them towards enlightenment. Many of their prophecies, he said, have come to pass. The Puri's Master Paying Guest House is a healing centre, with gods of several religions represented in its prayer room.

I asked, how could Hanuman, the Hindu Monkey God, be other than a figment of base oriental superstition? Hanuman, he explained Avnish, carries before him a stick or a sword; and when he moves it in a certain way or intones a certain chant, the energy of his body rises and focuses in his head, making his mind and spirit so free they can jump from tree to tree like a monkey. A true believer, he says, can do the same, "achieving an open heart and feeling the abundance of creation."