Around Delhi

I take a bumpy cycle rickshaw ride to Old Delhi, but the rider goes the wrong way and I pay him off and continue on foot. A hotel faces a litter-strewn bridge embankment across a hopelessly congested lane. "Hotel Bridge View," says its sign. On the bridge a teenager in a pressed white shirt on his way to school practises English: "What country you from? You like India?" And, as crowds throng on the railway platforms below and rubbish cascades from rooftops, "India is beautiful."

In old Delhi, above the used tyres and engines and wheels of the automotive market, there rises, on a stepped plinth like a giant red and white wedding cake, the mosque Jama Masjid. Says Lonely Planet: "The great mosque of Old Delhi (admission free) is the largest in India." Anil, fifty-ish with henna-ed hair and a worn but informative patter, takes me in hand and extracts a Rs100 entry fee before I remember the Lonely Planet price. The marble pillars flanking the entrance, he says, were brought by elephants from Persia. At Anil's bidding are brought into the light, in turn (1) pages of two Qurans inscribed by near relatives of the Prophet 1400 years ago, (2) the impression of the Prophet's foot in stone, (3) a decayed sandal of the Prophet and (4) a glass vial with a red hair from the Prophet's beard. For viewing these relics a donation of Rs100 is appropriate. Anil ends the tour with a demand for a further Rs500, at which I cavil; and with some ill-feeling we settle on a miserly Rs200. I later learn that Indian Navy pilots are paid Rs15,000 per month; so Rs500 plus extras for twenty minutes' guiding is a killing, even in this heat.

Delhi has, and needs, places of tranquillity. One, in South Delhi, is the Baha'i Temple. Still sore from the mosque episode, I visit its soaring folds of marble sculpted like an immense lotus flower among formal gardens. There is safe parking for Apollo, smiling security guards and no mention of rupees. Score: Baha'u'llah 1, Mahomet 0.

I search in Nizamuddin for the tomb of Humayun, finding instead that of Khan-I-Khana Mirza Abdur Rahim Khan (1556-1627), regent of Akbar. But yes, says the man at the gate (who wants me here), this is Humayun's tomb; so I share the wrong garden and tomb with the scampering squirrels, and sit in the shade (incredibly, in this city) alone. As I leave the man picks hibiscus flowers for Ann.

Humayun was father of Akbar; and his vast tomb nearby, built by his senior widow, is like Kahan-I Khana's writ large and in better repair. It inspired the design of the Taj Mahal and is deservedly a World Heritage site. However, the reason for finding it (as I do at last) is to walk and perspire in its thirty acres of garden, with water flowing in red sandstone channels among the trees.

The curving halls of India's National Museum echo to the cries of school-children chasing past three millennia worth of statuary with lifeless eyes. One can sense the ebb and flow of past civilisations and of people driven to make their ways in the world, just like the rickshaw-pedallers, restaurateurs, peasants and businessmen of today, but unlike them leaving a record of carved stone. In their ant-hill of commerce with opportunities for the quick and ready, the ancients, whose web of silk and spice routes criss-crossed Asia, did what they could to better themselves, stay out of trouble with their rulers and look beyond their visible worlds.

Lit obliquely from the ceiling, a square of worn sandstone bears the four-armed figure of an elephant, squatting with left knee on the ground, right knee raised with one hand on it and both upper hands raised to large ears. Ganesha, Late Gupta, 6th c AD, Gazipur, U.P., says the label. I wonder what the carving's creator would think to see his Ganesha here, with students walking past in jeans to a cafeteria with plastic tablecloths and tired pots of tomato sauce. Rain cascades in the round museum courtyard, washing heat and dust from the air, while a woman with a mobile phone shares my table. She lectures to Masters students, she says, and has a scholarship for PhD research on antiquities near Bhopal; and her field-work is made difficult by dacoits.

The dacoits of Bhopal may not be waving orange, white and green flags at present, but everyone else here is. Even Apollo has a flag on his handlebars. At midnight on 15 August 1947 the British released India, and the anniversary is cause for holiday and celebration.

It's August 13, and as I take morning coffee in the bazaar, girls from the nearby high school (a concrete prison with barred windows) file past in blue and white saris like a procession of angels. I follow them through the bazaar to the junction of Ramdwara Road, the nearest thing in this congested quarter to a public space. A man speaks importantly with a microphone while the children fan themselves with their flags (the heat is intense) and look bored until he leads a shouted chant. Then they sing vigorously, and the leading girls beat drums. You would not see girls doing that in Pakistan. But more important than the drumming angels is their sense of pride in a nation that has made its way, in a manner of speaking, for 57 years. This is, I understand, a practice for Sunday.

On Independence Day I wake to the sound of music and amplified voices. The sky is dark with thousands of tiny kites flown, like aimless sparrows on fine, invisible lines, by people on every rooftop. Lost and discarded kites lie in trees and in the tangled power wires and among the dirt and rubbish in the street. One kite gets stuck on an inaccessible part of the hotel roof; and with some trouble I free it, but its owner already has another aloft. Discarded kite strings festoon the lanes of the bazaar, brushing my face as I walk.

I celebrate with a haircut and unsolicited scalp massage for forty rupees, declining "colour," which likely would have been henna.

What do Delhi-ites think about, when it's not the state of their shares or the price of vegetables (high); or how to move a cow from in front of their shop; or get a job in the government or a passenger in their rickshaw or an exclusive apartment or a supply contract with the West Central Railway or, at the bottom of a very long scale, some baksheesh? The 39 television channels are nearly all in Hindustani, but the English-language Hindustan Times provides some insights.

Thirteen children died in an Independence Day bombing in Assam. A self-immolation in Manipur. On Saturday, India's first hanging for more than 19 years, for rape and murder. The 84-year old hangman, whose 25th hanging this was, afterwards broke down and was taken away in an ambulance. India craves (without much hope) Olympic success; since Independence she's won a dozen or so medals, eight of them for hockey. Athens rates three pages nonetheless. The overflowing Tibetan lake has expanded by five hectares, says the satellite imagery, and the Sutlej and Spiti valleys are under high alert. A paan-chewing legislator flying in an Indian Air Force helicopter spat out the window, fouled the machine and was ordered to clean it or be off-loaded. Taliban-style militance is growing in Bangladesh. The Delhi Development Authority plans a clean-up of the polluted Yamuna River, with promenades and cafes on its banks. The Sensex closed at 5139.7 on Friday.

Anil Ambani, an independent MP, writes a guest column for Independence Day. His subject is freedom, which is not yet taken for granted in India. More Indians, he said, have access to television than to tap water at home, and an estimated 1.5 million children die annually of avoidable water borne diseases.

Reading this, I think about the children of the Gupta sculptor and the water they drank 1400 years ago. And selfishly I wonder about my own intestines, which behaved loosely this morning.