The Real Urban Outfitter

NEW DELHI, India--Every night I go to sleep wearing Delhi. Try as I may to disrobe, to wash the city from my skin, I remain clothed in the urban masala of textures and smells that seasons the ancient metropolis on the banks of the Yamuna River. A drop of sweat lies delicately between my eyes, a saree of dirt and exhaust, pleated six times at my waist and draped over my shoulder, enshrouds my body and defends my modesty from the menacing eyes of the dark. And as I lay in bed, immobilized by the heat, with the dissonant smells of sweet roasted corn and cow dung wafting through my open window, I am ham-fisted to find where I end and my environs begin.

One doesn't travel through Delhi; one doesn't stay a few months as an observant guest. Like a lentil softened in pot of steaming dal, one is forced to absorb the city's scalding brew, to let it seep under her skin and flavor her tender flesh. Mouths, nostrils become cultural portals, entry points through which the diesel fumes of a Tata bus, the bite of a roadside fried samosa and the burn of the scorching sun enter one's body and transform one's soul. Here, the ordinary becomes the extraordinary and the magnificent flows from the mundane as the unabashedly deceptive city deflowers virgin foreign flesh with a walk in the park, a ride down the street, a single cup of chai.

At times it's disconcerting--to feel unfamiliar in your own skin, to wake up, as I have, ensnared in a cultural Venus fly trap slowly eating away at your former self. And more unsettling than a vindaloo--fiery hot with cinnamon, cardamom, cumin and peppercorns--is the suspicion that, innocent and unaware, I was anesthetized by an urban predator, and now must lay paralyzed as the city alters my very being.

But there is also liberation in the constant flux, excitement at the thought that I never return from an excursion quite the way I left. Fate-teasing rides in tin-can auto rickshaws, curiously aromatic meals at hole-in-the-wall dhabas, solitary walks through ancient ruins perched in the center of urban sprawl, they all leave their indelible marks, imprinting the city on my soul and stealing a bit of my life's predictability to make room for what they've left behind.

And, oddly, as the predictability recedes into a small speck on the horizon, as more and more of what I think and see and feel is filtered through new lenses, the wonderment with which I approach the world swells. Every red-earth-encrusted-nook, every monsoon-dampened-cranny, every horn blast and door-slam and shantytown and palace-wall screams of its life-altering-potentiality and bears the message that small places often conceal large secrets that an overly-habituated mind is too lazy to uncover.

Indeed, while this thieving city robs too-prepared travelers of their well-drawn maps, it has a canny habit of giving them a better sense of direction. For to be once lost in Delhi is to be taught the thrill of wandering back alleys and narrow side streets, of perusing untouristed markets and treading unworn paths, of dining off unfamiliar dishware and drinking from unpurified spouts, of being curious, taking risks, discovering what lies off life's major thoroughfares--of coming home at night wearing the city in which you live.

Lauren E. Baer '02, a Crimson editor, is a social studies concentrator in Dunster house. She is working at the South Asia Human Rights Documentation Centre in New Delhi, India. She's eating too much curry, drinking too much domestic tequila and dreading returning to a country where a 30-minute cab ride costs more than a dollar.