Did Delhi just get quieter?

Cadbury's elclairs, the new small change.

It’s now been about two and a half months since I arrived fresh off the plane onto Indian tarmac. If you happen to have been following this blog since the beginning then you may remember such extracts from my first couple of blog entries as, ”I’ve been in Delhi for less than 24hrs and I’m feeling a little shell shocked,” or,” I was a bit less scared of Delhi today than I was yesterday.” So perhaps the most surprising thing in the last month or so is that this city that terrified the living daylights out of me in my first 48hrs/weeks/month has started to feel like home.

The first time I realised this was walking home from work one day and noticing that Delhi seemed quieter. The combined chorus of rickshaw horns, motorcycle engines, bicycle bells, barking dogs, vegetable wallahs’ calls and construction workers was still going at full force, so either I’d finally started to lose my hearing due to over exposure to extreme noise levels or I’d actually started to get used to it. I have become quite proficient in the art of traffic dodging and looking left, right, up, down and behind me before crossing a road. I am accustomed to receiving my small change in the form of Cadburys éclairs (this is a system I will most definitely be implementing when I return to the UK). I am used to having my way home blocked because a wedding tent has been erected where there was a street that morning. I fall asleep to the sound of fireworks and wake up to the sound of out of time drumming and clapping (the 8am morning exercises of the three schools all carefully positioned right outside my window). These are my new daily routines.

I have to admit that there are still some mornings when I occasionally find myself shouting “shhhh!” to no one in particular in hope that the city will quieten down for a moment, but most days it’s hard to imagine a quieter, more orderly life before Delhi.