The Red Fort

Saturday 29th October 1983

I washed my rancid grey YHA sleeping sheet and after breakfast in the Delhicacy Restaurant we set off to the Nepalese Embassy to pick up our visas. En route we were assailed by a gaggle of wretched women pawing and begging. We fled, but not before on had half undone the zip on George’s daysack.

We passed the Iranian Embassy with it’s hysterical religious graffiti and passed a huge building site where women were doing all the donkey work (literally). We collected our visas with no trouble and made for the Red Fort which is about 7 kilometres away. The Red Fort is a historic fort in the city of Delhi that served as the main residence of the Mughal Emperors.

Emperor Shah Jahan commissioned construction of the Red Fort on 12 May 1638, when he decided to shift his capital from Agra to Delhi. Originally red and white, Shah Jahan's favourite colours, its design is credited to architect Ustad Ahmad Lahori, who also constructed the Taj Mahal. It was constructed between May 1639 and April 1648.

We paused at New Delhi Railway Station to get tickets for Agra tomorrow and spent more than an hour wading through the system, passing from the station to the huge maze of reservation offices. We tottered on through the hooting bustling throng and by the time we reached the old Delhi station we were all in!

We slumped against the tea counter in exhaustion and decided that the fort could wait for another time. We wandered back past a ridiculous traffic jam composed of bicycles, scooters, trishaws and various beast-drawn carts and wagons. People lived on the pavements under tarpaulin shelters while children scrobbled about in the dust and shit. The sun was cruel and, that too, took its toll.

We hit the restaurant near Ringo’s Guest House for an egg curry before returning to read and write in Ringo’s courtyard. Memorable sights today were the open-air barbers are shaved with a cut-throat razor in an old rickety chair with a mirror hung on a tree. The little upmarket chipmunks that scurry everywhere in the cleaner New Delhi but shun the squalid nastiness of Old Delhi.

A pot of tea renewed our flagging energy and we set about another book-browsing expedition. The book shops had some excellent novels, but official copies were too expensive for our limited budget. I purchased 2 bootleg paperbacks from a street vendor for 10 Indian Rupees each. We then paid our last trip to the Delhicacy Restaurant for a while – our train, the Taj Express, leaves at 06:00 hrs. tomorrow, bound for Agra.