I remember my first taxi ride in India: no kidding, I expected to die. I tipped the taxi driver an extraordinary amount in sheer relief and acknowledgment of the great risk that he too had made to drive me about.
I remember taking the same, late-night journey from Indira Ghandi International four years later. The same suicidal speed away from the airport towards town. Reluctant slowing to a stop at lights.
A tapping at the taxi window. The driver instinctively edging the car forward in a feeble gesture of shelter for his international guest. The dirty boy outside the window motioning to his hungry stomach. 'Please, one Rupee. One Rupee.' A fumbling through my bag. His hands cold, dry and unwashed.
I remember the familiar sights and smells of New Delhi unravelling like a map. Shadowy figures huddled in gray blankets; two men with broken sandals and a gas bottle on a pushbike; another with a long stick in place of a leg.
But just as I thought we were nearing the end of our journey and would, at any moment, be greeted by old familiar landmarks, the landscape started changing. The late night omelette-makers and street boys and crinkled blankets that could be corpses began to thin, and roads seem broader, starker. Large flyovers made of concrete slabs spiralled overhead, the alcoves of shelter they created eerily empty.
The smell of hot bitumen asserted itself in the chilled winter air as we passed a team of late night road workers. A whole family of saried women, nimble men and woollen-hatted children sifting gravel and carrying piles of stones on their heads. Their shelter, two tents made entirely of black plastic sheeting, cold and unlit.
The driver, seeing the direction of my gaze, nodded towards the ghostly work party and explained: 'Delhi Games.'
'Delhi Games' became a constant refrain thoughout those three months in late 2009. When we were careering through the sparklingly hushed underground veins of Delhi's Metro, or standing perplexed, above ground trying to find familiar street stalls amid the Jenga set of new roads.
We read out aloud the amusing 'etiquette lessons' printed in the daily Hindustan Times, schooling Delhites on not spitting in public during the Games and reports of manners training for the police force.
Most poignantly, 'Delhi Games' was the refrain spoken at the sight of babies dosed up on phernargan and asleep in bundles on the side of the road while their