There is something special about the first time I see a city. The spacial image of it that I build in your mind when you get there for the very first time, during the very first hour of discovering, is always somehow different from how that city exactly is. Distances are bigger, or smaller. What is near seems far, what is contiguous seems separate. It doesn’t stay for long. Already after a day my mind corrects that image, my sense of direction takes the place of emotional wandering; I get to know the space around me and the model of it in my mind gets more precise.
But that first impression still stays somewhere in my memory and I can always find it: the image of a place I know that you built when I felt lost in it.
I have them all, right in front of my eyes, with their aroma of excitement and fear: the first image of Bologna, the first image of Paris, the first image of New York. An enormous and desert piazza Verdi, Saint Michel on Ile de la Cité, Times square just two or three blocks away from Central Park.
And then there is Delhi. I can remember exactly how it looked to my eyes as I moved here. But it still looks the same.
It might be because I don’t walk, I drive (or they drive me, rather). It might even be because of the way driving goes. Or it might be because, whenever I am on the streets, watching life happening (every corner, every meter) distracts me from keeping track of routes, and understanding geography.
Whatever the reason might be, almost seven months after moving here, Delhi still has no order in my mind. I keep feeling this city as an immense pulsating space. I know my way to some places, I recognize some parts of town, but that’s about it. This city is just humongous: sometimes I can be in a taxi for an hour without passing any place I have been to before. What is next to what, how long does it take to where, which is the way to: all questions I can’t answer. No place like this before, with the millions and millions moving around me, has ever made me feel more like a unity. Nothing to do with loneliness, just that sense you have of being nothing more than a dot, a dot with connections, maybe, but still a dot.
Some people think that a city like Delhi teaches you that a human life doesn’t matter that much, that it gives you a couple of lessons on relativity. At the beginning, I tought so too, and it is a scary thought. But that is not quite correct. While showing you relativity, a city like this gives you all the responsibility for yourself. Nothing is going to stop for you and this, it seems to me, makes you the center. You have the precise feeling of being not just yourself but all your world. Your past, present, all the ones you love, whatever makes you happy, what hurts you, the memories, your dreams. All of this becomes tangible and stays with you.
When you cross the street. When you stop a rickshaw. When you go to bed. When you order food. You are a planet.
Delhi is a city one cannot master completely. It’s home to planets; just as any universe, it is infinite.
