Nonetheless, it was 8 am, and I was going to see a few last things in Chandigarh before I left. Bharat was ready to go, so we first stopped by the Rose Garden. I think I could live in this city. There are big roads, a huge number of parks, an almost gentile (for India) traffic circulation, and
trees throughout. The whole city, perhaps because it is planned, seems organized, clean and pleasant.While anyone will tell you I’m no special fan of roses, the Rose Garden was fabulous. It’s a wide-open park, almost as big as Piedmont, with rose beds scattered throughout. As I walked in, and the whole time I was there, I was walking through the aroma of rose blooms. There were also groves of willows and other trees whose names I don’t know, and there was a tree with bright yellow blooms planted throughout. I also saw a really odd bird – huge, orange beak and kinda squat body that was lemony green/yellow on the lower half and lime green on the top. It was defending its nest in a tree cavity from the ubiquitous magpies, so I got a great look at it. I’ll have to check it out. And there were also quite a few people out already enjoying the aroma and
the freshness in the air. Of course, I was sweating profusely, but I had wonderful 40-minute walk there.We next went to Le Corbusier’s well-known government buildings. Chandigarh is a special zone that isn’t part of any state (like Washington, DC), but the governments of both Punjab and Harayana are located here. The Ministry of Justice has three large, colored, vertical panels that support part of the building, and it’s still a striking structure these many years out. We accidently parked next to a guard station (you couldn’t tell…it was a mud brick house with a few trees in front of it), and an officer in a sweaty tank top came over to say hello. His blue-grey eyes are characteristic of Himanchal Pradesh, where I’d just left, and as he watched sweat drip off my nose, he told me I should go to Shimla. Ha! Behind him in the front yard, a couple of very handsome and hunky soldiers were taking their morning bath. There is a little tension in Punjab today because some Sikh religious leader who had been setting up religious communities was just mildly denounced by the mainstream Sikh religious leaders for modeling himself as the 11th Sikh guru (“mildly” being that they called for dismantling the communes and tossing the guy in jail for five years). Sikh fundamentalist thought the denunciation too mild, and there were riots throughout Punjab and attacks on the communes while I was visiting the Stone Garden
yesterday. Pictures in the morning paper showed angry crowds of Sikh men brandishing swords and calling for the head of the guru. While the government was assuring the world that Punjab was open for business, most banks and stores were closed, and there is a ban on assemblies of more than five people. That’s why the military guy came out to see what I was doing.Chandigarh was going about its Saturday routine, though. There were walkers in the Bougainvillea Garden (the size of the Rose Garden), and the same in the main park (many times bigger than the Rose Garden and filled with brushy, acacia-like shrubs). Le Corbusier also built a lake in Chandigarh, and there were people milling about there, too, discussing what was happening outside their Chandigarh bubble (in my fantasy of their conversation). Chandigarh really is a lovely, calm, easy city…if you have a car.
And I have a car, but we had to leave the bubble and re-enter unzoned India, with its dust, its chaotic commerce, and its loud, unruly traffic – the road to Delhi.
The trip up wasn’t too bad, even though it was so hot the AC on the Ambassador couldn’t quite keep up. Took a nap, wrote my blog, stopped for a cold Coke (I’m supporting you, David!) and fixed a flat tire at 2 in the afternoon in the heat of the day. What luck…30 minutes from the hotel! It was interesting to watch oblivious Bharat methodically take out the jack and crowbar and jack up the car as lanes of rickshaws, busses, trucks and passenger cars hurtled by honking (just honking, not necessarily at him). Then he inspected the tire in the middle of the road as traffic diverged around him. I sat on the curb sweating in the shade, partly from the heat and partly from anxiety. What do you do if someone gets hit by a car in India?
The rest of the day was business. Tried unsuccessfully to book a ticket to Leh. The travel agency was just booking the ticket on the airline site, so I tried to get the site to accept my credit card. I don’t think Visa liked my cc info and the Delhi phone numbers, and the site wouldn’t let me use American phone numbers. No go. Went to Thomas Cook to change some money to pay Bharat, and joked with the guys there about the rate, which has dropped since Dharamsala. I told the guys to stop working so hard (it was a Saturday) because the rupee was too strong; they told me to blame Bush for my weak dollar.
So it was soon dinner at the York and good, long night’s sleep.
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