The colour, chaos and courage of Chandni Chowk

Experience all of India in one Old Delhi street

All photos © copyright Matthew Brace

I’m buried deep in the human throng of Chandni Chowk in Old Delhi on a Tuesday lunchtime. This is one of Delhi’s busiest streets: a bazaar of jewellery and electrical shops, an open market of stalls and a major thoroughfare all rolled into one. Everywhere I look there is colour and activity.

A huge dirty-white sack is heading straight for me at head height. Only at the last minute do I see it is being carried on the shoulders of a diminutive, stick-thin man who is calling out for people to clear a path. I try to move but there’s nowhere to go. There are bodies and carts everywhere. Somehow the man and his sack squeeze past. Despite his burden and the sweat pouring down his face, he smiles.

A young woman with two young children nestled in a shawl slung over her chest comes close and holds out a hand. We’re pushed together by the throng, our bodies unavoidably touching in the crush. I’m sure it’s highly inappropriate but there’s just no choice. I apologise to her but I’m not sure she hears me in the melee.

The heaving flow of the human river separates us as quickly as it brought us together and I see her watching me as we are drawn further apart. If I could reach my pockets, I would give her some small notes but my hands and arms are tucked in close to my chest. I am temporarily turned the wrong way and have to back-pedal to keep up with the tide. A man is listening to full-volume, max-treble, Bollywood music on a handheld radio. Over the din, he speaks to me in a language I do not recognise, as if telling me to spin back around and go with the flow. He reaches out a hand and tugs my shoulder. It does the trick and I’m no longer the backwards-facing, odd-one-out fish in the stream.

I finally find some space to jostle to the edge of the crowd and cling to a metal column holding up a shop front, using it as a shield behind which to rest.

At my feet a paan seller sits cross-legged on the ground. He has a basket with his betel nut leaves and other ingredients to make the chewing tobacco parcels. How it all doesn’t get kicked away by the crowd I don’t know.

All he must see all day is feet, boots and the occasional rat scampering between the human limbs. He looks up at me with eyes that say: welcome to my world. He also has packs of cigarettes and I buy three from him and signal to him to keep the change. I haven’t smoked for a decade but I have to reward his courage somehow.

I see two more sack-carriers in mid-stream. They’re going my way so I push back into the crowd and drop in behind them, keeping step in their slipstream until the road widens and the crowd thins out a little.

Behind me, a man is half-singing, half-yelling. He has somehow pedalled his rickshaw through the mass of people… with passengers on board. He’s the Old Delhi equivalent of a chirpy London cabbie having a moan about the road works up Hackney Wick.

A boy offers me a drink from his juice cart. I pay him and gulp it down. Next to him, an older man is hunched into a hole in the wall, from which he serves small cups of chai. I can barely see his face through the small opening. It’s the world’s smallest café and he is doing a roaring trade.

Chandni Chowk is India personified, a microcosm of the nation. The crowds, the dust and heat, the incense and sandalwood. The beedee smoke swirling in the air. The never-ending cavalcade of people and animals and colour. The costumes of almost every religion in India, from Hindu to Buddhist to Muslim, from Jain to Sikh and many more besides. The myriad signs selling everything from books and newspapers to diamonds and sapphires, and the omnipresent noise, from the calls of chai sellers to the grunts of sacred cows and the clatter of rickshaws.

Everywhere, there is evidence of people’s fortitude to get through the day and their ability to smile in the midst of adversity.

To see it first-hand, dive into Chandni Chowk on any busy Tuesday.