purna kumbh mela

with the powerlines and streetlike aspect, this looks like a desert village. in fact, it is a view of sector 8 of the purna kumbh mela site. located on a floodplain just outside the city of allahabad in uttar pradesh, until a few weeks ago the site lay under the waters of the ganga and yamuna rivers. kilometers of steelplate roadway, thousands of tents, hundreds of public toilets and utility poles, and many temporary bridges have been built since december to make the site habitable for the event's 55-day duration.

the mela continues through the end of february but we're headed back to cambridge, ma today, scoured clean of karmic debt by the chilly waters of the ganga. the mela site's floodplain infrastructure and population continues to grow as the main bathing days approach, something the many vendors and entrepreneurs are counting on. a temporary city accommodating between 2 and 10 million people at any given time is a place to learn (among other things) about how to design more adaptable cities and communities: a topic for deeper consideration.

night lights

the kumbh mela is a recurring hindu pilgrimage featuring many lights, a complicated social ordering, and many tens of millions of people trying to bathe along the same few kilometres of riverbank. the mela forms in allahabad, in a giant temporary tent city built on the dry floodplain of the ganga and yamuna rivers at the triveni sangam, where the two rivers meet each other and the invisible saraswati river. a place to which many have ascribed mythic powers.

no trumpets

walkies

an early morning arrival on a heathrow-delhi flights offers serene vistas of the craggy, snow-covered peaks of the himalayas. indira gandhi international airport's international terminal has an arrival hall large enough to have its own weather system and, this morning, it was smoggy. a 45-minute drive through thick haze in a non-airconditioned taxi later, i fell into a deep and glutinous sleep to the sound of jackhammers in fort siri. waking with difficulty several hours later, i went out into the city hunting for food.

the day was cool and slightly humid and walking not a chore. at the end of the road, a sign in the gatepost of a stately stuccoed house read "NATURE MORTE."



many architectural features of south delhi remind me of singapore in the 1980s: packed sand yards with thinning crabgrass, balconies covered in many identical pots of mostly bougainvillea, unconvincing security guards dozing on stools under trees, the extensive use of crumbling, enamel-painted, coarse-sand cement.



i took a right turn into a gated and carefully tended colony, and stumbled onto, then into, the gulmohar clubhouse, where the smell of damp carpet and fry grease took me back many years. they let me have teacoffee even though i wasn't a member. i saw many great signs while the sun was still up:




i pursued a socket adaptor — a surprisingly elusive object — through a series of likely looking appliance and electronics shops, into the very depths of green park. except it turned out to be the rapidly gentrifying tourist trap of hauz khas. i realized my mistake when i walked by the fourth gourmet pizza shop and struck out again for green park market. by this time, the light had faded completely and the streets were illuminated only by the lamps of roadside stalls mounded with fresh fruit and vegetables. on the pavement in front of the green park main market strip, four vendors sold charcoal-roasted spicy sweet potatoes with raw starfruit. many friendly dogs that looked like horus got in the way of dabbawallas redistributing the last of their empty tiffins.



green park market ended abruptly and turned into a long stretch of pavement and no-pavement. then into the sudden noise and crumbliness of gautam nagar, where i saw more things i wanted to eat in a 30-meter stretch of sidewalk shopfront than i had in the last 6 kilometers: a narrow shopfront featuring one stool and a small table for guests but separate and dedicated tandoor and naan ovens, a chicken specialist (with butcher curled up smoking in the window), a coffeeshop with curry-to-order from a cook with a several thousand BTU burner far larger than his wok (a very good sign), a kebab stand with a large brazier of correctly glowing coals and a long line of waiting patrons, and a very large case of fly-free burfi.



in the dark, everyone wore scarves and hats. crossing the street was amusingly haphazard and best accomplished in a crowd. two men guided a battered bus full of india vocational college students back a hundred meters down a 3-lane highway so it could make the turn it had missed, then walked off separately. i felt anonymous and comfortably safe. sometimes, unpredictably, there was the penetrating and synthetic smell of saffron.