I took these photos on Swami Vivekand Marg. Somewhere behind me is the lively Fatepurhi Masjid, built  in 1650 by one of the queens of Shah Jahan. You would never know it (I didn’t until I examined a satellite photo later).

This must be the agreed-upon “Chandni Chowk Spice Market” where tourist tours of Delhi dump their foreigners, baffled and sneezing, even though Chandni Chowk Road proper (long shorn of the moonlit pool and central channel of its Mughal days) begins around the corner.

Some of the disoriented foreigners with whom I was temporarily traveling remarked openly (and I feel, rudely) that the locale seemed “like a dystopia.”

No, no, no. For one thing, the scene on the Marg (with the disjointed architectural growth looming above) was much too lively to fit my personal definition of “dystopia”. Chaotic, confusing, noisy, unplanned — and more than a bit wonderful. 

There, that’s more like it.

Behind the street front of the Marg stretch timeless, bustling mazes of bazars, tenements, mosques, subdivided former palaces, and unexpected square-like junctures, all choked with piles of burlap bags filled with mysterious grains, hung with paper lanterns or punctuated with a few light-deprived trees. I had a sense one could step inside and in short order deliberately lose oneself forever.