delhi, once

there’s a city that doesn’t wait for you to be ready.
you step into it and it’s already moving,
already loud, already somebody else’s tuesday afternoon.

the metro was the first thing.
not the train itself. the people inside it.
everyone going somewhere with a face that says
they’ve been going somewhere for a very long time.
a man in a pressed shirt reading something on his phone
like the screen owed him money.
a girl with earphones and closed eyes,
somewhere else entirely.
a boy standing near the door with a bag too heavy for his frame,
watching the stations pass
like he was counting how many were left
before he had to become someone.

everyone in that metro had a dream.
you could feel it. not in the obvious way,
not in ambition or hunger.
in the tiredness. in the quiet way people held themselves together
at 2pm on a weekday in a city that doesn’t stop
long enough to ask how you’re doing.

delhi doesn’t care about you. i mean that with respect.
it has too many people to care about any single one,
and somehow that makes it the most honest city i’ve been in.
nobody pretends you’re special here. nobody lies to you about it.
you either make it or you don’t,
and the city will be the same either way,
and there is something almost kind in that.

i walked through cp and javeda zindagi started playing
in my head before i put it on.
the roads do that to you.
wide and colonial and indifferent,
and the song fit like it was written for the walk,
not for the movie.

there’s something about cp at that hour.
the buildings don’t care what year it is.
statesman house stands there like it’s been watching
this city outgrow itself for decades
and has nothing left to say about it.
the architecture isn’t beautiful in the way that asks to be photographed.
it’s beautiful in the way that old things are beautiful —
it survived, and survival is its own kind of beauty.

khwab ho ya koi haqiqat kept coming to me.
walking through the streets, the line kept returning.
because delhi feels like that. half dream, half something
too solid and too loud to be anything but real.
the food is real. the smell of oil and spice
at a corner you didn’t plan to stop at is real.
the man making parathas who has been making parathas
at the same spot for longer than you’ve been alive is real.
and the hunger is real too.
not just for the food. for the life around it.

chandni chowk is a different city inside the city.
everything is narrower there. the lanes, the margins, the air.
people move differently. faster, closer, louder.
everything is being sold and everything is being bought
and somewhere in the middle of all of it
there’s a man pulling a cart with the calm of someone
who stopped being surprised by any of this years ago.

i bought some books. from a bookseller on the street
who had more books stacked around him than most people read in a lifetime.
i don’t know his name. i didn’t ask.
he didn’t try to sell me anything. i just picked.
there’s a kind of trust in that. two strangers
and a pile of books and no conversation needed.

khan market was quieter. cleaner. more expensive air.
the kind of place where the books come with bookmarks already in them
and the coffee costs what a meal costs in chandni chowk.
i don’t say that with judgment. i say it because
delhi holds both of these places at the same time
without finding it strange, and i think that’s the thing
i keep coming back to.

the city holds the dream and the struggle
in the same hand. it doesn’t separate them.
the man on the metro with the heavy bag
and the woman in khan market reading in the sun
are living in the same city on the same afternoon
and they might never cross paths
and they are both surviving
and neither of them would use that word for it.

i left and i took nothing with me
except the weight of a city
that runs on people who don’t have time to stop.

delhi doesn’t ask you to come back.
it doesn’t need to.
you’ll think about it anyway.

K.S.