New Delhi: Revisiting The Elephant Graveyard

Mansi’s brother showing me the ropes on his Royal Enfield

When I was a kid, I used to watch The Lion King every week, without fail. It became so much of an obsession that I realized one day that I had learned the dialogues by heart and could repeat them word for word. (For instance, the opening line of the movie is, “Life’s not fair, isn’t it?” said by Scar, as he catches a little mouse for dinner.)

The movie had so much of an impact on me that I began associating things I saw in it to things I saw in real life. After a 9-month ordeal in New Delhi in 2009-10, I associated the city with the Elephant Graveyard in The Lion King – a dreaded place where no one went, and a place of evil where no one was ever happy. My time in New Delhi was the worst 9 months of my life. I haven’t been more miserable ever. So, once I returned back to normalcy and battled depressions and won, I vowed never to go back there again. Ever. But fate, it seemed, had a few ironies up its sleeve.

Mansi hails from Gurgaon, Haryana – an integral part of the Delhi-NCR, and when she insisted that I accompany her to Delhi, I was very hesitant. She convinced me that she was going to make me see the place through her happy goggles, and was very confident that I’d like the trip. Well, given that I am in love with her and have decided to spend the rest of my life traveling with her, I decided to face my fear and visit the Elephant Graveyard with her. And I was so glad I did, because she not only made me see Delhi in a whole new light, she even made me admit that I had fun on the trip.

We spent half our time in Gurgaon, meeting her old friends and revisiting her old haunts. A lovely breakfast at Sakley’s in Galleria set the tone for a lovely weekend. We went visiting the famous Delhi Haat, where we spent a very satisfying evening eating street food from all around the country and window shopping for colorful, over-priced junk. A highlight of the trip was the visit to the world-renowned flea market at Sarojini Nagar, where Mansi found a treasure trove of Desigual clothes and we spent all of our trip’s budgets shopping for clothes, shoes and other things.

We stayed at Mansi’s parents’ house in Gurgaon and I immediately made her mom, dad and elder brother fall hopelessly in love with me through my charm and my south Indian cooking skills. The sambhar I cooked for lunch, I am told, was finger-licking good.

The trip also coincided with the birthday of one of Mansi’s closest friends – Joanna. We dropped in on her birthday party, surprised the living daylights out of her and spent a very nice evening catching up and socializing with her old friends. I really did have a wonderful trip, and I never thought I’d say this, but Delhi isn’t so bad. True, I kept spotting rapists everywhere, but I guess that’s the charm of living in a nation’s capital. Whatever that means.

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7 Reasons Why Facial Hair On Travelers Is A Bad Idea!

Nikhil’s Homeless Guy Look

Nikhil and I, on most weekends, can be found roaming around the country looking for interesting things to do and wacky places to drink tea in. We are even experimenting on weekend travelling overseas. With the amount of travelling we do and the fact that we both work full time in advertising leaves him with little or no time to shave. Many a time, I mistake him for a homeless guy begging for food when I lay my eyes on him. There have been a couple of instances where I’ve either screamed in fright or thrown something heavy at him, for not having recognized him. I’m exaggerating, of course, but you get the idea. It gets really annoying when he doesn’t shave and gives lack of time as an excuse. So, I bought him an electric razor one day, and he complained that it’s too “itchy”. I don’t know what to do with him now. He’s walking around in public looking like Tom Hanks in Cast Away.

I’ve compiled a list of 7 reasons why Nikhil should shave, especially because we travel so much. In no particular order, they are:

1. I don’t have facial recognition software installed on my laptop and neither does he. (Remember the Saif Ali Khan ad?)
2. I don’t want to retire for the night, look to kiss him good night and find a mini zoo on his face. I once found a colony of bugs in his beard that had evolved and were exploring their space program before I yelled at him and made him shave.
3. I have the most difficult time recognizing him in public. I once wanted a photograph of mine to be taken on the beach, while I posed with my bicycle. When I looked up, I saw this disheveled homeless guy with an ugly beard fiddling with my camera. I screamed bloody murder and ran after him, only to realize it was Nikhil. I beat him senseless, just for that.
4. When we are at airports, we can never pass a security check without incident. Nikhil’s always mistaken for either a homeless guy who wandered in, or a terrorist plotting to blow everyone up, with a bomb hidden in his beard.
5. He keeps experimenting with the way his stupid facial hair looks like. He once walked around with what he called the “Pharaoh Look”, with a thin strip of hair running from his lower lip to well below his chin, and I took one look and thought there was a centipede climbing into his mouth. I almost threw a book at it, trying to kill it.
6. Once in Goa, when we were trying to find our way back to a friend’s place at night and were lost on the highway, we stopped our car to ask for directions at a roadside dhaba. He went in, opened his mouth and was chased out before he could get two words out. I had to intervene and convince the waiters who had chased him that he wasn’t there to steal food. I made him shave his beard the minute we got home.
7. We live in a Christian locality of the Mumbai suburbs. Whenever we go out, small kids from the nearby convent point at him and shout, “Jesus!” And Nikhil finds it funny. I don’t.

If there was a way I could irradiate this guy’s face so that hair never grows again, I would. But I do love him despite his quirks, and I don’t want to deny him the pleasure of being yelled at by me. And the pleasure of shaving – I know he loves to shave, only experiments with funny facial hair designs.

Any other reasons that you can think of, please include them in your comments. I need tips. And badly. My face is starting to itch. 😉

This post is a part of the ‘Shave or Crave’ movement in association with BlogAdda.com