Delhi: A City Rebuilt Seven Times

Most travellers give Delhi a night and an airport transfer. This is a mistake of pacing, not of taste. Delhi is difficult on day one and generous on day three, and almost nobody stays long enough to find that out.

Seven cities, by the usual count, each founded by a ruler who assumed permanence. You can walk through four of them in an afternoon at Mehrauli, where tombs sit in scrub and the Qutb Minar rises out of a temple that was taken apart to build it.

The old city, early

Shahjahanabad at seven in the morning is a different city from the one at noon: shutters still down, the lanes swept, the smell of frying and cardamom and nothing else yet. By ten it is the loudest place you will stand this trip.

Delhi's ruins are not preserved so much as lived around — a goalpost against a Lodhi tomb.

End at Nizamuddin on a Thursday, sitting on the marble as the qawwals begin. You will not understand the Persian. It will not matter.