We found our guesthouse tucked away in a side alley, shaded by the high fading apartment walls. Just past the public urinal and a threesome of cute street mutt pups. Things were off to a bad start, when the air con in our room refused to work and hence save us from the eighty percent humidity that filled and clung to every empty space. Making everything and everyone feel uncomfortably close together. Fortunately, we were able to convince our hosts that it indeed wasn’t working and didn’t need the supposed forty minutes to ironically “warm up”. And were given a new room. Our room experience set the mood for most of our time in Delhi. Things didn’t work. But with some persistence we could squeeze some positive from our experiences.

We spent the next few days persisting. We persisted through the heavy heat to an overtly sexist mosque called Jama Masjid, then we persisted to the red fort, persisted to the Lotus Temple that looked remarkably like the Sydney Opera House in abstraction and persisted through the many different bazaars. It all seems like a hazy cloud of experiences that, upon reflection, I’m struggling to remember. The only thing that stands out is our reunion with our friend Amit, who took us to Dilli Baht – a bazaar with food and goods from every state in India. Each stall being set up by the tourist organisations of each state, as a taster for the kind of fare one might find there. We spent a good deal of our time talking about the fascinations of each other’s worlds, and the advantages and disadvantages of both. We looked for the things in common and found many things similar. Our love for cricket and movies, along with a strong belief in family and feminism. Amit strikes me as the perfect representation of the modern human: connected to the world around him with principles that transcend borders and traditions. I think this is why it was so easy for us to get along with him. Even though we may not necessarily agree on everything, we found more common points than differences. And even when we found differences, there was enough mutual respect to appreciate and attempt to understand each other’s viewpoints.

The common points reached a crux at our financial differences. Amit, although he had access to the same information that we did, didn’t have access to the same physical world. This was all due to the power of economics. His money simply wasn’t as valuable as ours. And because of this, he could never afford to leave his country and visit mine. To travel the world and develop, in his words, spiritually as well as mentally. Unlike the privileged traveller of the West, who’s dollar is far more powerful and hence can open more doors than his. Ironically, such privilege has come from the colonising power of the Europeans and the commandeering of lands like India for the last few hundred years. I wonder if we’d be having this conversation in a different place if India had been given the opportunity to thrive as much as the west. We can only speculate. And be grateful that we could have the conversation at all. Conversations that inspire us to build a more equitable world where we can meet each other in any land on any person’s terms, not just mine or the West’s. So, thank you Amit. Thank you for actually starting the conversation. And let’s hope we can have another someday, preferably in Australia.

One other thing that stands out is an Indian shopkeeper telling me to listen to Richelle, after I had asked her for a chocolate and she’d refused. We had a play fight, which he took as a real fight and immediately gave me some neatly packaged wisdom. He told me, “Always do as your woman says or else she can ruin the whole trip for you.” The Love Guru strikes again.

We made for the train early the next morning and sped to Jaipur, the Pink City of Rajasthan.