Tomb of tranquility

Delhi is not, generally speaking, a peaceful place. Zooming around the city cramped in the back of a beaten up green and yellow tuk-tuk is a truly hair-raising experience, like taking part in a metropolis-sized dodgem ride but without the bumpers for safety. Everything goes on the streets. Taking over inside or outside, u-turns where you please and traffic lights more for advice than for instruction. For the westerner pitched into this cauldron for the first time and used to, well, rules, it takes a while to adapt.

Thankfully though, Delhi rewards the persistent with enough hidden corners of peace and quiet to more or less maintain a traveler’s sanity during their trip. One of these, and for me the most memorable, is located inauspiciously a stone’s throw from the utter bedlam of Nizamuddin Station – Humayun’s tomb.

 

We visited late in the afternoon of our first full day in Asia, having been shaken by the culture shock of our arrival. Earlier we had been forced to duck into a packed MacDonalds restaurant to avoid the attentions of a team of touts who had followed us more or less directly after we had stepped out of our lodgings. Sensing our naivety, they stuck to us like glue until the fast food restaurant offered a chance of escape.

 

The Persian style gardens surrounding the tomb presented us with an immediate air of calm however. The sinking sun glowed off the red sandstone and pale marble of the tomb’s walls and gave the symmetrical gardens a beguiling atmosphere of shadowy silence. And where were the tourists? The place was empty but for prowling black cats and the birds that fluttered to and fro off the tomb’s perfectly proportioned dome.

 

In the midst of this tranquility my wife and I wandered down the sandy, ochre coloured path leading to the building. The only sound was the shuffling of our feet and the twinkle of water falling rhythmically into the fountain that ran the length of the path. Climbing the steps to the monument we could see the sun sink below the imposing entrance gate at the west of the site.

 

The monument, built in 1562, is the final resting place of the second Mughal Emperor of India, Humayun, a man famed for spending the great majority of his reign on the run from his foes. Inside we find various plain, marble tombs and beautifully decorated screens. Everything feels fresh and new, as if the mughals had just had to vacate the building the day before our visit.

 

As darkness enshrouds the gardens we manage to catch a glimpse behind the structure which backs on to a railway line and the Yamuna River. An old blue and yellow trains clanks past as we watch, full of commuters, some of which cling nonchalantly to the open doorways.

 

We leave the tomb satisfied at witnessing a true marvel of Delhi, an experience we would carry with us throughout our many Asian adventures to come.