“Step out of your hotel and let India beat you up,” advises James May at the end of Our Man in India.

Great advice that, for the second time on this trip (I briefly passed through Delhi a week ago when I arrived in India), I cannot take.

I have no hotel to step out of, have all my luggage, and a deadline to catch a train later tonight, with the ultimate goal of reaching Darjeeling.

A taxi has just dropped me off directly in front of India Gate in New Delhi.

I plan to spend the evening walking along Rajpath, officially called Kartavya Path, the long ceremonial boulevard that runs from Rashtrapati Bhavan to India Gate through the ornate Central Vista in New Delhi.

Heavy bags make walking Rajpath to India Gate hard

I am in India with my friends Finn and Cameron, who have just spent five hours in a taxi with me from Ramnagar up north, beneath the Himalayas.

We’re fresh and well-fed after attending a Hindu wedding as guests of the groom and our mutual friend, Ollie.

After we pay the driver with Ollie’s cash, we’re left on the busy kerb with our bags and an afternoon to see what we can of India's capital city.

Cameron and I are making do with large rucksacks, but Finn has a full-sized suitcase, which is an appalling item to cart around Delhi.

There are too many people, too much traffic, and too many foul things in the road to endure carrying more things than are absolutely necessary. Not that we have any choice in that matter as wedding guests.

What Rajpath (Kartavya Path) actually is

We’re standing on one of the extremely busy roads that intersect Rajpath—a wide boulevard flanked by shallow pools and rectangular lawns that stretches from India Gate to Rashtrapati Bhavan, the seat of the President of the world's largest democracy.

Rajpath is flanked by many buildings critical to the function of India’s government, and has served as the nation’s political centre since British imperial powers moved the capital of the Raj from Calcutta (now Kolkata) to Delhi in 1911.

The government buildings, memorials, and gardens that flank Rajpath are collectively called the "Central Vista."

How to handle touts around India Gate

As soon as we heft our bags onto our shoulders, we’re beset by a throng of hawkers offering to do things for us that we don’t want or need.

But we’ve already spent time in Agra and have learned that the best strategy is simply to ignore them.

This tactic beats verbal refusal, which is more wearing to us than them.

Walking purposefully away, pretending not to hear their offers, seems rude at first, but the visitor is just one among hundreds of business opportunities they will hawk at on any given day.

It’s hubris to think any part of their pitch is a genuine attempt to try and befriend us and establish themselves as benevolent and charitable tour guides.

We struggle to walk purposefully because we’ve just arrived from Ramnagar, hundreds of miles away, and have been too busy to formulate a detailed plan.

To settle upon which way to walk, we stop by one of the empty canals that line Rajpath.

Bleacher seats are being erected or taken down—we can’t tell which.

And there are some unspeakably filthy portaloos dotted around.

They could be remnants of the Republic Day celebrations or Beating the Retreat, a parade that happened on January 29th.

LGBTQ+ comfort in Delhi's public spaces

As we sit, we are approached by two brothers on their way to Rashtrapati Bhavan.

They engage us in dull, miscellaneous, and one-way conversation about sports and who we all look like. (I’m a burly Aussie, apparently. G’day.)

The confident brother does all the talking, while the shy one looks away, awkwardly.

I’ve drawn the long straw, sitting the farthest away, and I let Cameron and Finn take the brunt of the intrusion.

It would be great to be accosted by some Indian Dan Snow—that would save me from having to read books—but instead I have to listen to Confident Brother clarify that his compliment on Cameron’s blue eyes isn’t meant to be taken as “dirty” homosexuality.

We have many gay friends, and are not sure how to reply, silently reasoning that it's better for everyone to say nothing.

India Gate, the Central Vista, and their architect: Edwin Lutyens

Plan settled, we walk (purposefully) towards India Gate.

As we do, we pass by a dog in an empty canal and wonder if it’s dead or sleeping.

India Gate is a monumental cenotaph to the soldiers serving in the Indian Army who died fighting in the First World War.

Its proportions are befittingly impressive, although it embodies more than a little imperial arrogance compared to the cenotaph in Whitehall.

Both were designed by the same person, Edwin Lutyens, chief architect of the British Crown during the final decades of the Raj.

He designed swathes of New Delhi, seemingly on the Romanesque basis of straight, geometric road networks and ceremonial arches.

The canals of Rajpath and Rashtrapati Bhavan (formally the Viceroy’s house) are also Lutyens’ designs.

Assertive and unintegrated, they are the perfect seat for government.

We perform a lap around the base of India Gate to take it in.

Families picnic on the lawns, enjoying the warmth of the late afternoon sun.

Whether by the efforts of municipal workers or some unquantifiable collective will, these lawns are kept free of the trash that plagues everywhere else.

Parakeets cackle, hidden away in the trees of the park, and we search for the perfect sunset photo.

The sun is out, but it’s an orange and wheezing sun.

Light that took a mere eight minutes to get here from that sun compared to our five hours is almost entirely blocked out by the smog, and it appears as a dull pinhole that we can stare at directly.

The result is a peachy umber light possessing all the sultry qualities synonymous with India but lacking the directionality of the usual “golden hour” light that photographers crave.

To the east, Rajpath continues momentarily to reach the National War Memorial. This section is newer, but seamlessly added and unfortunately closed to us.

Astonishing A-frames made entirely of carefully arranged marigolds and dahlias depict silhouetted soldiers in their World War One uniforms, and we pause for a moment’s reflection in the deserted children’s park.

Parakeets scream their atonal call to roost while we chat to another interested passerby.

Tracing the imperial history of New Delhi

The tidiness of the gardens around India Gate are a small irony of history.

To try and interpret the small granny square of Delhi I will get to see on my trip, I have a copy of William Dalrymple’s City of Djinns (the perfect book to bring on a trip to Delhi).

During his year-long stay in Delhi, he is surprised by how thoroughly trophies to (and of) the British Empire have been eradicated from the imperial part of the city.

Just in front of us rises the giant statue of Subhas Chandra Bose, the somewhat controversial Commander-in-Chief of the Indian National Army who opposed British rule and courted, absurdly, Nazi Germany and imperial Japan (both conquered and occupied foreign territories).

The canopy this statue stands under is “original Lutyens,” but a statue of King George V originally stood there.

Thanks to Dalrymple’s urbex, we now know that this statue is “stranded now, amid a great flooded wilderness” of the northernmost suburb of Old Delhi.

In the year after independence, the statue of King George V was defaced, and, after mounting civil pressure, replaced with the statue of Chandra Bose.

Dalrymple describes the remains of the original towering visage of the imperial king as “India’s Ozymandias” and invokes the cadence of Shelley when describing the dramatic moment of his discovery.

“Then, to one side of the horizon, erupting suddenly from the marshy flatlands there appears a vast marble image, an Indian Ozymandias.”

Elsewhere in his magnificent historical treatise, he describes the national character of the occupying British during the end of the Raj as philistinism.

Listening to the parakeets, I’m glad the citizens of Delhi have not adopted this trait and destroyed Lutyens’ park out of malice or carelessness.

Rashtrapati Bhavan: The Viceroy's house

Having travelled to one extremity of Rajpath, we decide that the best thing to do with the remainder of our evening in Delhi is to walk to its other end for some psychogeography.

It’s still quite early, but the smog ushers in a premature twilight and dusk settles fast.

Our train out of Old Delhi, the Brahmaputra Mail, leaves at 11:40pm.

We’d like to explore further away sights, but Friday rush hour is in full swing, and if one leg of our journey to Darjeeling via the Brahmaputra Mail and the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway goes wrong, it would jeopardise plans for the remainder of our stay in India.

In City of Djinns, Dalrymple remarks that Lutyens’ Viceroy’s house reminds him eerily of Nuremberg.

We can’t tell.

By the time we’re halfway between India Gate and Rashtrapati Bhavan, we cannot see either of them.

They are both a mere kilometre away yet entirely obscured by smog.

Cameron informs us that Rashtrapati Bhavan is lit up by night, to which Finn replies that its lights have just been switched on.

Squinting, we can just about make out some balls of differentially coloured haze.

Like a friend pointing out familiar shapes in a cloud, we imagine that we can see the fuzzy outline of a dome here and there.

We continue towards it but are turned away by guards with batons before we get too close.

So that’s that.

It’s getting too late for three unfamiliar sahibs to see anything else.

Alert for mosquitoes, we retrace our steps and sit under the canopy of a tree to take five.

Cameron gets our bearings while I catch up on messages.

All of a sudden, the parakeets fall silent, as if they have all succumbed to the same deadly gas.

After our short rest, night is fully upon us, so we decide to move on.

Delhi's traffic is as bad as its air quality

Know thyself. The maxim is seldom more profitable than when applied to travel.

We know that sitting hungrily on our two-day long train towards Darjeeling will only offer cheap returns.

With time left to spend in Delhi, and at more sociable hours than when we passed through in the early hours of last Sunday morning, we asked Ollie for good places to eat.

On his advice, we’re heading to Dilli Haat, a marketplace with plenty of food stalls.

An air-conditioned Uber is slowly taking us there, but we spend much of the journey at a standstill in gridlocked Friday traffic, naturally.

Access to air conditioning at this moment is probably adding minutes back onto our lives.

The air quality in Delhi on this midwinter night is about as bad as it ever gets.

And we’ve been sucking it into our lungs all evening. Outside, people wear rags over their faces to take the sharp edge off their inhalations.

If you want a beer in Delhi, plan ahead

We didn’t drink too much at the wedding.

We spoke about it and thought about it, but acquired little more than a “two-pint buzz,” all said and done.

To cut time off the journey, our Uber pulls a U-turn across a six-lane highway, through a gap in the central reservation.

If he knew how singularly and tantalizingly he had just deprived me of my short-term coping mechanism for the dreadful air—an ice-cold Kingfisher—the driver wouldn’t have looked so pleased with himself.

Cameron, always my strongest advisor and enabler of my habits and desires, has his phone out and is on the search for places where I might get a beer.

And there it is! The bewinged neon sign, six lanes and a central reservation away.

Well that’s that then.

I would normally acquiesce, but, as if to fob beer-lovers off, pictures of genuine lager, cold enough to create little jewels of sweat, are used to advertise its supposed non-alcoholic equivalent, called “fruit beer.”

Eating at Dilli Haat is safe, tasty, and atmospheric

In Dilli Haat, we sit down at one of the food stalls and gratefully dump our bags.

A stray cat wastes no time in pissing up Finn’s expensive Osprey rucksack.

To make his life worse, he somehow manages to order a heavily salted version of an otherwise palatable and refreshing drink.

Intrigued by his disgusted expression, I try some. It tastes like doing a tequila slammer with rehydration salts.

I reluctantly order a fruit beer. Probably, it has some agreed upon recipe, but as I watch mine being prepared I’m dismayed to see that it’s just Coca-Cola diluted to a lagerish colour.

I order some momos, Cameron orders a creamy curry because he’s having withdrawal from all the creamy curries he gorged on at the wedding, and Finn orders some chicken fried rice that he’s too ill to engage with.

He came down with a sickness bug before the wedding really got going and has still not recovered.

We’re charmed and relaxed by the atmosphere of Dilli Haat.

Young couples and groups of friends meet up for an enjoyable evening meal before moving on.

Fairy lights hang above us, and the lively chatter and the sizzling of the kitchens create a great buzz in the small courtyard.

The quality of the food these small kitchens turn out is sublime.

Towards 9pm, the diners thin out.

Closing time is approaching, so we take a walk around the market.

Unfairly or not, Hindu tat is my least favourite kind. Statues of elephant gods and carved mandalas would look very out of place in my secular, book-and-whisky laden flat.

The Pashmina shawls and Kashmiri cardigans are very attractive, but we resist the bargains and book our ride to Old Delhi railway station.

Crossing from New Delhi into Old Delhi at night

The traffic is a string of smoggy red halos from brake lights, advancing at the pace of a glacier.

We head through an underpass and emerge parallel to India Gate, lit up in the night in red, white, and green strong enough to pierce the turbid air. Some high-rises are also lit up in the same way.

In another underpass, the traffic bears right, away from us as we head left to re-emerge above ground in an entirely different city. Old Delhi.

Doubtless, it has its own charms and wonders waiting to be cherished by a virgin Western visitor.

But not this late at night, and definitely not from the roadside.

Gone is Lutyens’ Delhi with its nouveau Punjabi power and investment.

The wide, tree-lined boulevards have been replaced by narrow lanes and dark side alleys.

Probably, they are as harmless as anywhere in New Delhi, but seen at such contrast, it’s impossible not to gawp.

Despite emerging from an underpass, the district we have entered into looks subterranean.

Smoky little fires burn on the bare kerbside and at the edges of tent villages.

On the ring roads and beneath the great elevated flyovers, people lie wrapped head-to-toe in blankets, with all their possessions in a small pile beside them.

Just beyond their feet, a maelstrom of Tuk Tuks and taxis beep and rev around us.

The smog hangs low like November fog, appearing deceptively benign.

Moving from India Gate and Rajpath into Old Delhi, the contrast hits you immediately.