3/ 100 Vegetable Dog

In the very heart of Delhi are the narrow busy streets of Chawri Bazar. In the past we have enjoyed an early morning stroll along the ancient and cluttered streets with a jungle of cables overhead — home to families of monkeys who have adapted brilliantly to their manufactured forest environment. Rather than eating fruits and nuts from the branches of trees these urbanised creatures are scurrying along wires and washing lines to drop down on a tasty banana from above.

On this particular trip I found the ridiculously excessive amounts of traffic too off-putting and I really wasn’t enjoying it. I’d just find something interesting to look at, or photograph, and a taxi would try to squeeze by me, millimetres away, blaring its horn. I’d spot a tasty snack on the other side of this narrow street but be unable to reach it without getting mowed down by a Tuk Tuk. I hate being jostled at the best of times and this was horrible.

As with most of India there are footpaths, but it’s absolutely pointless to even attempt to use them. On market streets the footpaths are like nocturnal creatures, only appearing well after dark, and disappearing before the sun has even risen above the smoggy horizon. The reason for this? There is basically too much to fit onto the road so the pavements become crucial real estate for a variety of users. Walking down a path you will always find:

•Parked cars (left completely on the path)
•Vegetable stalls (see photograph)
•Chai sellers
•Huge craters from work that began in the 1970s and was never completed
•Extraordinary quantities of faeces
•Sentry boxes
•Rubbish piles the size of cars
•Benevolent cattle (sleeping and standing)
•Enormous trees

At best you will manage to walk / scramble about 10 metres along the footpath before resigning yourself to the fact that it is actually far more efficient to risk life and limb by doing as the Indian people, and dogs, do and walk on the road.

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