A weekend in Delhi

Saturday morning: the south, the oldest part

South Delhi holds the oldest part: the first cities stood here. The Qutub Minar is the obvious stop (the tallest brick minaret in the world, the mosque built from demolished temple stones, the iron pillar that doesn’t rust) and you have to see it.

But what almost nobody does is what’s right beside it, and it’s the best thing in this city: the Mehrauli archaeological park. It’s an urban forest with over a hundred monuments inside (tombs, mosques, a stepwell, small palaces) from a thousand years of different periods, ruined, unrestored, unfenced, unticketed and with practically nobody there. You walk among them as if strolling through an ordinary park.

After the Qutub Minar queue, crossing over there and being alone in a thirteenth-century tomb is a contrast you don’t forget. Go early in the morning.

Saturday afternoon: Nizamuddin

Beside Humayun’s Tomb, in a maze of narrow lanes that doesn’t look like it leads anywhere, is the Sufi shrine of Nizamuddin, one of the most important living pilgrimage sites in South Asia. It has been running since the fourteenth century, without a break, and there’s the difference from almost everything else on this list: it isn’t a monument, it’s a place of worship full of people praying.

You go in barefoot, with your head covered, and everyone goes: Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs. What to know is the day: on Thursday evenings qawwali is sung, Sufi devotional music, in the shrine’s own courtyard, and it isn’t a show for tourists but the place’s ordinary liturgy.

You sit on the floor for an hour, among the people, listening. Go with respect and without a camera in anyone’s face. Leave an offering if you like.

It’s one of the most intense things you can do in this city and it costs nothing.

Sunday morning: the kitchen of ten thousand

In central Delhi, a step from Connaught Place, there’s a Sikh temple, the Bangla Sahib, with a tank and golden domes. It’s beautiful, but that isn’t why you go: you go for the kitchen.

The langar operates there, a central institution of Sikhism: a free meal, for anyone who turns up, with no questions about who they are, what religion they follow or whether they have money. Thousands of servings are given here every day, every day of the year, and volunteers do all of it: people peeling garlic in mountains, rolling bread on a production line, scrubbing pots the size of a bathtub. You can go in and watch, you can sit on the floor in a row with everyone and eat, and you can lend a hand if you want.

You enter barefoot and with your head covered: they hand out scarves at the door. It’s probably what you’ll take away from Delhi.

Sunday afternoon: the gardens and the tombs

In the middle of well-off Delhi, the Lodi Gardens offer a big leafy park, with lawns, paths and people exercising, picnicking and doing yoga late in the afternoon. And in the middle of the grass, just like that, there are five or six monumental tombs from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, from the dynasties that ruled here before the Mughals. Enormous, domed, open.

Nobody treats them as monuments, and that’s exactly the charm. There are kids playing cricket beside a five-hundred-year-old tomb, older men taking their walk through the inside of a mausoleum and couples sitting on the steps. In Europe that would be fenced with a twelve-euro ticket. Here it’s the local park.

Go an hour before sunset, which is when it fills with people and when the light hits the red sandstone. It’s the best place in Delhi to do nothing.