India: Feast for the senses

The sun is burning through the fog when I arrive at Jama Masjid, the biggest mosque in India. The beggars still huddle under their woollen shawls warming their hands on little fires of gathered litter.

Inside, the mosque is surreal. The sideways sun makes its red stone glow like a ripe tomato, the vast square courtyard, populated only by thousands of bobbing, cooing pigeons, seems to stretch to eternity, and on the west side, facing Mecca, three huge bulbous domes crown the main prayer hall. The courtyard has a tall, elegant minaret at each corner, a pool where pigeons sip and splash in the middle and enough space for 25,000 men to prostrate themselves in prayer.

We climb the circling stairs in the south minaret - it's needle-thin and 60m tall. The Imam used to climb these steep stairs five times a day to make his singing call to prayer but now the song is blasted over the city from big speakers. The top is circled with a wire cage to stop the careless and suicidal from falling. We peer through, like caged birds, at the intricate immensity of Old Delhi.

Not 500m away, at the Jain Bird Hospital, we peer into cages where sick birds are healing. There is a peacock with a leg in a splint, a huddled eagle with its wing in plaster, sparrows with broken, bandaged wings , parrots with skin infections and hundreds of pigeons recovering from botulism, a paralysing disease.

All are fed and doctored by three vets and numerous assistants, before being released into parks or forested areas according to their habitat. The Jain Bird Hospital is funded by donations from worshippers attending the Digambara Jain temple next door.

The exterior of the temple is plain. Inside is an exotic, ecstatic wonderland of burning candles, incense, ringing bells and glittery gold from hundreds of Buddha-like statues. People sit cross-legged, chanting, many read prayers aloud and the rumbled resonance of hundreds of soft voices is punctuated by the bells' sharp dinging.

By late morning and, being a Sunday, a bigger than usual crowd queues outside the huge ramparts of the Red Fort. We enter the three-storey gate and walk through a long covered bazaar, lined with arched cells where vendors sell all manner of Indian art and souvenirs.

The bazaar opens up into an octagonal area a kilometre long and half as wide. Built by Shah Jahan in 1648, the fort included all the trappings a 17th-century Mogul emperor needed to rule. We walk through pleasure gardens, past fountains that once spouted rose water, past a lofty stone hall where the emperor sat in a marble throne and around an elegantly arched stage where musicians played at parties. The most beautiful building, among many, is the Diwan-I-Khas, a cool marble pavilion with pillars embellished with amber, jade and gold.

The Persian inscription on the wall translates into, "If there be paradise on the face of Earth, it is this, oh, it is this, oh, it is this."

And it is still, for some, paradise for a day. There are crowds of happy people delighting in their country's grand past - villages on tour, extended families, courting couples and school groups. People shuffle in and out of ancient buildings, sit on the lawn, walk around the fort in orderly lines and take pictures of each other with cellphones. Everyone is in their best, brightest going-out clothes and the women are a kaleidoscope of shimmering, moving colour.

Although the Red Fort is bustling with visitors, the usually frenetic alleys of Old Delhi are merely crowded.

Sunny, our bicycle rickshaw puller, can, in places, peddle apace. He's been a bicycle puller in the area for 23 years, so he knows Old Delhi's nuances.

We wheel up Chandni Chowk, the main street, and Sunny points out the remnants of Victorian England, the Bank of India, the Town Hall, the old administrative buildings huddled between flamboyant shops and decaying, patched 200-year-old merchant mansions.

Because it's Sunday (market day), motor vehicles aren't allowed into Chandni Chowk and street-sellers crowd the pavement and road.

Women sit surrounded by kitchen utensils. Shawl sellers and blanket vendors jigsaw between others specialising in plastic ware, stainless steel cutlery or winter jerseys. The street is bright with the colour of carefully displayed, squeezed-together stalls and is flowing with walkers, rickshaws, bicycles and cows.

Sunny parks his bike and we walk through the spice bazaar - the bouquet of cloves and aniseed is overpowering. My throat gags and my eyes sting with dust from the chillies.

An arched alley leads up steep dark stairs. The building was once a spacious, four-storey hospital built around a large open courtyard, but filled in like a beehive, it's evolved to become homes for thousands of folk.

Family homes are in single rooms off the access verandas, which have been incorporated into the home space, so we weave through tiny kitchens, past people doing laundry and through groups of men smoking and chatting.

On the roof we pick our way under drying laundry, around water tanks and past boys flying kites. We look over rooftops down into a hive of cubist houses all jigsawed together.

Some have swing chairs and pot plants on roof-top patios, some use their wee space for laundry. Old folks sit in the sun, girls comb out long hair, and men in their undies lather up and bathe from buckets.

Sunny takes us for a ride down back alleys. We pass glittering jewellery lane, bright, silky sari street, shoe street and on to butchers' row, where chickens huddle miserably in cages and gore drips into the open drain. We wheel past vegetable sellers, a flour mill, a tiny temple and slow down to pass a sleek, fat cow wearing a marigold garland. Sunny gives it a pat on the rump.

A day is seldom more extraordinary than this. I glimpsed Shah Jahan's paradise, saw hell in butchers' lane and walked through the world of Rudyard Kipling's Kim.

Crowded, colourful and buzzing with life, I'm agog, fascinated with the hectic, strange, medieval world in Old Delhi.