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Clue 1:
What is the name of the astrologers's shop in Palika Bazaar, where Sam Miller gets a print-out of his digital horoscope, in which he is informed, quite correctly, that he is fond of cardamom?
Extract One:
The carbuncular protrusions in the park that I'd just descended from are actually air-vents, waste-pipes and sky-lights serving the labyrinthine, sleazy, electronic, underground world of Palika Bazaar.
This is Connaught Place's alter ego, its sunless and shrunken doppelganger, built like CP in circles. Palika Bazaar is, in the modern vernacular, a grey market, with dodgy goods galore.
Neon-lit stalls, set into this concrete underworld, sell fake perfumes, Minnie Mouse wall-hangings, 101 Dalmatians T-shirts, plastic jewellery, hair-tongs from China bearing the label 'Intellectual Ionic Hair Permer', bust-developing cream, pirated DVDs of new Hollywood films, Indian and European porn movies on VCD, mobile phones without guarantees at 60% of list price, and, as I discovered precisely 57 minutes later, a watch battery that didn't work for more than an hour.
I wandered into a shop called Astro-Scan, which promised computer horoscopes within five minutes. I handed over 125 rupees, and the date, time and place of my birth. A young woman dressed in a crimson salwar kameez, entered the details into her late 1990's PC, using special pandit-ji software. In three minutes, twenty seconds, I had received eight closely-typed pages of horoscope. I learned that I am a) 'jolly natured', b) proficient at mathematics c) a 'glib talker', d) like to spread religion through music e) have drooping shoulders f) like cardamom, f) am attracted to the opposite sex, g) have a skin disease h) am good at interior decoration and i) have a 'unique and weird nature'. 6½ out of 10, I thought. Not bad. As I left, thanking the crimson lady, she eyed me - and said with a malevolent smirk 'you will have many girlfriends'.
Clue 2: What is the common name for ‘lymphatic filiarisis’ which Sam Miller found in an unusual list of diseases at New Delhi Railway Station?
What is the name of the astrologers's shop in Palika Bazaar, where Sam Miller gets a print-out of his digital horoscope, in which he is informed, quite correctly, that he is fond of cardamom?
Extract Two:
On a recent visit to Jantar Mantar, I came across a tourist who seemed to have lost something inside the baby-Coliseum-like Ram Yantra. He was on his hands and knees in the dust, moving between the starburst slices of masonry that emanate from its central column.
‘Hello,’ I said, in my special kind voice for unfortunate tourists. ‘Have you lost something?’
‘Nope. I ‘m looking for a cache’.
‘What’s a cache?’
‘Hidden treasure. Geocaching. Look it up on the Net.’
I did. Geocaching is relatively new to India. It bills itself as one of the fastest-growing leisure activities in the world. It’s a kind of global treasure hunt, based around the Internet and a small electronic device (a GPS) that tells you where you are. Someone puts some worthless objects inside a small plastic container and hides it somewhere (there are caches in almost every country in the world). Clues and map co-ordinates are entered into geocaching.com and geocachers have to find it. My unfriendly dust-grubbing tourist was chasing a cache that been hidden in the Jantar Mantar complex. I later discovered he’d not looked carefully enough at the instructions. The cache hidden at N 28° 35.033 E 077° 10.870 (the coordinates of the Jantar Mantar) was a virtual one. Which is to say that it did not exist. Apparently, in India, city caches rarely survive the day – acquisitive locals take them away, or they get eaten by goats.
Extract Two:
New Delhi railway station was built in the 1950s, at a time when internal air travel was very rare, and trains were for all. It remains hugely congested, a place where different worlds coalesce, and where notice-boards abound. First-time escalator-users get special help in Hindi and English: ‘While climbing escalators put right leg on moving stairs and hold handrail (black belt) and put another leg immediately on moving stairs. While climbing down put right leg on comb plate and leave the handrail and put another leg on comb plate.’ Unfortunately, this escalator was not moving – and judging by the number of fag-ends and beribboned bidi stumps on the comb plate it had been inactive for some time. I leant against a nearby wall, trying to be inconspicuous (successfully for once, because of the abundance of so many varieties of foreign tourists). Dazzled by the activity of this city in miniature, I began writing down everything I saw. Bare light-bulbs of low wattage. A human of indeterminate gender, covered in sackcloth, asleep on the tiled floor. A pigeon with its head inside a crisp packet. A railway official strutting past, stiff with self-importance.
Bedraggled children, squatting in a nook, sniffing something, perhaps glue, and playing cards. A European tourist openly smoking dope, fiddling with and twisting his dreadlocks. Paan-spattered marble, stained crimson. Emaciated, scarlet-shirted porters – still known as coolies – joshing each other. Two pleased-with-themselves policemen escorting a baby-faced captive in handcuffs. An anxious British man (for a moment I thought it was me), following a coolie, and in turn followed by a chain of three children clinging to each others hands as if their lives depended on it. ‘Da-ad, wait,’ I heard the rearguard cry. A grand Indian family, with servants, led by a woman barking orders in execrable Hindi – and parting the human waves as miraculously as Moses.
And a large notice headlined in blood red:
Attention of Foreign Tourists:
Beware of touts. Do not listen to those who attempt to tell you the ticket office for international tourists is closed. Please proceed to the international tourist bureau on the first floor at New Delhi railway station building and ignore those who attempt to lead you to a booking office elsewhere.
I was, at this point, grabbed at the elbow, by a man who had appeared out of nowhere. I immediately presumed this was the tout of whom I should beware. ‘I am not a tout. I am a helper’, he pointed out, helpfully. ‘Come with me to the international tourist bureau. He pointed to an alternative, functioning escalator – up which I ascended, alone, tout-less. I entered a chilled room, rank with the smell of unwashed human flesh. Inside were at least thirty assorted foreigners, not a smile among them: shattered by days of continuous travel, unconfirmed bookings, and failed attempts to find the right queue. Up above, huge posters exalted ‘the Romance of Travel’. Underneath, a sign saying ‘reservation forms’, and in place of any forms there was a large, thick book garrotted to the wall with two loops of industrial-strength wire. The title, “When There Is No Doctor – A Health Guide’, caught my eye. It was an alphabetical compendium of all the maladies that might befall an unlucky tourist: anal fissures, bewitchment, cholera, dengue fever, elephantiasis, food poisoning, genital warts, hookworm, insomnia, jock itch, kidney stones, leprosy, meningitis, nausea, obstructed gut, piles, questions to ask a sick person, rickets, scrofula, testicular swelling, unconsciousness, vomiting, xerophthalmia, and yeast infection.’ They had clearly given up on Z, a distinct failure of the imagination. The entry dealing with jock itch had been particularly well-thumbed. I suddenly felt it was time to leave, and reflect elsewhere on the pleasures of travelling in India.
Clue 3: What is the name of Sam Miller's favourite Delhi eyesore?
Extract One:
entered the compound of the Harcourt Butler Boys Secondary School, which seemed deserted. A small boy came up to me, and asked me what I was doing there. I said he looked a little young to be at secondary school. His father, he said, was the watchman, but was having a sleep, and had asked him to make sure there were no intruders. He told me that the school was closed for a public holiday, choti Diwali, the day before Diwali. I told him I only wanted to look around, and, with a small theatrical bow, he allowed me in. Above each classroom door was written a deeply disagreeable English saying, designed, it seems, to inculcate fear into the students. Many were on the theme of mortality. Class 17 had the simple ‘Do not forget death’, and next door was ‘Death keeps no calendar’, and after that ‘Everything is under the sway of death and decay’. I could barely believe this was not a joke. Then came others that were only slightly less fatalistic or bleak: ‘Misfortunes never come alone’, ‘Hunger is the best sauce’, ‘All relations are chains of bondage’, ‘Enjoyments are our fatal diseases’ and ‘Desires are a tantalising mirage.’ Out at the back of the school was a playground, backing on to the Ridge, with teenagers playing volleyball, all students from Harcourt Butler. I asked them about the slogans above the classroom doors – but it was clear that most of them thought it a strange kind of question and were untraumatised by their pessimistic view of life. I climbed, unskilfully, up on the Ridge, alone among the rocks except for a family of black pigs, and gazed over central Delhi’s skyline – picking out Gopal Das Bhavan and the India Life building to the East and, to the South, the puce, circumcised dome of the Presidential Palace, New Delhi’s flagship building, and a key landmark for the next twist of my spiral.
Extract Two:
The British never really got to enjoy New Delhi. The new city took twenty years to build, and less than seventeen years after it was inaugurated, the British had left, tails between their legs, to return only as tourists, journalists and spouses. The Viceregal Palace was not, as Mahatma Gandhi would recommend, turned into a hospital; the huge family quarters of what became Rashtrapati Bhavan (the Presidential Palace) was occupied until recently by a bachelor nuclear scientist. The bureaucrats of North and South Block still reign supreme on Raisina Hill – a tribute to the continuing power of the Indian civil service. But they are barely visible. The minor potentates, file-shuffling princelings of the License Raj, enter from below through side doors; the big shots, the VIPs and (to use the Delhi demotic) the VVIPs, arrive in white air-conditioned Ambassador cars. There is something eerie, inhuman, about the whole area. Authoritarian, like Nuremberg, declaimed one writer about Delhi. I find its silent emptiness even more striking. Here is a huge, landscaped, open public space in the centre of the one of the biggest cities in the world, and it is desolate. No-one is here, except for me.
Originally all central government ministries were to be housed in North and South Block, but they became far too bloated. And so began the construction of many a ministerial bhavan, some of them of quite breathtaking ugliness. My favourite eyesore of them all, astonishing for its total lack of grace or aesthetic sense, is the bleak, scab-encrusted, moulting, death-grey eight-storey cattle shed called Sena Bhavan, or Army House, which loomed over me as I headed south from South Block, towards the heart of the land of the bungalows, known officially as the Lutyens Bungalow Zone or LBZ.
Clue 4:
There are two of Mahatma Gandhi’s teeth on display in the Gandhi Memorial Museum. In which central Indian city were they extracted?
Extract One
Khan Market, quite justifiably, has a reputation as Delhi’s most up-market market. Yet everything is on a small scale, with lots of little shops grouped together in a U-shape. It is far from stuffy, and provides a distinct break from the empty anodyne quality of bungalow land. Suddenly there are lots of purposeful and purposeless people milling around, creating loosely interconnected networks of activity. In this respect, it is like the rest of India and quite unlike Lutyens’ Delhi. Khan Market is an idlers’ dream: two delicatessens, three camera shops, four bookshops, five cafes, toy shops, magazine stalls, juice sellers, boutiques, a temple, even an animal dietician (‘Royal Canin – nutritional programme for dogs and cats’. The shop even has its own vision statement: ‘Knowledge of the pet. Commitment to the owner. Respect for both.’). And Khan Market’s hinterland spreads to its north and east, with busy roads, a mosque, a hotel, a street of restaurants, a taxi stand – before succumbing once again to the funereal atmosphere of bungalow land. Even the cemeteries here have more life – and there is a triad of them, adjoining each other; one each for Christians, Jews and Parsis. In the Christian cemetery, full of visitors, gravediggers, coffin-makers, masons, overseers and gardeners I chance upon the strangest of headstones. It says simply
STELLA
OF
MUDGE
1904-1984.
---a fable---
.
A gardener tells me she was a foreign princess, but knows no more than that . I peer over a wall into the much smaller Jewish cemetery. A young man beckons me to climb over, and getting a toe hold on a broken slab of marble I am able to stand on the wall. I’m so seized by what I see that I wobble and almost fall off. Amid a tennis-court sized cemetery, with headstones inscribed in Hebrew and English, many bearing a Star of David, I see a small hut, with two swastikas daubed in red paint on the wall.
Extract Two
Just beyond Feroz Shah Kotla is a second and larger Gandhi memorial museum. Here, in contrast to the striking lack of Gandhi’s possessions at Birla house, is a vast reliquary, a collection of objects that Gandhi once used, once touched: a microscope through which he examined leprosy germs, a plastic bowl (which appears to have come from a 1960s Tupperware set), an ivory toothpick and ear-cleaner, a fountain pen, a pin cushion, a spittoon. There are some human remains – two teeth extracted by Dr Barreto in Nagpur in 1936. And in a separate sanctuary, the blood-stained clothing Gandhi was wearing at the time of his death is displayed, alongside two of the bullets that killed him. Most bizarrely, there is, as there also is at the Birla House museum, the watch that Gandhi was wearing at the time of death, the one that fell to the ground and stopped at seventeen minutes past five. I tried to joke with the curator about it. Perhaps, I suggested, Gandhi was wearing two watches that both fell and both stopped at 5.17, or maybe the watch spends half the week here and half the week at Birla House . He was not amused, and sent me off towards the postage stamps gallery, where I discovered that seventy-two different countries have issued stamps bearing pictures of Gandhi. And then another gallery, for what might loosely be termed artwork. There are dozens of images of Gandhi in a wider range of media than I could have imagined: wire on wood, embroidered silk, watercolour on peepul leaf, mosaic of groundnut shell, and two rather lifelike paintings of Gandhi in human blood.
http://www.penguinbooksindia.com/delhi/photo-gallery.html
1An Internet search for Stella + Mudge helped solve this mystery. She was, it turns out, the second wife of the eighth Maharaja of Kapurthala. Stella Mudge was the stage name of Alice Villiers, a Kent-born cabaret dancer, the daughter of a wire-walker-cum-publican, who married the Maharaja of Kapurthala in London in 1937.
2The two watches are not identical; the one at Birla House has two smaller inner dials, and Arabic numbers. The one in the bigger museum has one inner dial and Roman numbers, and on my return the time had been changed to twelve minutes past five. I have also been unable to locate the well-travelled gun that killed Gandhi, a 9mm Beretta, manufactured in Italy. It was taken to Abyssinia by an Italian soldier in the late 1930s, and later brought to India by a soldier serving in the British army.
Clue 5: What animal parts did Sam Miller mistake for fir cones?
Extract One:
I was standing on the roof of a three-storey tenement block in Old Delhi, with my new laptop open, propped up precariously on a heap of broken bricks and tiles. A teenage boy was next to me - my self-appointed guide. We were watching a black-and-white movie on the laptop. Both of us were doing the same thing, looking up at the view from the rooftop and down at the screen of the laptop, up and down, again and again. We’d already had one minor skirmish, when he tried to touch the keyboard, but he’d let me resume control. With my finger on the laptop’s touchpad, I was able to fast forward, rewind, and then, frame by frame, search for the right shot… and then, finally, I had it. My guide gurgled and pointed excitedly. Triumphantly, I pressed the pause button on an image of a striking eighteenth-century building, with a man and a woman arguing in the foreground. My guide and I smiled at each other as if we had discovered hidden treasure.
Extract Two:
Large, proud hook-nosed hawks, at least a dozen of them; they hovered above me and then swooped, disappearing from view, and then reappeared soaring up and out of sight or sitting, tearing at and chewing something on a roof-eave. Then I saw a wooden handcart, carrying a mass of small, dark objects that looked from a distance like fir-cones. Two hawks were circling over the cart – and the cart-puller would lazily wave his stick to scare them away. As I got closer, the fir-cones appeared to be hairy, like rotten rambutans or blackened tufts of grass. I saw what I thought were tiny patches of pinkish flesh, and that the objects were vaguely bowl-shaped. I peered at the cart closely. And then I recognised them for what they were. Ears. Hundreds of them. Freshly cut, I presumed, noticing that the purple-red blood had not yet congealed. I gagged, and a strange noise of disgust came from my throat. The cart-puller laughed out loud.
Clue 6:
What is the Greek version of the name Jerome, after whom a Dutch master was named, and who was the apparent inspiration of some cartoons on the wall of a house on New Rohtak Road?
Extract One:
Beside the entrance to the International Centre for World Renewal were several smaller similarly-hyperbolic signboards, this one a little obscure but strangely seductive:
Health, Wealth, Happiness for 21 Births is your God-Fatherly Birth Right.
NOW OR NEVER
Those last three words were painted in scarlet, each letter eight inches high. I was in the mood to give ‘now’ a chance. I headed in, passing through a dust-choked courtyard and entered a square room, whose four walls were covered with dazzling cartoon-strip murals. No-one was there. In the centre of the room was an armchair. I sat down and looked around me at the swirl of colours and caricatures. The head of a man, a comic-book Tintinesque villain with x-ray vision and a magnificently-oiled handlebar moustache, was leering at a woman in a scarlet sari. And next to him, written in English: ‘Sex-Lust’. Underneath was written the Hindi word kaam, or sexual desire . I began to look at the other murals - all depicting acts of destruction or depravity. These were scenes from nightmares: a hanged man, a nuclear war, a stabbing, a race riot; like Hieronymus Bosch with clothes on.
Extract Two:
Rajendra Place is a decrepit shopping mall that only dates back to the 1990s, crumbling as if it were a fourteenth-century pre-Mughal caravanserai. It is a failed attempt to bring commercial life to a run-down area of the city. This is Delhi at its most mediocre. Walkways and staircases are turning to rubble, steel reinforcements protrude dangerously, huge malarial puddles wait to be evaporated by the sun, blue wall paint can be pulled off in sharp-edged sheets. Above, precarious pieces of concrete are destined to crash to earth. A watchman told me that cheapskate builders had used the wrong cement mix. For no obvious reason, Rajendra Place appears to be very popular with accountants. Further on is an entirely empty McDonalds, an un-air-conditioned cybercafé, a large hotel in the middle of a building site – and the new Metro line, towering high above the fractured pavement. A passing accountant tells me that the Metro will bring new life to the area; sotto voce, I suggest that a few controlled explosions might be just as effective.
Clue 7:
What was the British name for the city, renamed after a Saudi prince and now the third largest urban centre of one of India’s neighbours, which was the birthplace of the Olympian who was impersonated by the author at Nehru stadium.
Extract One:
It was as Willingdon Airport that this tract of land entered my childhood consciousness. I was a youthful admirer of the twentieth century’s most famous Belgian: Tintin, a teenage journalist with a quiff, whose cartoon escapades I can still recall in embarrassingly accurate detail. Near the start of Tintin in Tibet, the most visually evocative of all his adventures, the eponymous hack, accompanied by his dog Snowy and his alcoholic, blaspheming collaborator, Captain Haddock, spends three eventful hours in Delhi. And they nearly miss their flight from Willingdon airport to Nepal. They sprint desperately across the runway towards the Air India plane, but Haddock, blinded by a mote, runs up the wrong airplane staircase, and plunges to the tarmac. He is - and here we enter the realms of airline fantasy – still allowed to board the plane. An Air India stewardess patches up his wounds with sticking plasters as the flight leaves Willingdon for the Himalayas and a series of perilous adventures with an abominable snowman, levitating Tibetan monks, and a lost Chinese boy called Chang.
Extract Two:
It’s possible to date Delhi’s emergence into modernity to 1982. This was the year of the Asian Games, which was the spur to the construction of many of the city’s flyovers and five-star hotels. And the centrepiece of the Games was the Nehru stadium, built between three minor medieval tombs to the east of Lodi Colony. The stadium is Delhi’s largest, with a capacity of seventy-five thousand, but it has rarely seen a capacity crowd, and is, in practice, outranked by the National Stadium at the end of Rajpath, and by the cricket Valhalla at the Kotla ground. The list of tenants outside the Nehru stadium betrays the obscurity or unexpectedness of some of the activities within. It is home to the Wushu Association of India, the National Project for the Eradication of Rinderpest, Fibcom (India), and the National Hydrogen Energy Board (Ministry for Non-Conventional Energy Sources). I wandered around the stadium, followed by an affable Sikh watchman in a turquoise turban. The all-weather russet track had seen better days and more serious runners. I briefly ran at full pace, breasting the finishing line as if I had won the 100 metres at the Olympics that Delhi hopes to hold in 2020. As I slowed, pumping the air with my fist, I caught my left foot on the misaligned metal of the track. I jarred my good knee, and came to a sudden halt. I fell to the track and rolled up my trouser leg, looking, with the excitement of a hypochondriac, for signs of swelling. The watchman knelt beside me, and silently and studiously examined my knee, before helping me back to my feet. ‘I’m Milkha Singh’, I told him, and he laughed. I had guessed the name of his hero, ‘the Flying Sikh’ who came fourth in the 400 metres at the 1960 Rome Olympics – still the best performance by an Indian track and field athlete.
Clue 8:
Taganrog’s most famous son, this mongoose-owning doctor’s second collection accompanied Sam Miller on his disastrous second visit to Delhi’s most controversial temple.
Extract One:
A week later, encouraged by the doctor to keep on walking, I went back to Akshardham. Chekhov’s short stories were permitted entry, and so I would have something to read as I queued for India’s largest IMAX cinema, showing a 45-minute film about the life of Swaminarayan, and the 12-minute subterranean boat-ride through 10,000 years of India’s history (7.2 seconds per century). An officious ticket-seller with a Swaminarayan baseball cap and a sleepy left eye said that I would have to buy a ticket for the diorama animatronics as well as the IMAX and the boat-ride. I readily assented – but said that I would skip straight to the film. ‘No’, I was told. I would have to see the diorama animatronics. I explained that I had already seen it, last time I had visited – and it had taken an hour, and it was very good, but I didn’t want to see it again.
‘No, that is not allowed.’
‘But I’ve already seen it.’
‘No queue-jumping’, I was told firmly and just a little unfairly.
A smiling young Indian woman, a fellow visitor, told me it would be good for me to see the diorama animatronics again. ‘It is very soulful’, she said with the kind of look normally reserved for the mentally ill. I cracked, losing my cool, slamming my Chekhov down on the ticket counter and began muttering about incompetence and intolerance. I think I lived up to their expectations of me, a difficult foreigner with no patience, and, probably, no soul, and, just possibly, a little mad. I marched off and feeling a little ashamed. And I would probably never see the 45,000 extras in the IMAX film, or learn about the ‘rishi-scientists’ of ancient India, while floating on a boat through an underground tunnel.
Extract Two:
I struggled my way through a waterlogged building site, waved on theatrically by hard-hatted construction workers, leaning out precariously from bamboo scaffolding, directing me over tangled piles of steel wire and hillocks of gravel towards the nearest road. As the clanking of metal on metal, and the shouted instructions of the building foreman, began to fade, they segued with an entirely unexpected sound that seemed to be coming from a coppice beside a broad avenue of rutted, fossilised mud. It was, I imagined western classical music, as if a brass band were playing Mozart on the deserted Yamuna flood-plain. How absurd, I told myself. The winter sun was turning my mind. But the music got louder as I neared the coppice, and I thought I recognised it as the opening bars of The Marriage of Figaro. Peering over a hedge, into a small sapling-ringed clearing, rubbing my disbelieving eyes, I realised that this was not an illusion or a dream. It was a police brass band in mid-performance. At least thirty uniformed men sat and stood with their backs to me in a semi-circle, the sunlight dancing off their gleaming golden trombones, trumpets and tubas, and the conductor, on his feet and pacing around, was flamboyantly wagging his baton at them. He spotted me – and distracted, he allowed the tempo to slow, and a trombone broke ranks, squawking out a false note, and the overture was transformed into a cacophony of blustery yowls, and the conductor dropped his baton, smiling accusingly at me.
Clue 9:
The Hindu Rao hospital in north Delhi offers the amputation of which body part, on its list of facilities and service available to the general public?
Extract One:
The Hindu Rao government hospital has long been the butt of medical jokes, and has a reputation as a place, whether sick or healthy, which it’s best to avoid. I first visited Hindu Rao in the early part of the new millennium, and while exploring the oldest part of the building came upon a particularly squalid pile of medical waste in a corridor next to the plastic surgery ward. There were used syringes, soiled bandages, and specimen bottles complete with specimens – and some cockroaches having a feast. Half a decade later, the plastic surgery wards had been emptied, the corridors cleaned and the cockroaches had disappeared. The only medical waste I could find was near the incinerator, neatly stacked in colour-coded heavy-duty plastic bags. Hindu Rao seems to have had a minor makeover. In 2005, it even got its own website as part of the Municipal Corporation of Delhi Hospitals’ portal, launched with some fanfare as a new healthcare service to the people of the Indian capital. The site includes a brief history of the Hindu Rao building, clinic opening hours, several paragraphs of tongue-twisting medical obscurity (including references to Choledocholithotomy, Myringotomy and Sialolithiasis) and a shopping list of operations provided by the hospital, including, I do not joke, ‘amputation of penis’. It is not quite clear whom the website is targeting.
Extract Two:
Hindu Rao’s socio-economic footprint ripples down the western slopes of the Ridge – with small, unkempt buildings which provide homes for junior hospital staff, and house businesses selling an impressive range of surgical and pharmaceutical paraphernalia. And then at the bottom of the Ridge, this medical hinterland crashes into the footprint of another institution, Delhi University. There, on the streets, is a brief intermingling of white coats and T-shirts; of the sick and the stoned; of hypochondria and flirtation. Then, as I continue westwards, the students take over, establishing their own brief dominance with a wave of cybercafés, bargain boutiques and fast food shops. The University Bookshop’s window display is plainly the creation of a marketing whiz-kid who has discovered that students aren’t really interested in purchasing textbooks. The titles on display are Creative Loving: An Inspiring Guide to the Art of Making Love, Guitar Facts, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, Week-by-week Pregnancy Planner, India’s Cricket Captains, Delhi Nightlife Guide, and The Street Guide to Flirting.
Clue 10:
The leaf of which plant, conjoined with the name of an East Asian capital, is used to make the noose used to hang death row prisoners at Tihar Jail?
Extract One:
: ‘TJs’ is a retail brand. It has a logo of its own, a red bird that appears to be carrying the letters T and J from its beak, like a stork delivering a baby. The main retail outlet for TJs products is a rather unusual gift shop, with the same name. It stands all alone, far from any shopping mall or street market. Its entrance is set into the wall of Delhi’s longest urinal. I spotted seven drive-by pissers – two cyclists, one auto-rickshaw driver, and four car passengers, their vehicles clumsily parked on the kerbside. The stench of urine was overwhelming by the time I reached the iron gates of TJs. The urinal is in fact the eastern wall of Tihar Jail, whose initials give the brand and the shop its name; and the gifts inside are all made by prisoners.
Extract Two:
Five days passed. Tihar procured a rope. The deputy superintendent of Tihar travelled more than 700 km to the town of Buxar to collect it personally. The sixteen-foot wax-coated rope was made out of twenty separate yarns spun from Manila hemp by prisoners in Buxar jail. Technical specialists were consulted to assess how long the gallows ‘drop’ should be. Too short - and death would be very slow. Too long - and there’s a chance of decapitation. Indian news websites gave the English-speaking, computer-using elite a chance to take part in the debate. The hangers outnumbered the non-hangers by roughly ten-to-one. On the website of the acronymically-challenged CNN-IBN, one of India’s newest and most professional news channels, there was a section entitled ‘How to kill Afzal. Needle or rope?’ Among the suggestions sent in by e-mail were that he be buried alive, have all his limbs chopped off and then allowed to bleed to death, or that medical students practice their surgical techniques on him while still alive, and without anaesthetic
You should now have a single-letter answer to each of the first 10 clues. Rearrange the letters to make a Delhi place name – in preparation for the 11th clue which will help you locate the more precise whereabouts of the treasure.
Clue 11:
Five conditions for Hindi speakers with a garden, or perhaps an instruction at the end of a driving test, in South Delhi.
If you need some help click here! (link this to a new page that displays this excerpt:
P__________ _____ is in the heart of South Delhi, the city of the well-to-do. The super-rich live to the north in their Lutyens-style ‘bungalows’, or in ‘farmhouses’ along the city’s southern borders. In the 1950s, most of South Delhi was farmland and villages, and as the poorer newcomers built to the west and east, the well-off moved southwards. These were, quite literally, greenfield sites. Today, South Delhi is the haunt of the junior diplomat and the senior journalist; of expatriate aid workers and retired mandarins. This is Anglophone, blinkered, comfortable Delhi with its large pockets of well-hidden poverty, away from the main roads, away from the unprying eyes of its more affluent residents, who travel to their offices and golf clubs and sports centres in smart new cars (with chauffeur, of course – except on Sundays) and do not venture off-piste into the congested slums where their sweepers and washerwomen reside.
Clue 12:
The treasure will be found in a park within a park; a park with four bandstands and a 1.6 km fitness trail.
Extract One
We live at the end of a cul-de-sac, at the top of a house built in the late 1960s, which is overshadowed by the crumbling stone walls of Siri Fort, built two-thirds of a millennium earlier. Unlike our earlier flat, there is no lift, or generator, or marble flooring, or sauna. A previous tenant tried and failed to retrofit the bathtub with a jacuzzi. The toilet seat (on which I experienced my first earthquake) is broken, and nips my left buttock every morning. The water dribbles from the shower, the plug points have been installed sideways on, or upside down, much of the woodwork is rotten, and rainwater leaks through the window frames. But its idiosyncrasies are not life-threatening, and it is deliciously eccentric in a part of the city where modular similitude prevails. This is a home that I love, and from which I have finally made my peace with Delhi. And best of all, only twenty metres away, is one of those magical patches of half-tended wilderness, complete with four bandstands, hidden away, unknown to the rest of Delhi. At sunset, I walk and run here, waving at or exchanging local gossip with other regulars, who, like me, want to keep this perfect place a secret.
Clue 13:
Extract One
Follow the exercise trail for 300 metres, to an oddly appropriate signboard. The treasure is about 15 metres from the signboard, in the jungle behind. Climb the small slope to the left of the signboard. From the top, take five paces straight ahead and then take eight paces to the left. Turn 90° right and walk a further twenty-five paces (make sure you duck beneath the branch of the tree). Then turn 90° left and take another six paces. Look for the orange ribbons, and an ancient ruin. In that ruin, the Treasure awaits…
See the Treasure Hunt photos here
PLEASE NOTE: THE TREASURE HAS NOW BEEN FOUND.
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