Shahjahanabad

Old Dehli, Shahjahanabad, the walled city built by the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan in the 1600s. Intense, but in a different way from the neighborhood of the Namaste Hindustan and Central Train Station. Still the high energy but less of the hustle.

And unlike the Dehli of monuments, government buildings, high end shops, and restaurants, there are far fewer cars and many more tuk-tuks, rickshaws, and motorcycles.

With Dolly, our guide from Lost Compass, a young couple and I explored its streets from mid-afternoon until bedtime, sampling the food along the way.

We started out on foot - Cormack, born in Georgia, raised in Ireland, later moving to Amsterdam where he’s an AI coder and met Flavia from Rome, a social media consultant for Booking.com.

Our first stop,

bites of soya chaap,

a soy-gluten dough pre-cooked and fried hard with red chili, chaat masala, salt, lemon juice a little butter added. Chewy inside and crispy outside. Yum.

Then a slice of ananas chaat,

pineapple slices tossed in a powdered spice mix of chaat masala, kalak namak (black salt), red chili powder and roasted cumin powder, topped with pomegranate seeds and dark brown chutney. Quite a treat.

Second stop, samosas,

deep-fried pastries filled with spiced potatoes and peas, served with red and green chutney. I preferred the red for its sweet-tangy heat.

We road a tuk-tuk for a while,

hoping off for a weigh in.

Dolly says, for reasons unknown to her, Indians prefer a public accounting.

More walking

then the spice market

and a back alley peak,

emerging to find a passing wedding procession,

and enjoy an amritsari lassi wala,

fresh curd set overnight then churned with sugar added and topped with malai - a thick layer of clotted cream - saffron, crushed almonds, and cardamon.

With evening came the observation of Shab-e-Barat, a religious food distribution of a rice pudding known as kheer.

It’s a night of remembering the departed, prayer, charity, and feeding others.

Dolly cautioned against accepting the kheer.

“You don’t know what’s growing in it.”

Instead we sipped on Old Delhi chai,

milk and water boiled together with loose black tea added along with cardamom, ginger, cloves, cinnamon, and a lot of sugar.

According to Dolly, it’s meant to “revive the body in the middle of chaos.”

Last stop, kachori,

a soft dough mound filled with a mixture of ground lentils, cumin, coriander and chili, fried until crisp.

Time for bed.