Qutb Minar lay only a few kilometers away. We’d decided to walk.
Rickshaws continued pulling alongside us every few hundred meters, each insisting they would take us there for free. By now we understood enough about India to know that nothing was free.
Then Dani noticed a narrow opening in the trees.
She looked at her map.
“This cuts through.”
Across six lanes of traffic, a dirt path disappeared into the woods.
Crossing the road proved harder than finding the path. Cars rushed past at highway speed, too fast for the weaving techniques that had carried us safely across streets everywhere else in India. We waited.
Eventually traffic stalled near the metro station.
Brake lights rippled backward until the lanes nearest us became an idling wall of buses, motorcycles, and cars.
We crossed.
~
The noise vanished almost immediately.
Trees replaced traffic.
A gravel path wandered between crumbling walls and broken domes.
No ticket booth greeted us.
No guards.
No souvenir stands.
Only scattered tombs disappearing into the brush.
Sometimes a narrow trail branched away toward another ruin. We followed whichever looked interesting.
At one tomb a man slept beneath a collapsing archway. Beside him leaned a shelf piled with book with an old clock hanging above it.
Nothing else suggested anyone had lived there.
A ruined step-well descended three stories underground.
An abandoned palace overlooked it.
A mosque overgrown with flowers.
The grass smelled warm. Birds sang from the trees.
For nearly an hour we wandered wherever curiosity pulled us.
~
Eventually the path emerged from the trees beside the entrance to Qutb Minar.
Tourists crowded the ticket booths.
Inside, thousands of visitors circled the tower, lifting their phones, turning in place, stepping back for wider shots.
The red sandstone rose above them, banded and carved, patched together by centuries.
A guide raised his voice over the crowd.
Cameras clicked.
I looked behind me.
Beyond the crowds, I could still see the gravel path disappearing into the trees.