This year marks the fortieth anniversary of my first visit to Delhi.  I have returned many times in those forty years and it remains one of my favorite cities.  I recently had the opportunity to spend a few days there with someone seeing it for the first time.  I enjoyed being a tour guide, accompanying her to Humayun’s Tomb, Gandhi Smriti, and the Lotus Temple.  February can be a lovely month in Delhi, with cool, clear days and that extraordinary light, and we were blessed with brilliant blue skies.

Delhi has been transformed since my first visit and although I find it easy to remember the city of those days and the wonder-struck teenager I was, I have no nostalgia for the dirty and crumbling Delhi of the late 1970s.  It’s a cleaner, less chaotic city for sure, but seeing it through someone else’s eyes made me realize it’s lost none of its power to amaze.

First-time visitors to India tend to arrive in the country laden with misconceptions, half-truths, and distortions.  This is what Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie describes as “the danger of a single story” in her wonderful TED Talk.  Those who love India and its people, those who are drawn back again and again – and I’m certainly one of them – know it’s a place of a billion stories.  Some of them are mine.