A Winter in India

Lavina and Rajiv Shankar have arrived and have included us in many of the family visits they are making in their one and one half days here. We had a wonderful breakfast with Lavina's sister, Shavina. So many delcious things to eat and a pleasure to meet Shavina and her husband and his mother and sister.

We later went to a very old part of Delhi called Nizamuddin, a "village" that has grown up around the tomb of Hazrat Nizam-ud-din Aulia Chishti, a Sufi saint who died in 1325. Sufis are Moslem but Nizam-ud-din is revered by Moslems, Sikhs, Hindus and Buddhists because of his message of tolerance for all religions. His prayers are credited with saving Delhi from a Mughal invasion in 1303, so it is interesting that his tomb was actually built in the late 1600s by Shah Jehan, one of the greatest of the Mughal emperors (and builder also of the Delhi Red Fort and the Taj Mahal in Agra).

This place is not easy to find, and without Lavina asking lots of questions in Hindi, I'm not sure if we would have found it. Like everything else in India, this place was full of contradictions. This photo is the shrine, covered in gold and intricately painted with roses. The guy in the lower right is actually talking on his cell phone and reading the newspaper.