Pyotr is crestfallen. The Delhi air is hot and gritty. Temperatures are in the 90s, and his stock of Kashmiri woolly sweaters, knitted to keep out Siberian winter draughts, is attracting no attention.
No one is shopping, which is particularly irksome given the lengths to which he has gone to try to snag clients. He calls himself Pyotr when he is, in fact, an Indian born in Delhi, called Kumar. I have seen him before, a short, amiable figure prowling outside his small shop in what the locals consider a prestigious New Delhi market but which is more accurately described as a store-lined underground subway, like a smelly passage in one of London’s least lovely Tube stations.
He works his pitch in competition with "Misha" whose shop is opposite and who is also an Indian who has renamed himself for commercial reasons. Their targets are Russian-speaking tourists and diplomats from the former Soviet Union whose embassies are close by. To increase their appeal, both men have learnt Russian. The same seems true of much of rest of the market, Yashwant Place. One walks through it to a heavily accented chorus of "Ztrastuite" and "Privyet"; Cyrillic signs advertising jewelry, cheap flights, international phone calls and even stress counseling are everywhere. "It’s not always easy," Pyotr explains. "Call out ‘Hello’ in Russian to the wrong person and they don’t like it. The Czechs don’t like it; nor do the Americans."
***
We know the rules. Do not look a British football fan in the eye because this is grounds for violent attack. So too in Delhi, with one very small difference.
"Don’t look the monkeys in the eye." That’s what everyone told us here. It’s not as easy as it sounds, because you don’t often see monkeys loitering around a world capital. Eyeball-to-eyeball contact is considered aggressive, and may well cost you your nose, or a chunk of cheek. Delhi’s authorities have been trying to get rid of them for ages.But they are still here, Robert de Niros in simian form, thinking, "Hey, you lookin’ at me?" Every time I chug past in a rickshaw, my eyes averted. (The Independent)
