on the day Chandni Chowk felt like mine

I've lived in this city for six years. Chandni Chowk, which is technically everyone's, has never felt like mine. Too crowded, too layered, too much happening at once. I go with intention and leave exhausted. But there was a Tuesday in December, cold enough for a jacket, that I went alone with no plan. I had been doing something in Lal Kila — a work thing, not important — and I had an hour to kill before the meeting moved to a second location. I walked into the spice market for no reason. The smell is the first thing, always — the layered, accumulated smell of a hundred different things ground and dried and traded in the same space for four hundred years. I walked slowly, which you can't usually do, but it was a Tuesday at noon in December and it was cold. An old man was sitting outside a shop selling dried rose petals. He offered me some in the palm of his hand, just loose petals. I stood there and held them and he went back to his newspaper. I don't know what made that day different. The cold, maybe. The fact of having no agenda. The rose petals, which I carried around for the rest of the walk and then didn't know what to do with and eventually left on a window ledge. For that hour, it was mine.