Simple pleasures

Mumbai does not give you the simple pleasure of standing by a pool in a park and watching geese swim by. Delhi does. On this count I score Delhi ten on a scale of one to ten. Work brought me to Delhi, but in the evening before I dived into a series of meetings, I followed the locals into a lovely garden in the middle of town: the Lodhi garden. The sun was about to set when I walked through this crowded park and came to the pond full of geese. Some of them stood about in the shallows and honked; others glided through deeper waters, submerging occasionally and coming up looking satisfied for no visible reason.

In the middle of these large white birds I saw a small dark thing swimming rapidly by. Was it a duck? No. When I looked at it the purple colour was clear. A lone purple moorhen glided past the cacophany of geese. I stood by the pond as the sun went down, enjoying these utterly commonplace sights in the company of the hordes of Delhi.