The people of the aquarium.

[Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi]

Such delicate figure, such slender arms and all of her essence so perfectly condensed into her long white pearl necklace. And look at the woman there. Her white hair are fit enough for a Balkan queen. And that black woman in a pure black dress that leaves enough gap at a strategic spot for us to admire her bare black shoulder.

All these marvelous people are so different from us. It is like watching exotic fish in a glass aquarium.

One evening The Delhi Walla attended a party to celebrate the German Unity Day at the German ambassador’s residence. His sprawling lawns in the diplomatic enclave of Shantipath were a fairy world thousands of air-miles away from the Delhi we know. It was like entering into the pages of a society novel written at a time when it was still difficult to travel to strange lands, and the closest we could get to the faraway corners of the earth was by chance sightings of foreign faces.

As the evening ended, and the beautiful people left for their beautiful, spacious homes in their long, beautiful chauffeur-driven cars and I began my long search for an auto-rickshaw, the scenes of the evening became as ethereal as Hindu myths. By now, they are but a dream.

The foreign land

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