City Travel - Jardin du Palais Royal, Paris

City Travel – Jardin du Palais Royal, Paris

City Travel - Jardin du Palais Royal, Paris

The Delhi Walla in the French capital.

[Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi]

A family is having baguette and cheese. A middle-aged woman is jogging with her dog. A girl is kissing a boy. A young bride in white is walking with her man in a black suit. A pair of ‘sensitive boys’ is running together. The pigeons look better fed than their cousins in Delhi.

The Delhi Walla spends his first day in Paris in the shade of Jardin du Palais Royal.

Two symmetrical rows of trees make the garden. The benches are of wood and iron. All the trees reach to an equal height; their leaves look manicured to the same dimensions. The Louvre and the Seine is close, and the bourse is not far, but the garden, in the center of Paris, lies unaffected by the city that struts and rushes about it.

An underworld of intimate and discrete lives, the garden humanizes this aesthetically perfect city and makes a third-world foreigner like me feel at home.

Dark and inviting

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City Travel - Jardin du Palais Royal, Paris