India – Ahmedabad Old City Center

Returning to Ahmedabad for my last couple days in India I stayed in Dhai Ni Pol (the old city center) in a remarkable 150 yr old building. This mostly Muslim area is a warren of narrow roads and even narrower alleyways. Some of the paths are so narrow that two people can’t walk by each other without someone getting pressed up against the walls. The buildings and paths were constructed to form mazes. I was told this was done on purpose as a deterrent to invaders. I’m sure it would give the locals a big advantage over an invader that wasn’t familiar with the layout.

In some areas you could be just yards from a place you wanted to get to but it’d take a half hour hike to cover that last few yards. I found this out the hard way a couple times. I was quite happy and a bit amazed that my navigation skills allowed me to walk three times out of Dhai Ni Poi and return without assistance, though once I got lost and spent and hour wandering the maze. When the hotel rents you this room they offer to rent a portable cellular wifi hot spot to guests so they can be located if all else fails.

My ‘room’ was actually an entire two story restored house named Mangaldas ni Haveli. It was quite a place with an intricately carved interior and massively thick wooden walls. I had the place to myself but many could have comfortably stayed there. There was no staff as the actual hotel that ran the place was a 20 minute tuktuk ride away through the maze. Quaint they called it.

There were several Mosques nearby. I went into a couple and wandered around without creating a stir. In places the walls were covered with beautiful graphic characters taken from the Urdu version of the Koran. Here’re photos of a few, there were many more and all quite beautiful.

Not far from my Haveli was an area alive with a mix of old and young. The old were drinking coffee amongst flirting young people until late at night. The scene looked familiar. Well, that’s not true, the scene looked totally foreign in terms of the surroundings, dress and most everything else. The thing that looked familiar was the flirting. There was a party mood. Joking and laughing which back home would imply lots of alcohol. “Exotic cocktails’ in a huge variety of flavors with no alcohol were sold from little stands. Guys carrying loads of them hawking cocktails and snacks to the crowd. And I do mean ‘crowd’, they were check to jowl for an entire block filled with blasting music and flashing lights. It felt like ‘date night’ but I wasn’t clear on how that works in a land of arranged marriages.

Pol seems to be the equivalent of ‘neighborhood’ or just ‘hood’ with each Pol having a slightly different feel. I went out walking very late that night exploring the Pols after the partying had settled down. The alleyways were deserted and lights out. I imagined it felt similar several hundred years ago.

Day and night there were dogs all around India in both Muslim and Hindu areas. The cool thing here was the dogs slept on the scooters. I found one cul-de-sac with a dozen scooters parked for the night with dog sleeping on each scooter. Well, there was one scooter that had a bunch of bricks placed on the scooters seat to keep the dogs off. I guess that scooters owner wasn’t fond of dogs.

I was in town the day Modi and Trump visited. Police everywhere and 20 ft improvised statues of the two. Lots of hoopla. I was able to use this as a landmark with entering the old city maze. After getting lost for an hour it took on a Groundhog Day feel for me.