A reminder that the capital city was made for walking
Long before Sam Miller began exploring the streets of Delhi, another writer had measured them in steps. On one occasion in 1971, Ruskin Bond, quotes Miller, walked to his friend’s home in Rajouri Garden. When he told his friend’s family that he had walked there from Connaught Place, they “greeted him with a pained and bewildered silence”. Finally his friend’s mother, “a practical Punjabi lady, asked, “How did you lose your money?” They had never heard of anybody walking from choice.

Miller, too, walks from choice. A tall white man with a bad knee, who often evokes as much curiosity as he displays, neither chasing pigs nor sneering butchers can keep him at home. The result is the chronicle of his walks, a warm portrait of a city in all its ordinariness and strangeness. This is a city we recognise but not always stop for. Miller, a former BBC producer who stayed on in Delhi has the advantage of being both at home here and an outsider. He observes its changing rhythms and pieces together a map of a city of ruins that’s never stopped building, with its invisible but very-much-there snob divides and an energy fuelled by aspiration.

Miller’s Delhi is not the Delhi of emperors and colonisers. It is the Delhi of the everyday that meets him as he wanders about in a spiral, starting from Connaught Place, winding up in Gurgaon and walking over everything in between.

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