India made easy

For the first-time visitor to India, the sheer vastness of the country — more than a million square miles — all but defeats the romantic notion of seeing all that this place has to offer in anything approaching the usual time frame of a normal vacation. Retirees no longer punching the clock, college students who want to take a couple of semesters off, backpackers on a global journey of exploration: these are the kinds of travelers that India seems made for.

But what about the rest of us who are limited to one or two weeks of vacation a year? Is India completely beyond our grasp?

In a word, no. Even sampling the tiniest geographical crumb of India over a period of 7 to 10 days can be a satisfying travel experience.

Quite rightly, no one wants to miss the Taj Mahal, especially on a first visit, so our suggested route pivots around that Platonic ideal of tourist attractions. Spending a couple of days first in the nearby capital of New Delhi — a strange patchwork of imperial Mughal monuments, bustling urban villages, leafy British Raj-era avenues and expanding middle-class housing colonies — is bound to give you a good taste of urban India. Still, some two-thirds of Indians live outside the nation's cities. With that in mind, this route, after passing through Agra, site of the Taj, and the ruins and palaces of Gwalior, culminates in Orchha, a riverside village well-stocked with palaces, tombs, Hindu temples and ordinary village life.

Rajasthan? That fascinating, tourist-infested merry-go-round has been deliberately omitted, though it is a place worth coming back to when you have time to explore its less overdeveloped pockets. The hiking trails of the Himalayas and the beaches of Goa? Next time.

Start your trip in New Delhi. Like a steaming bath, the city is best eased into slowly, and there are few sights more soothing than catching an advanced yoga practitioner holding a pose in the city's lush Lodi Gardens with the spooky, 15th-century domed tombs of the Lodi sultans looming in the background. Residents from the well-to-do neighborhoods nearby go there to picnic or jog it all off, while young couples still head there to coo discreetly, keeping alive the park's historic function as a romantic hideaway safe from conservative parents' horrified eyes.

The gardens are convenient to sites like Humayun's Tomb, a serene, enormous red sandstone monument dedicated to the second of India's Mughal emperors, who lost an empire, recaptured it, and died in 1556 in an unlucky tumble down a staircase. As you gaze at the pearly-white onion dome, you might wonder to yourself: how much nicer can the Taj Mahal possibly be?

Other interesting old monuments — the Kalan Masjid, Khan-i-Khanan's Tomb — are scattered about the surrounding neighborhoods, some primarily used as giant, priceless wickets for informal cricket matches. From Humayun's Tomb, a mad scamper across busy Mathura Road will get you to the shrine of the Sufi saint and mystic Nizamuddin Auliya. As with all the approaches to India's sacred pilgrimage sites, there is a gantlet of brazen commerce to be run, in this case mostly of men selling rose petals, just the kind Nizamuddin likes to be offered if he's even to think about answering your prayers. A defunct airport-style metal detector marks the edge of hallowed ground; it is here, and no sooner, regardless of the cries of the petal-sellers, that you must leave your shoes (here and anywhere else you go barefoot, storage for 5 to 10 rupees a pair, or less than 25 cents at 45 rupees to the U.S. dollar, is about right). Women are expected to cover their heads — shawls go for around 50 rupees.

Spend enough time watching the crowds flit around the chandeliered, prettily painted shrine, and sooner or later a small troupe of qawwali singers will shuffle into the marble courtyard. A crowd gathers around as they sit cross-legged with harmoniums and tablas, using their hands to almost physically fling their rhythmic, ever-escalating hymns through the shrine's open doorway. If the mood strikes, you are welcome to rise up and whirl like a dervish with arms outstretched in ecstasy.

The crowded, narrow lanes of the neighborhood surrounding the shrine are only a warm-up for a visit to Shahjahanabad, the walled city built by the Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan in the 17th century and now usually called Old Delhi, though it is by no means the oldest part of the city. The obvious sights include the beautiful Jama Masjid, reputedly India's largest mosque (the view of the strangely cubic cityscape from the top of one of the minarets is more than worth the 20-rupee ticket), and the hulking Red Fort, its innards sorely vandalized by the British.

But aimlessly exploring the walled city's monstrously corroded grandeur is much more fun. Bazaars are often devoted to a single trade, thus a street given over to shops selling wedding stationery abuts another swimming in oily motor parts.

Much of Old Delhi life goes on unabashedly out in the open. Young men get facials in open-fronted male beauty parlors, or you might spot a gaggle of children getting bucket-washed in the courtyard of a haveli, a once-grand mansion sunk into decay. Some kind of encounter with goats is virtually guaranteed, many of them dressed attractively in ladies' sweaters during the winter. None of them seem even remotely alarmed at the sight of stalls piled high with severed goats' heads.

It pays to be friendly to any sweaty, orange-glowing man you see perched over the fire-filled manhole of a bakery's tandoori oven. He may reach in and fish out a free naan for you, carefully trying to avoid burning yet another scar into his forearm. Even the most nervous of street-food eaters should try the fresh-baked sweet potato, dusted with some delicious species of sneezing powder.

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