Nizamuddin

The alley leading to Nizamuddin's tomb. 

Lucky me. I went to the Nizamuddin neighborhood with friends who wanted to "buy meat," meaning water buffalo. My friend brought an extra scarf. I talked them into visiting the holy site. Nizamuddin was a 14th century Sufi mystic admired for his "piety and disdain for material desires...His daily assemblies drew both the rich and the poor." (That's from my DK India tour book.) Several hundred years later Muslims still read his sayings and go to his tomb with prayers and offerings. We saw supplicants, but not until we had walked through a long covered alley with several right angle turns. It was a little claustrophobic. All along the way men in white sold colorful Muslim alter cloths, flower petals and for ten rupees, wanted to watch our shoes while we were at the tomb. You can see the ground is covered in rugs or tiled. Photography was not allowed at the tomb, where women prayed outside of lattice-work walls while men knelt directly around what looked to me like a bed. It was very foreign and a little scary. A man approached me with a guest book to sign and asked "what he could put me down for." (That's paraphrasing Dickens.) I left a hundred rupee note on a separate table where others had donated. On the way out my friends told me they had never been "inside" before and they marveled at my courage. Fools rush in?