You roll over and rub your eyes and wonder for a moment where you are. Your cell phone, in its slightly affected monotone, is announcing that "it is time to get up, it is seven o'clock, it is time to get up…" As you grasp half-asleep for the phone you remember: you've crashed at a friend's house. That would explain why the mattress feels so strange.
You pull yourself up off the spare bed and stretch quietly, hoping not to awaken your friend who is still sound asleep. After staying up late chatting, you decided it would be best to stay put instead of taking a taxi home. Delhi isn't the most forgiving city if you don’t know it well, and you've been given the death speech by enough well-meaning locals and compound-dwellers to be sufficiently freaked out by nighttime travel. Plus, staying over means an extra hour of chat time.
Thankfully your friend's tiny but perfect apartment comes complete with a hidden extra mattress, bedding, and the comfiest tie-dye t-shirt for you to sleep in. Despite the fact that there were only six hours between the time you set the alarm and the time it went off, you're feeling pretty rested.
You tiptoe into the bathroom to change into yesterday's clothes. You can't help but notice that they're of questionable cleanliness after a day spent in 35 degree weather, but at 7am in Delhi no one but you will likely pay any attention.
After a quick hug and directions from your friend you wander out into the early morning sun. After a week of monsoon rain the sun is a welcome sight, and at this time of the day it hasn't yet had a chance to really heat things up. The neighbours glace at you and then at each other as you pass by, going back to whatever it was they were doing before you caught their attention.
Luck is on your side this morning—as soon as you reach the main road you flag an auto wallah who is willing to ferry you all the way back to the compound for only marginally more than your Indian friends would pay. He pulls a u-turn and trundles off toward the diplomatic enclave.
It's actually a really nice morning. There's been a lot of haze lately but today is crystal clear. Those big puffy clouds won't be threatening until they reach somewhere closer to the mountains in the north, and they're sweeping away some of the grime that's been hanging in the air. The traffic is comparatively light on account of the hour, but the rickshaw is one of those older slow ones; you get a leisurely and almost unobstructed view of the chai wallahs and construction sites, the kids in their school uniforms, sleepy dogs and the odd cow.
The rains have wreaked havoc on the roads so the rickshaw has to bump over the pockmarked surfaces. As you navigate a particularly rough patch, a newer rickshaw pulls up beside you to say hello. The drivers are friends, apparently, and yours can't help but beam a little at the catch he has in his back seat. You spend most of your time with expats so you forget that, of the tens of thousands of rickshaw drivers, there must be many to whom foreigners are still novel. You nod and wave to the mother and daughter in the scooter beside you and they smile and wave back.
Maybe it's the early sun, or the lack of traffic, or the smiling women in the neighbouring rickshaw, but this morning Delhi's almost pleasant. It's likely that at this rate you'll be late for work, but somehow that isn't really a concern. How many Delhi Mondays start off like this?