Delhiwale: Your visa to Vasant Vihar is ready

The idea for a foreign trip begins with two images

The idea for a foreign trip begins with two images. An embassy and an aeroplane. In Delhi, Vasant Vihar brings them together.

Before arriving at the embassy of Senegal, you are obliged to pass by a roadside kiosk crammed with packets of kurkure and aloo bhujia. (Mayank Austen Soofi)

The shortest foreign trip takes only an afternoon. You do not need a hard-to-get visa or a boarding pass. Just walk through this South Delhi neighbourhood where foreign missions line leafy residential streets and aircraft descend towards Delhi airport every few minutes. For an hour or two, the rhythm of embassy, aircraft, embassy, aircraft, persuades the mind that the overseas journey has already begun.

The illusion begins with the roadside signboards. Every few streets seem to belong to a different country, with directions to the embassies of Maldives, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Côte d’Ivoire, Costa Rica, Brunei Darussalam and Gabon. Overhead, jets descend so low that their airline names can easily be read before they disappear behind the trees and multi-storey bungalows. Even the Vasant Vihar Metro station contributes to the fantasy, its exit sign pointing towards the embassy of Togo.

But for all its diplomatic addresses, Vasant Vihar’s street life remains stubbornly ordinary. This humid afternoon, a fruit seller is waiting for customers beneath a sign pointing towards the embassy of Paraguay. A pavement barber’s chair occupies the pavement outside another diplomatic mission. Nearby, a man sits on a bus stop bench. (No bus comes.) Before arriving at the embassy of Senegal, you are obliged to pass by a roadside kiosk crammed with packets of kurkure and aloo bhujia—see right photo.

Whatever, these blue signboards are the neighbourhood’s distinctive charm. One signboard points towards Colombia, sharing a pole with a fashion exhibition poster. Another directs visitors to Argentina above a faded street sign. At one intersection, signboards for Ecuador, Cuba and Lithuania are sighted within a few metres of each other. Just then a jet glides in. Indeed, almost wherever you walk in Vasant, the roads resemble an atlas, the sky supplies the aircraft, and your mind does the rest.