Delhiwale: The best evening show in town

Visit India Gate lawns as the light fades behind the war memorial and catch the setting sun in your fist

We always imagined that the perfect sunset belonged to cities with a beach or a mountain range. So obviously there couldn’t be any place in Delhi to watch an ideal sundown.

At India Gate grounds you can watch the perfect sunset. (Mayank Austen Soofi / HT Photo)

We were so wrong.

One evening we enter the circular India Gate grounds through the side that faces the Coast Guards headquarters. Here the lawn is free of tourists and ice-cream sellers.

Only a few loners are sitting on the dusty grass, apart from a couple and an athletic man stretching his legs.

Nothing, however, prepares us for the sight directly in front of us.

The sun is reduced to a small coin. It is sinking behind the war memorial — quite fitting since the British-built arch commemorates fallen soldiers of World War I. Indeed, the western sky is bleeding like a braveheart making the ultimate sacrifice.

The only distraction is a flock of birds flying from one tree to another, as if drunk on the evening. But this is a welcome intrusion.

We do occasionally sight picturesque sunsets while driving over flyovers (depending on the state of the sky, of course).

But those are fleeting glimpses that disappear before we can truly savour them.

In this part of India Gate circle, we watch the nature’s great show in explicit detail — the view is unencumbered by high-rises or elevated metro tracks.

The show lasts a few minutes but it hurls us out from our city-life routine, briefly propelling us into another space.