Of frayed edges and burst seams

South of the smart new skyscrapers, a narrowing artery signals the end of the metropolis. 

Now begin the signs of suburbia: small, dusty shops line both sides of the street; cycle rickshaws and cycle “vans” ply people and objects through tight by-lanes that narrow snake-like as they get further from the main road. Here, suddenly, people actually have the time to just stand and gaze at vehicles passing by.

We stop for tea and samosas at a small roadside shop in an amphibious settlement that is neither suburb nor village and we are promptly mobbed by lungi-clad men and hardly-clad children who unashamedly ogle us as we drink our tea.

We are in a frayed edge of Calcutta.

It is just a few miles out of the urban jungle, but it may as well be another world. Thatched mud-houses coexist happily with concrete structures amidst palm trees and ponds.

Concrete gives way to overgrown flora between the main road and the villages behind it. The busy road with its densely packed metropolitan debris and fast-paced traffic is a dramatic contrast to the almost asleep, rural, lush green and brown landscape just a turn and a few yards away.

Only minutes out of the Eastern Bypass, we’re out of the human bustle and into the wetlands. As we pass the serene palm-green, grass-ringed, reed-filled bheris, the sunlight is still dew-wet and the breeze is cool and pleasant on villages with creeper-vegetables like pumpkins and gourds growing on their thatch-roofed huts.

How do I describe these places that are nowhere, really. 

It's like a sudden interstice of sunshine piercing laser-like through dense smog. It demands to be seen, but is too starkly different and so it hurts the eye. It is too thin a sliver of light, so it vanishes before you know it and you're back in the smog.

Delhi has burst seams.

Numerous pockets that are not-Delhi appear constellation-like all over Delhi. They exist intermittently within the bounds of the capital city, which goes on and on neverendingly in all directions. Delhi's burst seams are the lal-dora areas.

More on them later.