I had fled New York, a great glossy and effectual city that seemed to offer a haven to everybody but me, for New Delhi, the sweaty and bureaucratic and oddly welcoming capital of India. I had been to Delhi before, numerous times in fact, but this time it was different. There was a palpable buzz in the air. Restaurants packed with patrons popped up in every nook and down every grimy alley, no longer restricted to the luxury hotels as they had been for decades. Thai, Italian, Greek. And the bars. Delhi was now laying claim to proper watering holes where the country’s like-minded could congregate, over a beer or a vodka Red Bull. Yes, many of these places were still far out of reach for the average Indian, but one couldn’t help but notice: Delhi was beginning to look like a city.

Historians will tell you Delhi has been home to nine distinct cities through the ages, the remnants of which are scattered everywhere, like seeds from a flower: a poet’s tomb fifty paces from my front door, an old fort not far past the Sundar Nagar market. But I will tell you that there are ten cities of Delhi and I live in the last, one with restaurants where one can order mushroom and goat cheese farfalle, use wireless broadband and go to nightclubs where girls in spaghetti strap tank tops gyrate to the latest hip-hop influenced Bollywood hit.

The waves whipping through India sent Delhi into the modern age. Previous avatars of Delhi had announced themselves with a new-fangled type of Indo-Islamic cupola or the wide, orderly streets designed under the British Raj. This one arrived atop the juggernaut of globalization, which never travels far without its handmaiden of technology, and nobody knew where it would lead.

That wasn’t why I left New York City and came to India, though I’d heard intriguing tales of this new New Delhi. I came for different reasons, reasons that were far more resonant with the never-budging India of time past. I came to find a husband.