Dateline: 6 December 2025. Waking refreshed the next morning, we checked out of Hotel Africa Avenue after breakfast and began what would be our final full day in Delhi. The original programme indicated a visit to Lutyens’ Delhi, that grand imperial layout conceived in the early 20th century. However, the roads were closed due to visiting foreign dignitaries. Our coach could only crawl through the roads, offering us a moving glimpse rather than the intended walk.
Still, we saw the imposing sweep of the India Gate. Beneath its 42-metre-high arch now stands a 28-foot granite statue of Subhas Chandra Bose, installed in 2022 in the canopy that once housed a statue of King George V. Designed by Edwin Lutyens and completed in 1931, the India Gate commemorates more than 70,000 soldiers of the British Indian Army killed in the First World War and the Third Anglo-Afghan War. Its resemblance to the Arc de Triomphe is unmistakable.
From imperial grandeur, we proceeded to Gandhi Smriti, formerly Birla House. It was here that Mahatma Gandhi spent the final 144 days of his life, and where he was assassinated on 30 January 1948. The museum preserves the atmosphere of those last days.
Born in 1869 in Gujarat, Gandhi studied law in London before forging his political conscience in South Africa, where he spent 21 years advocating for Indian civil rights after being thrown off a train for refusing to leave a “whites-only” compartment. Returning to India in 1915, he transformed the Indian National Congress into a mass movement. His philosophy of Satyagraha or non-violent resistance reshaped the struggle for independence and inspired global leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr and Nelson Mandela.At Gandhi Smriti, a simple concrete path marked with footprints traced his final walk to the prayer ground. A modest pavilion marked the exact spot where he fell. Inside his preserved living quarters, we saw the sparse belongings that defined his life: spectacles, a walking stick, a spinning wheel, low writing desk. Outside, pillars inscribed with his teachings stand among traditional symbols such as “Om” and the ancient swastika in its original Indian context of auspiciousness.
In the afternoon we visited the National Museum. With approximately 200,000 artefacts spanning over 5,000 years, it was less a museum than a condensed archive of Indian civilisation. Walking through its galleries felt like compressing millennia into a single afternoon.The Indus Valley Civilisation section alone contained more than 3,500 objects excavated from sites such as Harappa and Mohenjo-daro. There were sculptures from the Maurya, Shunga, Kushan and Gupta periods, coins and armour, textiles and jewellery, miniature paintings and manuscripts. Each gallery offered a different chapter in India’s long history.
But it was the section devoted to the Buddha that drew us all in the end. The most fitting end to our Indian journey. Here were sacred relics of the Buddha excavated from sites such as Piprahwa in Uttar Pradesh. These relics, believed by many scholars to be among the corporeal remains distributed after the Buddha’s cremation in the 5th century BC, were displayed in a specially designed chamber meant to evoke the serenity of a stupa. 
A notice on the wall invited visitors to pay homage to the relics:
"Around 463 BCE at Kushinagar, Lord Buddha passed away or achieved Mahaparinirvana at the age of eighty. The residents of Kushinagara cremated his body with ceremonies befitting a Universal King (chakravartin). Buddha's relics were divided into eight portions and distributed among eight kingdoms. The sacred relics were commemorated into eight different stupas.
The relics housed in this hall are excavated from Piprahwa in the Siddharth Nagar District of Uttar Pradesh, an erstwhile part of the ancient city of Kapilavastu. The discovery of one inscribed casket in 1898 by W.C Peppe refers to the relics of the Buddha and his clan, 'Sakya'. Further excavations conducted by the Archaeological Survey of India in 1971-1977 discovered two more un-inscribed steatite caskets containing twelve sacred relics in the bigger casket and ten sacred relics in the smaller casket.
National Museum, New Delhi humbly invites the devotees and museum visitors for paying homage to the sacred relics of Gautama Buddha."
Here, the atmosphere was understandably hushed. Visitors instinctively lower their voices. One does not merely look; one contemplates. Our Chief Abbott signalled everyone for a session of meditation. Even visitors from outside our group joined in. Later, there were other Buddhist groups that arrived to perform their own sessions.
There were exquisite sculptures representing different artistic traditions: the serene sandstone Buddhas of the Gupta period, often regarded as the classical ideal of Indian Buddhist art; the Gandhara sculptures influenced by Hellenistic forms, where the Buddha’s robe fell in Greco-Roman folds; and Mathura figures carved in the red sandstone of India. Each style reflected how Buddhism travelled, adapted and absorbed regional influences.
The museum also displayed fragments of ancient stupas, votive tablets and inscriptions in various scripts. Together they charted not only Buddhism’s spread but also the evolution of artistic language across centuries. For us who had earlier stood beneath the Qutb Minar contemplating the rise of medieval powers, it was humbling to be reminded of an even older spiritual current that had once radiated from this land across Asia.By late afternoon, the collective weight of the centuries seemed to have settled gently upon us. Once again, there was that familiar sensation of information and visual overload. Delhi had offered us monuments of empire, places of martyrdom and relics of enlightenment. All in a single day.Within hours, we would truly be on our way home. As I reflected on our 16-day journey from Kathmandu to Delhi, what I had initially thought would be a long trip but which now felt unexpectedly too brief, I realised how much there was still to absorb. Not merely the sights, but the stories behind them, which I hope I have been able to do justice to here in my blog. Perhaps that is what travel ultimately offers: not simply movement across geography but a quiet passage across time.
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A notice on the wall invited visitors to pay homage to the relics: 
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