Five thousand miles may be a long way to go shopping but, let’s face it, there are those among us who have travelled further

Of course it was a good idea. How could it not be? Save thousands and wallow amongst the sensuous stench of Delhi with all the technicoloured parphanelia of India thrown in as a bonus.

Picture the scene: in Central London, a shop selling thoroughly foreign furniture, each piece for about the same as the average overdraft. How I longed to tell the woman with the gold card that she was about to pay five times too much for a simple wooden trunk because Sir Terence Terrific, arbiter of price-tag ethnic chic, had declared it a must-have piece. She would think it was better than sex to be able to save that much money and get a holiday thrown in. Five thousand miles may be a long way to go shopping but, let’s face it, there are those among us who have travelled further in search of a conquest, admitted later over a bevy of beers that the sex was not up to much and not even had a 19th century Rajasthani blanket box to show for it.

The seed had been sown. The Conran Shop trunk at £595 was not as good as the ones that I could get from my invaluable furniture dealer in Delhi for £80. He could ship items back to Thamesport for £55 per cubic metre. The trunk that I was looking at in London was just under a cubic metre. I made out an annoying little chart that would have the glossy gold-card shoppers ripping out my eyes. It looked like this:

– Classic Indian coffee table: £450 (central London) or £55 (Delhi);

– Planter’s chair: £500 or £80;

– Wrought iron fronted cupboard: £750 or £150;

– Kilim carpet in fashionably muted colours: £400 or £90;

– Desirable silk cushion cover: £35 or £9;

– Thick-rimmed silver picture frame: £80 or £20;

Total: £2215 (London) or £404 (Delhi).

Before crying out with indignation that your local homeware shop does silver frames starting at £2.50, please remember that we are talking about the shops where the beautiful people go, the cathedrals of high fashion, where the atmosphere fairly crackles with “has she/hasn’t she had a silicone job” conversations.

Thus the project was born: to furnish a small London flat with the things that the beautiful people buy but to do it in India, ship it back and still have saved enough money to take a two-week Himalayan trek, with a stopover in Paris on the way back for a bit of a frilly fashion spree. Seemed like a good financial experiment.

Step one: picking the time to go. Not during the peak season from November to March when all hell breaks out on the streets of Delhi. April, September and October are the months when the heat is bearable and there are flights under £400. There is also the advantage of off-season bargaining power at hotels.

Step two: dealing with the spice and stigmas of Delhi. There are now an increasing number of small hotels and serviced apartments which offer an alternative to Delhi’s extremely expensive four- and five-star hotels. Ignore every word Joss-stick Jo, the travel junkie, told you about shopping in India. As long as the tourist shops are given a width berth, Delhi is shopping Mecca.

Step three: discriminating good from bad, real value from cheap and nasty, and not deviating from the wish list we made up in Central London.

Furniture & Fabric

There are furniture shops and bazaars all over Delhi but a good centralised buying area is Hauz Khas Village in South Delhi. This is a designer rough-and-rural development around a beautiful monument. It is all here, from antique gramaphone players to the wedding jewellery of a Maharani. There are beautiful pieces from Gujurat, Rajasthan and the South; antique camel carts converted into tables, doorways and window frames that have become cabinets and cupboards, spice boxes that have become state-of-the-art bathroom cupboards. Most of the furniture dealers will make furniture to order if the pieces they have in stock are not quite the size you want. By the time you have been off up the Himalayas and back, any ordered pieces should be ready for shipping. Bear in mind that India works on IST, Indian Standard Time, a jokey euphemism for the fact that very little ever appears on the date promised. In terms of fabric, there is the potential to save thousands when you think of the meterage involved in curtains and sofa covers. Look-of-the-moment cotton ticking is around £25 a metre in London. In Delhi it is £2.50 a metre.

One of the best furniture stores is Aavaram just on the edge of the village where water buffaloes and chic shoppers wander cheek by hide.

Fabric: The biggest selections are to be found at The Central Cottage Emporium at the junction of Janpath and Tolstoy Marg and Fabindia, N Block Market, Greater Kailash. In both cases you need to buy more than 50 metres before they will ship for you at a worthwhile price. For smaller amounts Pandit Brothers, 9-10, F Block, Connaught Place (recently renamed Rajiv Chowk in a fit of anti-Raj fervour) will ship any amount at about £1 a kilo depending on the volume.

Carpets

A warning on the carpet chicanery of India, which is now part of the culture but is still fooling the virgin tourists in their thousands. Nearly all the hotels are surrounded by taxis who work on commission basis with the carpet boys. This means the price has been upped by as much as 50% by the time it gets to you. Beware the salesman whose wares are unmarked. That means they are eyeing you up for credit value before naming their price. Top tip to remember for silk carpets: get them to razor off some of the silk across the complete colour range of the carpet and light it with a match. Silk does not burn, it smoulders. Wool burns. The tricksters are so sharp they mix silk and wool in the high price range and just razor the silk when you ask for the test – hence the need to ask for a razor sample across the whole colour range of the carpet you fancy.

One of the very few non-commission shops is June 1st, D-962 New Friends Colony where there is a range from bright dhurries to silk on silk Kashmiri carpets – serious shag pile. They will even send a car to pick you up.

Tips and warnings

The haggle factor: in some stores, you will have to challenge every price quoted. It is always worth offering a bit less if you are paying cash. It sounds less insulting, though, if you ask for a small discount rather than pluck a figure from the air. Prices at government shops are fixed and not negotiable. The twinkly jewellery trap is another temptation to be avoided. As every Delhi mother buys a truckload of gold jewellery for her daughter, most gold is imported and, therefore, hugely overpriced.

Shipping and travel information

Rates for shipping to England vary from £1 per kilo for fabrics to about £55 per cubic metre for furniture. Some shops will ship for you, but some have a minimum order before they will ship so check first. 17.5% VAT has to be paid at the port of entry but for everything you ship you must get a Certificate of Origin. This exempts you from any other duty. Make sure that you get the shipping manifest for your goods before you leave or a written guarantee that it will be sent to you as soon as it is available. You cannot receive your goods unless you have it. Most shops in Delhi are open from 10.00am to 7.00pm. Some of them are open on Sunday by appointment. From the point of view of getting around, Delhi is big. If you are a bit brave, and rise to the autorickshaw challenge, spend a little time finding someone you like the look of and then keep him with you all day. This is cheap at the price: an open-air, personal chauffeur with lots of carbon monoxide thrown in for about £10. Alternatively you can get the ubiquitous Ambassador taxi complete with garrulous driver for the day for about £25.

(originally published in Evening Standard November 1996)