Elegance taken for granted

[Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi]

The door itself is small in relation to the sprawling scope of the doorway. The entire entrance is dense with sculpted patterns, including four human figures, plus the mandatory taaks and arches.

The sandstone darwaza of Sri Digambar Jain Mandir in Old Delhi’s Dili Gate is striking. This afternoon, its arresting beauty stays unaffected, even as a local biscuit suppler has piled up a fresh stock of brown cardboard cartons right in front of the closed doorway, see photo.

Old Delhi is home to numerous remarkable doorways. An aesthete might feel their beauty to be under constant threat because these doorways tend to be taken for granted by Purani Dilli wale. They are often treated with the rough simplicity of a child who will innocently play with a collector’s piece with no more circumspection than if it were a plastic doll.

The Walled City’s most picture-perfect door though is not in Gali Naughara, celebrated for its old houses and doorways, but in Gali Badliyan. The entrance to a private house, the darwaza is extremely narrow and extremely tall. The entire surface is sculpted into legends and stories. One pane shows a hatted hunter aiming his gun towards a lion, who is chasing a poor deer. Another pane shows a vase filled with flowers, the stalks disproportionately tall compared to the vase. The panes at the bottom teem with parrots.

Then there is the appropriately named Gali Lal Darwaza with its many gracious-looking darwazas. The lane was recently visited on these pages. But it is nearby Gali Arya Samaj that is like a museum of doorways. Every door is a shrine to exquisiteness. One latticed doorway, painted red, consists of a stone slab carved with flowers.

Sone lanes away, in Tiraha Behram Khan, a grand doorway is sadly the only residue left of a vanished haveli. It stays hidden behind a street stall, being decked up from top to bottom with “ladies suits” and dupattas. Another doorway stands similarly orphaned at Kamra Bangash.

The doorway enthusiast must certainly visit Gali School Wali, near Chitli Qabar Chowk. An archaic blue doorway stands beside an equally old-fashioned pink doorway, which is followed by a green doorway. While the elegant darwaza of an abandoned mansion is smeared with such thick layers of dust that it must not have been touched for years.

Meanwhile, outside the aforementioned Jain temple, all the cardboard cartons have at last been taken off the doorway. The mandir portal has been restored to its pristine solitude.