Path of the Pandavas.

[Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi]

The empty footpath is shadowed by a dense cover of tree leaves. This smoggy November afternoon, Pandara Road in central Delhi is dead silent. The adjacent houses too aren’t showing any outward sign of life. It is like strolling through a deserted city. The ambience nevertheless is not at all hostile.

The area is lined with standard-issue apartments and bungalows. These are homes of high-ranking government personnel. According to recent reports, Bangladesh’s exiled leader Sheikh Hasina is currently residing somewhere in the vicinity. Her “safe house” might not exactly be on Pandara Road, but during her earlier exile to Delhi in the 1970s, following the assassination of her father along with virtually her entire family in Dhaka, Sheikh Hasina lived for six years in a Pandara Road bungalow. Incidentally, the road is named after five legendary brothers from a long-ago time who too were obliged to spent more than a decade in exile—the Pandavas of the Mahabharat. (The road is believed to have ended up as Pandara, and not Pandava, due to a fateful typo—the letter ‘v’ was mistyped by a clerk as ‘r’).

Indeed, the entire stretch is impregnated with a protective feel of friendly exile. Detached from the hard realities of an otherwise chaotic megapolis, Pandara Road always exudes such serenity. This moment, a tired auto driver has sensibly chosen the peaceful roadside here for his break. Lying sprawled on the auto’s spacious passenger seat, his sleeping head is partially visible.

Some distance ahead, a van is parked under a tree. The driver is on his seat, motionless. The leaves of the tree are casting their reflections on the van’s windows. On one of them, the driver’s figure and the reflected leaves are placed on top of each other, as if the leaves were growing out of the man’s visage. The sight evokes the magic-realism of Latin American novels.

Not a long avenue, the road ends at the palatial Bikaner House, where it merges into a far busier road forever heavy with an unending procession of buses, cars, autos and bikes. Beyond looms India Gate and its grounds.

A passage to Pandara

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