Winter’s hang-out.

[Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi]

Scores of men are sitting along a fence, their backs turned towards a scenic edifice. But the scene they are facing isn’t at all scenic—it is of impossibly chaotic Delhi traffic jamming up a smoggy T-intersection.

So tough to crack the strangeness of Purani Dilli’s Turkman Gate Chowk. The place derives its name from the Turkman Gate darwaza, the aforementioned edifice that culminates into the said T-point. While the centuries-old stone gateway does have a small gate to slip inside the monument, the public chose to sit outside on the concrete ledge along the fence.

These days the monument is undergoing maintenance, and a good portion of it is scaffolded from top to bottom with metal poles. Two monkeys are leaping up the poles like circus acrobats. They reach to the top of the monument, then they tumble down playfully, and start all over again. The gateway itself is currently deserted of maintenance workers— “they all have gone to their villages for holidays,” says the guard inside.

The seating along the gateway fence however is packed with people. It always teems with crowds, usually consisting of the area’s homeless (an aspect already featured on these pages). During the cold season, the stretch undergoes an abrupt gentrification, with the residents of cramped vicinities rushing to claim the precious sun-soaked real estate. See photo.

A history-minded citizen too must join this gentry, so as to creatively recreate the immediate world that existed during the gateway’s early days, more than 300 years ago. The entire Old Delhi was then the newest Delhi, cordoned off by a stone wall with 14 gateways. The jungle outside the wall teemed with wild animals and brigands. By sunset, the wooden darwazas of all the gateways were closed, the night sentries taking up positions atop the turrets, holding weapons and flaming torches. Today, most of the wall is gone, most of the gateways are gone, the jungles outside the wall are gone, including the babool forest that lay close to Turkman Gate (today it is Connaught Place shopping district).

Now an elderly man sitting along the gateway ledge starts to recite an Urdu verse he composed himself, he says. The other men laugh at the poem’s “sadak chaap” triple innuendos. Meanwhile the head of a huge mouse emerges out from a hole close to the poet’s feet. The creature looks around, and eyeing a brown dog’s direct gaze instantly goes under.