City Life – Death Notices, Old Delhi Life by The Delhi Walla - July 31, 20240 Sad shutters. [Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi] Late night, a shuttered shop in Old Delhi’s Chitli Qabar Bazar is bearing three printouts in Hindi and Urdu, see photo. “Muhammed Ali Bhai’s younger brother Ahmad Ali, aka Kallu Bhai, died on 25/07/2024. The funeral procession for Dilli Gate Qabristan will start from home at 5.45pm.” Death comes to every home. Coping with the private pain of losing a family member is to be simultaneously endured with the necessity of making a public announcement of the loss. In Old Delhi, one of the ways is to put up simple handwritten sheets of paper on walls. This is more common when the bereaved family owns a shop. The notice is taped to the shop’s
City Landmark – Bougainvillea Pave, Chelmsford Road Hangouts Life by The Delhi Walla - July 27, 20240 Changed, unchanged. [Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi] Things change profoundly. Yet, they stay the same. This is a brief sketch of a lane, a small stretch of it. Let’s go back to a log-ago July afternoon in the pre-Covid era. Barber Ishtiaq’s stall, on a lane off central Delhi’s Chelmsford Road, would briefly become among the city’s most picturesque shaving spots. It lay under a dense shrubbery of pink bougainvilleas, which for some reason, always bloom most gloriously during the rainy season (unlike many summertime bougainvilleas elsewhere in the city). The flowers would make such an overwhelming impression that the astonished eyes would register the modest stall underneath only a moment later. The middle-aged barber had been manning the booth
City Life – Ramjas Path, Daryaganj Life Walks by The Delhi Walla - July 7, 2024July 7, 20240 Of silence and song [Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi] The lane is steeped in ‘pin drop silence,’ just the thing the teachers at the school ahead might expect from their students. The short Ramjas Paath in Daryaganj is lined with a handful of enormous pilkhans, whose thick brown branches gently spread upon the lane, colonising the upper altitudes, hiding much of the sky from the earth. A pair of vessels are hanging from a branch high up in the air; one of those is said to filled with grains for the birds, another is filled with water. Aam Panna seller Yameen shows a rope-and-pulley apparatus equipped around the tree’s wrinkled trunk. “It brings down the vessels to our level for
City Life – Newspaper Men, Mathura Road Life by The Delhi Walla - June 18, 20240 Print edition ambassadors. [Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi] Wars, bombings, summits, tournaments, tornadoes, murders, chain snatchings, fashion gallas, film star scandals, opening nights... so much has crashed into the world over the last 24 hours. The whole of it is piled up along a dusty Delhi curb, on Mathura Road. Here lies all the news fit to print. It is already warm at half-past five in the morning, also a bit humid. The man sitting cross-legged on the pave is hemmed in by heaps of Hindi-English dailies. He is inserting publicity flyers inside hundreds of newspapers, his fast-moving hands a blur. Overlooking the blue dome of centuries-old Subz Burj, the curb is packed with many of these newspaper suppliers, each man ensconced
City Neighbourhood – Brijmohan Marg, Old Delhi Life Regions Walks by The Delhi Walla - June 9, 20240 A lane in the Walled City. [Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi] Buildings evoke eras. With its arched doorway and carved balcony, a mansion of lakhori bricks in Gali Chooriwallan instantly transports the gazer to the late Mughal times. Some streets away within the same historic quarter, in Ganj Meer Khan, a multi-storey apartment complex resembles the contemporary aesthetics of the distant suburbia. While towards the eastern walls of the Walled City, here at Brijmohan Marg, these contemplative houses are indicative of… just which era? These buildings are neither as ornamental as havelis, nor as toneless as flats. Take this mansion of modern-day bricks. It doesn’t look old, it also doesn’t look new. The hulky facade is partitioned into equal halves
City Hangout – Friendly Faces, New Friends Colony Hangouts Life by The Delhi Walla - June 8, 2024June 8, 20240 Different perspectives. [Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi] Are folks in New Friends Colony (NFC) friendlier? Seems so—at least in the market. The NFC Community Centre is an archipelago of interconnected plazas dense with mehendi stalls, cake shops, chai houses (shout out to Juhi’s Tea, the adda with 14 varieties of chai options!), eateries, groceries, stationeries, and denim outlets bearing grandiloquent names like Fashion Point-The Hub. Beyond these bazar businesses lie the bazar faces. Say salam-namaste to three friendly folks of New Friends. Their presence fortifies the Community Centre’s quirkiness, a trait borne out of the commingling of big city commerce with small town apnapan. The juice walla The friendly man’s modestly named Juice Corner is across the road from the Community
City Hangout – Khan Market Updates, Central Delhi Hangouts Life by The Delhi Walla - June 6, 2024June 6, 20240 Last houses. [Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi] The Khan Market sunset is seldom noticed. The sightings of the famous and the fashionable, strolling along the lanes, take away attention from the twilight sky. Then there is the market’s other sunset. It too is seldom noticed, though it has long been gathering about the market’s original character. Khan Market started with 154 shops and 75 flats. That was in 1951. The year 2024 began with only five of those flats, all the rest having slipped into history. One of the flats, a market tattletale informs, was vacated a few weeks ago. It too might be replaced by a cafe or a showroom. Named after the freedom fighter Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan’s elder
City Neighbourhood – Gali Andheri, Old Delhi Life Regions by The Delhi Walla - June 3, 20240 The darkened street. [Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi] No darkness tonight in Gali Andheri, not even a spot of it—though the name translates to ‘darkened street.’ The twisty long-winded Old Delhi lane is momentarily landscaped with unwieldily patches of white and orange luminosities. These lights are emanating out of scores of street lamps and house windows. Young Moosa, a Gali Andheri dweller, is standing at the street’s colourfully painted gateway, where it meets Pahari Bhojla’s crowded bazar. He informs that his street had no wayside lamps until about the turn of the century, and that it would return to total darkness each day after sundown. An eighth grade student, the boy naturally doesn’t have a lived experience of
City Life – Citizen Vinod in Heatwave, Fasil Street Food Life by The Delhi Walla - May 30, 20240 Working in extreme temperature. [Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi] It is unbearably hot these days—such words lack heft unless one dares to walk on Delhi streets during the burning midday hours. Many Delhiwale have no choice but to continue doing exactly that everyday, exposing themselves uninterruptedly to the dangerously blistering sun. Look around here in Old Delhi’s Fasil Road— rickshaw pullers are plying their rickshaws, the fruit sellers are selling their fruit, the labourers are hauling bricks on their carts, and Vinod Kumar is hawking the cold sattu ghol on the dusty roadside (10 rupees per glass). The mild-mannered man is battling the extreme heat by sheltering under a multicoloured parasol. The stall is basic, the drink is inside a large
City Life – Auto Drivers in Heat Wave, Around Town Life by The Delhi Walla - May 27, 20240 Working in extreme temperature. [Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi] The sun’s glare was repeatedly hitting the auto rickshaw’s windshield. It was not even ten in the morning, but the road, the roadsides, and the trees along the roadsides were flooded with hot white light. So much white that it was hurting his eyes, driver Mahadev Kumar says, recalling his first half of the day. The pain inside his head was picking up intensity. Since Delhi’s green-and-yellow auto rickshaws are open on both sides, their drivers have to absorb the full blast of the summer season’s wrath, all through the day. One auto rickshaw driver copes with the heatwave-like conditions by tying a wet gamcha, length-wise, along the steering to prevent the