City Life – Infrastructure Workers, Sarai Kale Khan
Capital builders. [Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi] The airy space high up between the two gigantic plinths is crisscrossed into a maze of grids, the kind printed in a school student’s maths notebook. From a distance, these grids…
City Neighbourhood – Changing World, Haveli Azam Khan
Going with the wind, coming with the wind. [Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi] The stately sheesham door looked sufficiently venerable to be a tangible link to some unrecorded past. It is gone, replaced by a metal shutter. The…
City Obituary – Bhag Bahri Malhotra, 1932-2023
A bookstore icon. [Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi] As a 15-year-old girl, she survived the partition in which two millions perished. Like many others lucky enough to live through that cataclysm, she went on to survive a migration,…
City Life – Hijron ka Phatak, Old Delhi
A lost world. [Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi] Katra Chandi Walla in Old Delhi is home to handicraft artisans of chandi or silverwork. Most people call it by its former name–Hijron ka Phatak. The place used to be…
City Life – Local Chatter, Gali Haveli Azam Khan
Talk of the street. [Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi] Shabrati is shuttered. The Gali Haveli Azam Khan landmark was reinvented in the uncertain early months of the coronavirus pandemic into a fancy grocery, breaking the heart of a…
City Life – Delhi Floods, 2023
The bridge under the Yamuna. [Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi] Delhi has more than 15 road bridges spanning over the Yamuna. In the city’s worst flood in 45 years, here’s a sequence of interactions with the citizens and…
City Life – Friends with Best Friend, Around Town
Lives of citizens. [Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi] The road is a blur of bikes and cars, on both sides of the road divider. The man sitting on the divider, legs splayed out, is quietly having his chai…
City Life – “Lodhi Reads”, Lodhi Garden
A readers’ collective. [Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi] A woman in hat is reading a Mahasweta Devi paperback, with the centuries-old Bada Gumbad monument as her backdrop. So far, so ordinary. Reading in park is a regular Lodhi…
City Life – Gali Haveli Azam Khan, Old Delhi
Street out of a mansion. [Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi] The word is spreading along the galis and kuchas. A new eatery is rustling out unorthodox dishes like “chicken white sauce pasta” and “chicken red sauce pasta.” The…
City Season – Heatwave Citizens, Around Town
June is the cruellest month. [Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi] A heap of broken images, where the sun beats, And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief, And the dry stone no sound of water……
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