The beautiful Delhi instant.

[Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi]

One evening, one scorching Sunday evening, The Delhi Walla was at the weekly book bazaar in Daryaganj. It was getting dark and a little less hot. The market for second-hand books was no longer crowded. The shoppers had returned home. The exhausted sellers and their equally-tired assistants were packing their unsold books.

Near Golcha cinema, a boy was hauling a huge stack of novels into a rickshaw. His bare arms were wet with sweat.

On the pavement outside Hotel Broadway, a man was sitting on a stack of books. Holding a plastic cup filled with chai, he was lazily flipping through a guidebook to Czechoslovakia, a country that no longer exists. A dozen bundles were placed around him. These books and thousands of other worstsellers elsewhere in the bazaar were the remains of the day. It was a beautiful moment.

The leftovers

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When buses will fly.

[Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi]

Delhi’s international airport is named after Indira Gandhi, while Maharana Pratap has to make do with its main inter-state bus terminus. Unfair?

Bus terminals, or bus addas, are not considered half as romantic as train stations and they lack the surcharged mood of an airport’s arrival lounge. They are our last resort—when the plane ticket is too steep and it’s too late to get a confirmed booking on the Shatabdi.

In April 2012 the aforementioned inter-state bus terminus (ISBT) momentarily grabbed the attention of Delhiwallas, who refer to it as the Kashmere Gate ISBT—it’s at a stone’s throw from the Mughal-era gateway. For the revamped ISBT reopened after an ambitious makeover by the Delhi Integrated Multi-Modal Transit System (DIMTS), a public-private venture.

The Delhi Walla spent time there on the first afternoon.

Touch-screen kiosks, granite flooring, glass-panelled elevators, centrally air-conditioned lounges, LCD screens and escalators—the place is movingly aspirational. The inauguration-day banners promised a “high speed, secured Wi-Fi zone” for the “working/business class people”. A large mural showcases Kashmere Gate in a deep-yellow tint.

Half-expecting to step into a duty-free zone, I crashed back to reality at the sight of passengers and stray dogs lying sprawled on the floor, and the sound of ticket conductors shouting out mofussil names like Barnala, Moga and Pathankot (in Punjab) and Kotdwar (Uttarakhand).

Although the building came up in 1976, the terminus originated during the 1960s, “when it was just a large hole where long-distance buses parked themselves on entering Delhi”, according to a retired engineer from Rampur (Uttar Pradesh) who regularly passed through the Capital on way to college in Pilani, Rajasthan. Today, buses here do 1,000 trips a day and it connects 10 state transport departments, including that of Jammu and Kashmir.

The country’s oldest and largest bus terminus, the ISBT not only sprawls over 50,000 sq.m of real estate, but also occupies a place in the hearts and memories of many Delhiites who would take inexpensive late-night buses from here for hippie havens such as Dharamsala in Himachal Pradesh. It has also featured in many books, mostly by travel writers trying to X-ray Indians by probing our bus adda manners on hot summer nights (Pankaj Mishra’s Butter Chicken in Ludhiana: Travels in Small Town India, for instance).

The scale of operations of Delhi’s other inter-state bus terminals is much smaller but each is richly pickled in its own special ambience.

Bleak and expansive, the terminus at Sarai Kale Khan, off Ring Road, faces a ghetto that frames the rear view of upscale Nizamuddin East. Passengers squat on the floor amid sacks, suitcases, babies and chickens. The buses, always filled beyond capacity, go to Mathura and Agra in Uttar Pradesh, Dausa and Tonk in Rajasthan, and Bhind and Morena in Madhya Pradesh, the latter once the land of dacoits such as Paan Singh Tomar. But who was Kale Khan—nobody at the bus terminus seemed to know.

Comprising a series of tin sheds teeming with people and rats, a large terminus came up in east Delhi’s Anand Vihar in 1996 to ease the pressure on Kashmere Gate. Buses from this terminus go to Uttarakhand and Uttar Pradesh. You could compose a nursery rhyme by reading aloud the signs pasted on their windscreens: Etah, Etawah, Atta, Orai, Auraiya, Khurja, Kasganj… The solitary bookstall has Hindi translations of Shakespeare and Tagore; Premchand shares space with Sexy SMS Jokes. “That’s a medical book,” the bookseller tells me when I pick Sex Guide.

There are no naughty books at central Delhi’s Bikaner House. A boarding point for Rajasthan-bound passengers, it has a garden with palm trees and a peacock. The waiting lounge has a large, plasma flat-screen TV. A bird is chirping somewhere—it’s the evening hour—and a woman is walking with a loaded baggage trolley, the kind seen at airports. She is heading towards a Volvo. The bus has Jaipur’s Hawa Mahal painted on it; the glass windows are wide and the passengers inside are looking as relaxed as if they are in a hotel lounge.

It’s unfair and impractical to expect the busier Kashmere Gate to be similarly urbane, but it’s trying.

Things change and remains the same

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A vanishing world.

[Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi]

One evening, The Delhi Walla knocks on the door of Abdul Sattar. In his sixties, Mr Sattar lives with two of his four children in Pahari Imli, a Walled City neighbourhood. The biggest room of his house is stacked with books. “This is my library,” he says. “I was born in this room. Here I read, eat, write and sleep.”

The library has a mattress, a desk, a wooden almirah, a desktop computer, a TV, a few closets and 600 books. “Most are in Urdu and Persian and most of them are on Delhi’s Mughal-era history,” says Mr Sattar. “I usually purchase my books from publishers though I have got a few old volumes from dealers of second-hand books.”

Waving towards a shelf of paperbacks, he says, “These came from the Urdu Academy.”

The lone window of Mr Sattar’s library looks to the neighbour’s roof. A boy is flying a kite.

Handing me a bulky brown hardbound, he says, “Pashanama deals with the reign of (Mughal emperor) Shahjahan. It was compiled by Abdul Hamid Lahori. This is the second volume. I’m still looking for the first.”

Mr Sattar, who retired from government service in 2005, has an extremely gentle voice. He speaks slowly and appears to deliberate a great deal in choosing the most suitable words to frame his sentences.

“Three years ago I started working on a book on Madarsa Ghaziauddin Khan… it was an Islamic seminary near Ajmeri Gate and now exists as a school… the book may take a few more years to finish. I’m not getting the material I’m looking for.”

Mr Sattar leaves his house only to visit public libraries to research on his book.

Opening a drawer and taking out a wooden box filled with old ink pens, he says, “They are very expensive.” Closing the lid with caution, he says, “After my death, my children will inherit my collection of pens. But my books… I have already drafted my will. After my death, my books will be donated to a library.”

“Why are you not giving them to your children?” I ask.

“They can read in English and Hindi but not in Urdu.”

One of the most precious items in Mr Sattar’s library is a Mughal-era map of Old Delhi. Unrolling it on the floor, he places his finger on a black circle and says, “We are here.”

He then go towards his bed and takes out a tattered red book from under a blue pillow. “This is my wedding album.”

Showing his wife’s photo, he says, “We married in 1975. Actually I was happy in my world of books and did not want to marry but my mother forced me… this is Shamim Begum, my wife. We went to Kashmir for honeymoon.”

“Did she like reading?” I ask.

“Shamim Begum was busy taking care of our household… since she was particular about cleanliness, she would get irritated by my habit of leaving books and papers all over the place. She got upset each time I came home with yet more books. She died in 1995. Her blood pressure suddenly went down… now I’m left with what she wanted to get rid of… ”

“And what is that?” I ask.

“My library.”

Living with books

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Last chance to see a classic.

[By Mayank Austen Soofi]

A comi-tragedy, it’s a cult classic. Directed by Pradip Krishen, the author of Trees of Delhi, and scripted by Arundhati Roy, the author of The God of Small Things, the 1992 film Electric Moon will be screened on May 20 at India Habitat Center (IHC), Lodhi Estate.

A few years ago the movie was showed at the British Council, Connaught Place. In 2011, it had a screening at the India International Center. A year later it was again shown to a packed house in IHC.

“It is probably one of my last showings,” says Mr Krishen, “because the print is beginning to show signs of senility!”

The film’s DVD is not available on amazon.com. It’s not there on YouTube. This is a rare chance to see a film that, amongst other things, can also be described as a spoof on accents.

Irreverent and full of delicious Hindustani swearwords, Electric Moon pokes fun at foreign tourists who visit India in search of the stereotypical exotic ideas they have of this land.

After the film’s screening at the Bangalore Film festival in 1992, critic Madhu Kishwar wrote, “Director Pradip Krishen and script-writer Arundhati Roy were flooded with a barrage of hostile questions: “How dare you present Indians in such a bad light?”, “It will harm the national image,” and so on.”

But Electric Moon is more like a cheeky Indian rejoinder to A Passage to India.

Describing the film, The New York Times wrote, “In this story, the main business of a group of former aristocrats living in central India is leading tours into a national park and re-enacting the lifestyles of colonial India. However, this has only been possible because the park’s officials applied its rules with some sense of perspective. In this wry and leisurely comedy, the worst possible disaster has struck: a small-minded and very honest official has just gotten posted to the position of park director, and he is bent on following the letter of the law.”

The 103-minute-long English film stars Roshan Seth, Naseeruddin Shah, Leela Naidu, Gerson Da Cunha, and Raghuvir Yadav.

The movie has an extremely hilarious Delhi scene, which appears in the beginning. Place: Lodhi Road.

Come for the laughs.

Where India Habitat Center, Lodhi Estate Time 7 pm, Monday, 20 May, 2012 Ticket Entry free Nearby Metro Stations Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium and Jor Bagh

Electric Moon

A passage to India

Actor Roshan Seth plays a sophisticated scamster

Leela Naidu gave much trouble in the film sets because of her drinking problem

Filmmaker Pradip Krishen and scriptwriter Arundhati Roy

Listen to this.

[By Mayank Austen Soofi]

BBC Radio 4 interviewed The Delhi Walla. The Bristol-based BBC presenter Chris Ledgard came to Delhi to record an episode of his weekly show Word of Mouth. The theme: Language and Politics in India. Mr Ledgard talked to newspaper editors, professors, authors and civil servants, and he also captured the delightful Indian street sounds. Click here to listen. (I’m in between and in the end.)

Like a painting.

[Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi]

If French novelist Marcel Proust had lived in India, he would have lived in Calcutta.

The city is like a faded watercolor painting. The Delhi Walla visited it for a week.

Unlike Delhi, the old houses in Calcutta still survive. The green shuttered windows of crumbling yellow mansions preserve a genteel elegance of literary conversations and afternoon naps.

I visited a retired woman in Charu Market whose modern-day flat was steeped in the same ambiance. Hardbound works of Rabindranath Tagore were stacked under her bed. DVDs of Satyajit Ray’s films were stored in a drawer – next to her plasma screen TV. A tanpura was kept beside her dressing table. The woman made fish fry for me.

One evening I made a pilgrimage to the city’s Jewish cemetery — Calcutta has less than 30 Jews. The graveyard has hundreds of tombs.

One morning I boarded the Tollygunge-bound tram; the continuous rattle of its creaky wooden floor added a comforting rhythm to the city’s traffic sounds.

The same day I had club sandwich in Park Street’s famous tearoom Flurys. The toilet was filthy and the waiters huddled together and cracked jokes to each other.

Calcutta cabs are yellow.

Each day I passed the hot and humid afternoon hours inside the cold lobby of The Grand, where I would sit under a chandelier and read.

The walls in Kalighat and in many other neighborhoods are painted with hammer-and-sickle signs under which sleep the city’s homeless.

The rice-eating men in Calcutta have huge paunches, which they display in public by rolling up their shirts.

One late morning I bought several back issues of National Geographic magazine from a pavement stall in Esplanade. When I was leaving Calcutta, the coolie carried them as I headed towards my train at Howrah railway station.

Satyajit Ray’s city

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Woman convicted for adam-teasing.

[Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi]

A roadside Juliet, who was arrested for using obscene language and making indecent gestures towards two plain-clothed policemen during an anti-adam-teasing drive, has been held guilty of outraging the modesty of men by a Delhi court. Metropolitan magistrate Shakti Kapoor convicted Sarojini Nagar resident Chandralekha Verma under Section 509 of IPC for outraging the modesty of men, saying, “From the evidence, prosecution has been able to prove the charges against the accused beyond reasonable doubt.”

The court also ordered the Delhi government to file an affidavit explaining the steps taken to implement Supreme Court’s guidelines to bring adam teasing under control.

Amid rising incidents of adam teasing in the city, Delhi police has already formed an anti-adam-teasing cell functional at the Kamla Nagar police station of the capital.

Victims of adam teasing, sexual harassment, obscene phone calls, threat calls, harassment in work places can either call the officer and register their complaints or can lodge the complaints physically.

Meanwhile Godwoman Devi Amritamaya, the hugging saint, while addressing her followers yesterday evening in Ramlila Maidan, said that when a boy encounters women with bad intentions “he should take God’s name and should hold the hand of one of the women and tell her that I consider you as my sister.”

No city for men

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One of the one percent in 13 million.

[Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi]

Wading through the warm, wet air of a humid May, she says, almost casually, “No, I will not say I ran away from my father’s home in Noida. That’s too romantic. I just left his house.”

The Delhi Walla meets Bonisha Bhattacharyya at South Park Street Cemetery in Calcutta. In her twenties, Ms Bhattacharyya is dressed in black. Pointing to a tomb, she says, “That’s like a bath tub.”

A short walk from Flurys, the famous tea room on Park Street, the generously-wooded Colonial-era cemetery is an archipelago of mausoleums, pyramids, cupolas and obelisks. These ruined structures are final addresses of British reverends, sergeants, and their wives and children — the early settlers of Calcutta.

The pathway on which Ms Bhattacharyaa is walking is covered with yellow and red flowers that fell from the trees above. Picking up a red floret, she says, “This is jabaphool (hibiscus). My grandmother uses it for puja.”

As we stroll amid the graves, Ms Bhattacharyya narrates a history of her recent life – compressing it to a couple of disjointed sentences.

“I grew up in Delhi… My twin sister… I moved to a women’s hostel in South Extension… At the college… The flat in Sant Nagar… shifted to Calcutta a year ago… want to understand my roots… stayed in a series of hotels… the rent went up and I asked the grandparents if they would take me in at their bungalow in Lake Town… ”

We come across a dog sitting at the base of a tall tomb. Ms Bhattacharyya takes out a slim book from her red bag. “I purchased it from the cemetery’s office,” she says. “Wait, I’ll read out a passage.”

She flips through the book and stops at a page.

“In 1978 when the first edition of this booklet was published the South Park Street Cemetery in Calcutta was in a state of almost complete dilapidation. Tombs had been vandalized, walls were broken and the whole area overgrown with weeds, trees and shrubs. The grounds were used by thieves to store their loot, and vagrants lived in mausolea whose roofs were still intact. The main paths were knee-deep in tangles weeds and grass, and in the monsoons, slushy and muddy. The employees of the cemetery who were often descendants of those employed there a hundred and more years ago, and who lived in rooms on either side of the main entrance, cared little for cleanliness or hygiene. There was no running water. There lived in the cemetery too, about 40 or 50 dogs which bred continuously and most of the puppies died of starvation. The plaster on tombs still standing was often loose and every year disintegrated still further.”

Ms Bhattacharyya closes the book and takes a deep breath.

As we walk from one obelisk to another, she says she likes to walk on Calcutta’s streets.
“I started walking a few years ago when I was living in Delhi. I was obese and I thought that this exercise would make me fit. I often walked from my room in Sant Nagar to India Habitat Center. One day I walked from Delhi Gate to Red Fort. Gradually I began to feel a connection to Delhi. Now I feel the same for Calcutta. It is not unusual for me to walk from Tollygunge to Esplanade. Sometimes in the evening I walk to Howrah Bridge. I stand there and look down at the Hooghly (river).”

Ms Bhattacharyya stops at a tomb. It is a thick slab of stone and reaches to her neck. She rests her chin on the tomb and blows away the yellow flowers on the top.

We inspect more tombs.

After some time, Ms Bhattacharyya, looking at her mobile phone screen, says, “My grandfather is expecting me.”

On exiting the cemetery, Ms Bhattacharyya hails a yellow cab. An instant later, she is gone.

[This is the 73rd portrait of Mission Delhi project]

A girl in a graveyard

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Life in a red light district.

[By Rakhshanda Jalil]

Rakhshanda Jalil discussed Nobody Can Love You More: Life in Delhi’s Red Light District, a book by The Delhi Walla in the Karachi-based daily Dawn. See below.

PROBING, PENSIVE, perceptive Nobody Can Love You More (Penguin Viking) takes us into the heart of Delhi’s red-light district with an unself-conscious ease and disarming unpretentiousness. In its author, Mayank Austen Soofi we have a Manto of our times and in the book’s central character, Sushma, a latter-day version of Manto’s Sultanas and Saugandhis.

Like the Sultana of Kaali Shalwar, Soofi’s Sushma too lives in a kotha on G. B. Road facing the shunting sheds of the Delhi railway station and ekes out a living by selling her body. Plump, middle-aged, greying Sushma cooks arhar daal for Soofi and offers to put mehndi in his greying hair. Through her very ordinariness she shows Soofi, and through him us as well, that despite the extra-ordinariness of her life, she is no more and no less than a flesh-and-blood woman. Neither saints nor sinners, women like Sushma are a far cry from the prostitutes of popular imagination (or sex workers as the proponents of political correctness would have us call them).

Three years ago, when he was still new at G.B. Road and unused to its ways, Soofi recalls his nervousness when faced with aggressive pimps. But, as he writes;

‘Soon I devised a strategy. I did what I do while walking down a street teeming with stray dogs. The dogs might growl and bark, and sometimes follow me, but I walk past them as if I were the king of the street and the dogs didn’t exist…That trick always worked. And it worked in GB Road, too. Within a few months, the pimps stopped bothering me.’

Soon, the inhabitants of Kotha No. 300 accept his presence in their midst as they go about their work, tend their children, cook for their loved ones, watch TV or listen to music, complain and gossip in between disappearing into dingy cubicles to conduct their business and earn a living in the only way they know. Some even share their lives and memories with the stranger in their midst who, over time, ceases to be strange.

Of course, there is no knowing what they tell of their past is real or imagined. ‘In these three years in GB Road, have I recorded the truth?’ Soofi wonders, only to conclude: ‘Maybe it is better this way. It is fulfilling enough for a writer to get a sense of GB road without stripping bare the lives of its people.’ He grapples with the multiple versions of reality that appear before him. Sushma and her colleagues are ‘so open, yet so closed’, ‘their life stories and especially when they became sex workers, are almost identical.’

At the same time, there is something in each woman that makes her distinct: ‘There is no person like Sushma in the world, and I am frustrated by my inability to grasp the essence of her personality. She shares her feelings with me but only to an extent and only on occasion. It is the same with Roopa, Nighat and Mamta. They guard their thoughts and memories more closely than others. Could it be they cherish the secrecy because there is no secrecy about their bodies?’

For all his misgivings, Soofi does a fine job of opening a window into a world many would quail at venturing into. Of course he shows its grime and filth, poverty and violence, exploitation and degradation, but he also shows its humanity and tolerance, pluralism and multiculturalism. For instance, Fatima, an old prostitute, lights incense sticks over framed portraits of sufi shrines, calendar images of Mecca as well as Hindu gods and goddesses with as much devotion as she prays during Ramzan or sprinkles her veranda with ‘sacred’ water from the nearby Hanuman Mandir.

In studding his narrative with little vignettes such as these, Soofi seems to be saying: This too exists. This too is normal and ordinary despite its extraordinariness. The hauntingly evocative black-and-white photographs that accompany the text – also taken by Soofi – corroborate his telling.

Also Read:

Courtesan’s Quarter, A translation of Munshi Premchand’s Bazar-e-Husn, Translation by Amina Azfar, OUP, Karachi, 2003: the story of a woman’s fall from grace and the concerted effort of the civilised folk of Banaras to push these fallen women out of the city limits

Umrao Jan Ada by Mirza Ruswa, Translated by Khushwant Singh, Harper Collins, 2004: the intertwined stories of an Awadhi courtesan-poet and Lucknow told by one who had seen the rise and fall of both

Taboo: The Hidden Culture of a Red-light Area by Fauzia Saeed, OUP, Karachi, 2001: Intertwined stories of the prostitutes, pimps, patrons of Lahore’s famous Hira Mandi

Available in book stores and shopping websites across India

Nobody Can Love You More

Our new monument.

[Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi]

According to The New York Times, Swaminarayan Akshardham Temple has a “Disney touch”. That’s very insulting but that’s no exaggeration. Akshardham has a musical fountain, a large format movie screen, and also boat rides, all coming with a fee. Offering a mix of religious and nationalist paraphernalia, it has statues of sadhus as well as of “patriots of India”.

Built over 100 acres on the banks of Yamuna by a sect called Bochasanwasi Shri Akshar Purushottam Swaminarayan Sanstha, the temple is dedicated to a 18th century Hindu godman called Bhagwan Swaminarayan, who at age 11 embarked on a spiritual journey across the subcontinent.

Writing about it on The Delhi Walla here, blogger Gaurav Sood said:

The Swaminarayan temple complex is a strange mix of architecture styles, ranging from Deccan to Mughal to Mewari. The intricately carved marble interiors are reminiscent of opulent Mughal tombs and palaces, the main building’s red sandstone facade seems to pay ode to Deccan style temples (most prominently Meenakshi temple in its ostentatious carving), while the boundary wall and supporting structure seem to be inspired by a mixture of Mewari and Mughal styles.

Don’t expect much spiritual contemplation here. There is a constant crowd of people streaming through. But if you don’t tire easily, the place could engage you. The temple, the complex’s chief attraction built of pink stone and white marble, is all about numbers. It has nine domes, 20 pinnacles, 234 pillars and over 20,000 sculptured figures. In the center is the gold-plated statue of Swaminarayan. The structure stands on a plinth that is sculptured with 148 elephants. The surrounding two-tier colonnade has over 2,000 pillars and 300 windows. There is also a food court and souvenir shop. Visit this temple to get a hint of tomorrow’s heritage.

Where Near Noida Modh Nearest Metro Station Akshardham Time April to September – 10am to 7pm, October to March – 9am to 6pm, closed on Mondays Warning Photography now allowed

Tomorrow’s heritage

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