The Bengal country. [Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi] The men look carefree, playing cards by the pavement. The vegetable seller is napping by his cart. A balloon hawker is slowly dragging his bicycle and the helium balloons, tied…
Life of a ruin. [Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi] History is intrusive, and always finds its way into our today. Sometimes that intrusion is barely perceptible, as the touch of a gentle breeze on the skin. Like the…
A literary icon. [Archival photos belongs to Ali Ahmed Dehlvi and Vaseem Ahmed Dehlvi, text and other photos by Mayank Austen Soofi] The building has lost its colour. A tree is growing out of the balcony. What rescues it from…
Relic from the living past. [Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi] It’s like coming face-to-face with the indecipherable relics of a lost civilisation. The pale pink wall, here in Old Delhi’s Meena Bazar, is defaced with two acronyms: STD…
The parlour confession. [Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi] Literature student SM Shafi eats poetry — poetically speaking. He reads poems, he writes poems. In his 20s, he is currently preparing to start his PhD on poet Fakir Mohan…
A shrine’s best-kept secret. [Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi] It’s one of the lesser known shrines of the capital and it is tucked within… oh well, another lesser known shrine. The historic graves of Hazrat Sarmad Shahid and…
A bit of the Mediterranean. [Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi] It might be dry, dusty and polluted, but Delhi is home to 252 species of trees. (New York has 130.) Right now, the bloom of the semal’s red…
The evening show. [Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi] The sun is gone, the sky is dark. Bats are flying over the lake, letting out shrill chee-chee cries. They are spilling out in all directions, as chaotically and in…
One of the one percent in 13 million. [Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi] Many book-loving Delhi homes have Shakespeare, Tagore, Tolstoy and Ghalib. French author Marcel Proust is more difficult to spot, though his novel is counted among…
Taste of home. [Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi] It’s called Northeast Grocery Shop but it is not in north-east Delhi. It is, in fact, in the southern part of the city, in Chirag Delhi village. And yet the…
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