Our Self-Written Obituaries - Mayank Austen Soofi, Hauz Khas Village

Our Self-Written Obituaries – Mayank Austen Soofi, Hauz Khas Village

The first death.

[Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi]

Mayank Austen Soofi, a writer and photographer who wrote about lives and places in Delhi, died on July 3 at his one-room apartment in south Delhi’s Hauz Khas Village.

The cause was “reading too much poetry”, according to his friend Surinder Singh, a second-hand bookseller in Daryaganj.

Apart from blogging on The Delhi Walla, Mr Soofi had written five books. The last was on GB Road red light district. Reviewing it for the Hindustan Times, literary blogger Aishwarya Subramanian had said, “Nobody Can Love You More may want to gesture toward the complexity and chaos of the human lives it documents, but it feels merely muddled and unsatisfactory.”

According to his close acquaintances, Mr Soofi rarely stepped out without his well-thumbed copy of the first volume of Marcel Proust’s novel In Search of Lost Time. His wallet contained a faded black and white photograph of the great Sufi shrine of Ajmer. His otherwise blank moleskine diary, which he pretentiously carried in his rucksack, had a cutting of a New York Times article about the death of blogger Morgan Powell whose body was discovered floating in Brooklyn in 2014.

Mr Soofi is survived by many people who made his life very happy.

Our Obituaries invites Delhiites across the world to write their obituary in 200 words. The idea is to share with the world how you will like to be remembered after you are gone. (May you live a long life, of course!) Please mail me your self-obit at mayankaustensoofi@gmail.com.