Glimpses of a sacred space.
[Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi]
An elderly pilgrim from Rajkot in Gujarat lovingly offers a rose petal to the lips of his wife. Nearby, rose petals are placed on an unknown person’s grave.
The Delhi Walla is in the Sufi shrine of Hazrat Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti in Ajmer, Rajasthan. (I wrote about this shrine in great detail here.)
Ajmer is a town with dream-like aspects. This is a place where the earlier ways of life are fleetingly glimpsed in fragments of old buildings, like in Delhi, too. But you see the old world also in the everyday dresses of the people of this town, in the quiet gestures of the fakirs, in the beautiful eyes of a bangle-seller, and also, in one instance, in the spice bowls of a tea-stall.
I offer you images from one of the holiest cities of India.
Khwaja’s land
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