A Walled City street [Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi] The door’s tatty curtain was to hide the once-affluent family’s wretched poverty, its threadbare predicament instead exposed its decline. Yashpal’s iconic short story Purdah immediately comes to mind on gazing at this purdah, here in Old Delhi’s Haveli Azam Khan street. The purdah is actually looking ok, the giveaway is the derelict doorway on which it hangs. The arched portal is made of long-ago lakhori, its damaged portions patched up with modern bricks, the blue paint severely discoloured. Haveli Azam Khan is said to have been the site of the haveli of a Mughal-era noble called Azam Khan. Nobody today remembers the haveli. A new world has emerged sphinx-like from