City Life – Death Notices, Old Delhi Life by The Delhi Walla - July 31, 20240 Sad shutters. [Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi] Late night, a shuttered shop in Old Delhi’s Chitli Qabar Bazar is bearing three printouts in Hindi and Urdu, see photo. “Muhammed Ali Bhai’s younger brother Ahmad Ali, aka Kallu Bhai, died on 25/07/2024. The funeral procession for Dilli Gate Qabristan will start from home at 5.45pm.” Death comes to every home. Coping with the private pain of losing a family member is to be simultaneously endured with the necessity of making a public announcement of the loss. In Old Delhi, one of the ways is to put up simple handwritten sheets of paper on walls. This is more common when the bereaved family owns a shop. The notice is taped to the shop’s
Delhi’s Proust Questionnaire – Amir Bhai, Paharai Rajaan Delhi Proustians by The Delhi Walla - July 30, 20240 Into a newsstand person's soul. [Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi] While his family is known by all as Buttonwale because of a shop specialising in buttons, Amir bhai himself administers the family’s other business, here in Old Delhi’s Pahari Rajaan, just beside Bhai Rajjo’s grocery. An electrician, he mends household appliances. Other than his usual customers crowding the repair shop with faulty toasters and mixies (and even handbags with dysfunctional zips!), the friendly man also draws the neighbourhood’s idle folks itching for timepass gupshup. This humid afternoon, he agrees to become a part of our Proust Questionnaire series, in which citizens are nudged to make “Parisian parlour confessions”, all to explore our distinct experiences. The natural talent you’d like to be
City Landmark – Kamala Places, Around Town Landmarks by The Delhi Walla - July 30, 20240 Delhi place-names and American politics. [Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi] You think you just fell out of a coconut tree? Somebody famous famously asked this sometime last year. She immediately went on to answer the question herself—“You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.” This is particularly true in the case of Delhi’s place-names. The names of Delhi localities didn’t just drop from the sky: each of them has a background. Accidentally, quite a few places in our city bear the first name of the woman quoted above. Another hint: she might become the first person of Indian origin to take oath as the president of the United States of America. Readers
City Curtain-Raiser – Humayun Museum, Near Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya’s Dargah Hangouts Landmarks Monuments by The Delhi Walla - July 27, 2024August 4, 20241 India's new heritage site museum. [Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi] Nestled in a corner of the pristine Sunder Nursery garden, across the road from Humayun’s Tomb, a series of red sandstone ramps gently head to the grassy ground beneath. They descend into corridors and halls with massive sheesham doorways that summon the grandeur of Fatehpur Sikri’s Buland Darwaza. Inside, await five huge galleries of granite flooring, marble columns, and stone benches. Delhi is crusted with layers and layers of past. These exist laterally, extending outwards, but also vertically, beneath the ground, under a surface that millions of feet pound on every day. It is fitting, then, that the newest landmark of this city of graveyards is entirely underground. Opening next
City Landmark – Delite Cinema, Asaf Ali Road Landmarks by The Delhi Walla - July 27, 20240 70 years of delight. [Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi] Chandeliers, stained glass windows, wood-panelled walls, and stately staircases. This is Delhi’s oldest surviving cinema theater to have stayed with its original owners—a fact confirmed by author Ziya Us Salam, a scholar of the capital’s film theatres. This year the landmark on Asaf Ali Road quietly observed its 70th anniversary. Opened in April 1954 with Raj Kapoor’s Angaray, Delite stands where a portion of Old Delhi’s historic wall stood. The balcony’s waiting lounge doubles up as a restaurant with marble-top tables, the “Gents Toilet” has a long slim settee that wouldn’t look out of place in a Defence Colony drawing-room, and electric panels display the temperature within the hall.
Mission Delhi – Kuldeep Prasad, Chirag Dehli Mission Delhi by The Delhi Walla - July 27, 2024July 27, 20240 One of the one percent in 13 million. [Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi] The afternoon air has no breeze. Waiting for a “sawari” near Shiv Mandir in Chirag Dehli village, the profusely sweating auto rickshaw driver Kuldeep Prasad picks up his punkah and starts fanning close to his face. The hand fan is actually a white cardboard sheet, one side scrawled with something in Hindi. “My son’s handwriting.” A few weeks ago, Kuldeep’s younger child had copied a few lines on the sheet as part of his classroom assignment; afterwards he dumped the thing in a corner of the house and forgot all about it. On a recent morning, while leaving for work, Kuldeep spotted the sheet lying on the floor.
City Monuments – Headliness Ruins, Hauz Khas Monuments by The Delhi Walla - July 27, 20240 "Off with his head." [Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi] Do not be surprised on coming face-to-face with headless ghosts in Hauz Khas. The south Delhi district has a particularly frightful past, and that past is etched in stone. The historic region has many monuments, including the tomb of Emperor Feroz Shah Tughlaq. Two of the monuments are not particularly handsome or well-known or greatly historic, but they are the most unique among all the monuments. For they are dedicated to the head. To the lack of head, actually. 'Off with his head', meaning “chopping off the head,” is a gruesome phrase that famously appeared in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, as well as in the plays of Shakespeare. The phrase strongly resonates with
City Nature – Amaltas Monsoon Bloom, Around Town Nature by The Delhi Walla - July 27, 20240 Never let me go. [Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi] Such a strange sight--the tree is clad in golden yellow flowers from top to bottom. But it is mid-July, a time of the year when the sightings of these flowers become less frequent. The roadside Amaltas tree near Sukhrali village in Gurugram is refusing to let go of its blossoming. Same is the case with many other Amlatas trees in the city. The flowering of Amaltas trees is at its greatest around mid-May, a time of extreme heat. In literature, Amaltas bloom is frequently employed by novelists and poets to evoke the consoling aspect of summer. As the monsoon arrives, the blossoming begins to fade. Naturally, every summer this space devotes one
City Hangout – New and Old Balconies, Ansari Road Hangouts by The Delhi Walla - July 27, 20240 Changing architecture. [Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi] Look at this photo snapped last week. Two balconies, one old, the other also said to be quite old but so newly renovated that the work on it is still to be completed, and it might not end up as a balcony at all. Both structures are worlds apart in their aesthetics. Together they evoke the evolution of a Delhi neighbourhood in which the defining visual character for a long time has been the architecture. Named after freedom fighter Mukhtar Ahmed Ansari, the Old Delhi avenue is bordered by fragments of the mostly vanished Walled City wall. It houses several publishing houses and book distribution companies, and lately parcel delivery services. It also has
City Landmark – Bougainvillea Pave, Chelmsford Road Hangouts Life by The Delhi Walla - July 27, 20240 Changed, unchanged. [Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi] Things change profoundly. Yet, they stay the same. This is a brief sketch of a lane, a small stretch of it. Let’s go back to a log-ago July afternoon in the pre-Covid era. Barber Ishtiaq’s stall, on a lane off central Delhi’s Chelmsford Road, would briefly become among the city’s most picturesque shaving spots. It lay under a dense shrubbery of pink bougainvilleas, which for some reason, always bloom most gloriously during the rainy season (unlike many summertime bougainvilleas elsewhere in the city). The flowers would make such an overwhelming impression that the astonished eyes would register the modest stall underneath only a moment later. The middle-aged barber had been manning the booth