City Life – Ramjas Path, Daryaganj Life Walks by The Delhi Walla - July 7, 2024July 7, 20240 Of silence and song [Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi] The lane is steeped in ‘pin drop silence,’ just the thing the teachers at the school ahead might expect from their students. The short Ramjas Paath in Daryaganj is lined with a handful of enormous pilkhans, whose thick brown branches gently spread upon the lane, colonising the upper altitudes, hiding much of the sky from the earth. A pair of vessels are hanging from a branch high up in the air; one of those is said to filled with grains for the birds, another is filled with water. Aam Panna seller Yameen shows a rope-and-pulley apparatus equipped around the tree’s wrinkled trunk. “It brings down the vessels to our level for
City Hangout – Gali Teeke Wali, Old Delhi Hangouts Walks by The Delhi Walla - July 7, 20240 Doorway lane. [Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi] Sixty-paces-long, the narrow Gali Teeke Wali is a tributary of the much larger Gali Choori Walan. The lane is stamped with a few “car body parts” shops, along with a few printing presses. Sometimes a sweating labourer is seen hauling a mountainous stack of paper sheets on his bent back. This afternoon, the primary sound is of a printing press machine’s rhythmic rattle. People popping up infrequently along the street don’t have much to say on its name except that “the naam has passed down from the old times.” A woman in black burqa suggests that the lane must have originally been the “address of Brahmins who would apply sacred teeka on their