A Walled City lane.

[Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi]

The yellow door headlines the saffron doorway, and the wall around is light blue.

The sight dazzles the eye. It is one of the many compulsively clickable private doorways on this Walled City street, which is actually named after a doorway. Gali Lal Darwaza is entered, naturally,, through a lal darwaza, red doorway. This long lane near Bazar Sitaram goes past a series of residences and temples before ending into a… well, doorway.

Here’s a severely truncated tour of Lal Darwaza darwazas.

—An unusually tall wooden door graced by a sculpted Ganesh ji forms the portal to Jugal Bhawan, marked with the year 1953.

—A doorway’s dark-wood door is arrayed out into dozens of squarish panels, making it look like a slab of tasty chocolate.

—A sandstone doorway is topped by a sculpted figure sitting cross-legged, sculpted flowers dangling from her ears.

A few other darwazas stand out for being less traditional. Saraswati Computer Centre has glass doors. Mahakal Haircutting Saloon has a simple shutter. The saloon’s name is calligraphed with a Hindi matra (punctuation) shaped into trishul, or trident—the weapon of Mahakal, the Shivji Bhagwan.

And here is the street’s signature monument. Lal Darwaza’s lal darwaza comprises of a red arch supported on walls of old-fashioned lakhori bricks. This afternoon, these exposed bricks are looking like raw wounds. They are clearly the remnants of some long-ago edifice that no longer exists in its entirety.

The modern-day soul of Lal Darwaza however isn’t in its beautiful old bricks. It lies in its corner, consisting of a popular paan stall administered by the friendly betel-leaf man Anil. “I inherited this stall from my late father Shri Ram Sevak, who had founded it many years ago,” he says, smearing flavoured pastes on a wad of peepal leaves.

Now, two Lal Darwaza dwellers emerge from the street. One of them is Teetu Sharma, a musician who manages a “bhajan mandli” in the neighbourhood temples. The two men start discussing the events of the day, perhaps in the same way and at the same place where the Lal Darwaza dwellers of olden times must have discussed the events of their era.

Red gateway

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.