A portal to the village.

[Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi]

Time passes, things change, some things continue to stand. The historic Chirag Delhi village has transformed over the years, many of its old buildings (such beautiful doorways they had!) have disappeared, but this old gateway to the village has survived.

This overcast afternoon, the timeworn portal is mutely overlooking a smoggy stream of pedestrians, bikes and autos (see photo). The busy road of the city unspools along the northern perimeter of the village. The inverse side of the gateway faces a life more at leisure—that being a sleepy village lane full of small shops such as Manoj Namkeen Bhandar, Ashok General Store, and JS Tailors.

Meanwhile, a young man is stationed inside the gateway, smoking like a brooding artist. Above him hangs a banner advertising classes for “Spoken American English.”

Flanked by a mishmash of modern-day concretes, the graceful gateway evokes the bewilderment of a Gulliver besieged by the tiny Lilliputian army. A peeling plaque introduces the edifice as the “northern gateway of the enclosed Chirag Delhi village.” It was in fact among the four gateways of a long wall built around the village by a Mughal emperor in the 18th century. The wall was raised to honour a Sufi mystic whose tomb lies within the village, and who gives his name to the locality.

Until a restoration some years ago, the gateway was severely derelict, damp, musty, and smelled of bats. Curiously, it lacks a name (in contrast to the gateways of the Walled City of Old Delhi). The locals call it simply a khandahar, ruin.

This moment, nobody is pausing to swoon over its stately arches, or its old-fashioned Lakhori bricks. Maybe because the “khandahar” is so seamlessly integrated into the daily life of the neighbourhood that it has become as mundane as the sky. The gateway is as finely entwined with the village’s physical landscape. It shares its height with the spire of adjacent Shiv Mandir, and has cobbler Babulal’s long-time stall attached to its aged walls like a limpet.

One would imagine that a Delhi village with such an architectural relic would be choked by an antiquated flavour, but Chirag Delhi is youthful and cosmopolitan. The lanes teem with young busy people who have come to the capital from across the country, and who live here in rented accommodations. Some village groceries specialise in spices and food unique to India’s north-east. While almost every third shop offers “money order service to Nepal.”

Soon, it starts to rain. A few pedestrians rush into the gateway, exploiting it as an emergency shelter.