A town in the city.

[Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi]

Eyes darting around wildly, as if desperate to soak in all the sights along all the paves. Kamla Nagar in north Delhi always lifts the mood with its wondrously kaleidoscopic disposition. Especially catchy is the buzzy road that cuts through the main market.

The multifaceted universe is inevitably youthful due to its nearness to Delhi University colleges. But it doesn’t have the alienating vibes of an age-arrogant college campus. Instead, it exudes the calmly pace of a small town bazar where everyone feels welcome, irrespective of age or style. (So appropriate then that the place-name ends with the Hindi word for town). The tick to best experience the Nagar is to breathlessly croon aloud all that you chance to see in successions of sweeping glances.

Start with… well, the mehendi stalls–Mohan Mehendi Walla stands beside Mukesh Mehendi Walla. Then there are watch kiosks, lipstick sellers , carts stocked with red and blue ganjis, baskets overflowing with velvety hair bands, tables piled up with toy elephants… wait, there’s more on the roadsides! Hawkers of damru, tailors with their silai machines, nail polish sellers, a sugarcane juice machine made entirely of wood, a stand for “fancy bangles”… and there’s some more! Shyam Chuski Corner is run by Shyam, but this evening his colleague Pawan is attending to customers Sunit and his little daughter Jessica—see photo. (The adjacent stall, run by Mukesh Kumar, serves super-tasty matar kulche.)

The shop names too are unique. Sample these: Maharani of India, Miss Fashion, Gulabi Gori, etc.

Kamla Nagar’s heart is undoubtedly the pillared colonnade of Bada Gol Chakkar, which, being a chakkar, runs around a gol (circular) shopping mall—just as the inner chakkar of the legendary Connaught Place runs around the beautiful Central Park. The colonnade is full of vendors, and each one has a back story, often poignant. Young Deepak, a native of Bihar’s Motihari, has been exhausting his precious youth by selling kitchen aprons. A vendor for five years, he is waiting for “better opportunities.” Next to him, the venerable Sunder, squatting on the colonnade floor, makes his living from a body-weighing machine. He charges 10 rupees per person. He is 85.

To be sure. Kamla Nagar wasn’t named after this year’s US presidential candidate. The clue lies in the next-door ‘hood named Jawahar Nagar. Jawahar was our first prime minister, and his wife’s name was…. guess!