On Old Delhi streets

[Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi]

The cul-de-sac is full of discoloured doors and cobwebbed windows. Suddenly a little white cat slinks out into the empty lane from under a locked door. On seeing an unfamiliar visitor, she starts fleeing towards the far end of the lane, stopping after every few moments, turning her head to make an eye contact with the stranger.

Gali Ansari near Turkman Gate has to be among Old Delhi’s least-known streets. It is also a street that has apparently stayed frozen in time. For it hasn’t changed at all since the independence in 1947, insists the venerable Shamshuddin, sitting inside his box-making workshop. He has been living in the lane since his birth 67 years ago.

“Our gali looks exactly how it used to look like when I was a child…. no new building has come up here.” The man notes that his family has been residing in Gali Ansari for five generations. “My grandfather was a carpenter, my father too was a carpenter.” He points his finger upwards to a wooden beam running along the workshop’s ceiling. “That is 200 years old.”

Despite this being a sunny afternoon, the narrow lane is submerged in semi-darkness. The tenements flanking the lane on both sides stand so close to each other that they have blocked out the sky, making it impossible for the daylight to penetrate. “Our gali remains thandi (cool) during the garmi (summer)… one ceiling fan is enough, we never need a cooler or an AC.”

Shamshuddin now steps out into the street. Nobody else is to be seen at the moment, but the air in the street is filled with sounds coming out from the surrounding homes—a woman’s scolding voice, a child complaining about something, a muffled laughter. Some steps ahed lies a handicraft workshop, with only one “karigar” inside, working silently with metallic bracelets.

Shamshuddin assumes that the man who gave his name to the street “must have been somebody important during the time of the kings.” Shaking his head, the soft-spoken gent mulls over his years, all of which were spent within this cramped lane. “Our bujurg (elders) lived and died in this gali, I feel their saya (presence) over me, which gives me sakoon (calm)… I sleep very nicely at night.”

Shamshuddin now sits on a short flight of stairs at the mouth of the street. “My younger brother used to sit on these steps… he died ten years ago.”