The Walled City encyclopedia

[Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi]

This secretive Old Delhi pedestrian lane has no shop and no house, no temple and no mosque, and currently neither any pedestrian. It also has no name. There is nothing else like it in the entire historic quarter.

Linking the hectic Netaji Marg to the less hectic Ansari Road, the short, straight, almost-hidden passage might be empty of humans this cold afternoon, but is brimming with the traffic sounds of the adjacent Netaji Marg. Even so, the lane’s distinctive silence is stubbornly intact.

The track goes past a wasted heath littered with paper cups, cigarette butts, chip packets, thermocol bowls, tobacco sachets, beer bottles, a severely rusting vehicle—and amid all this litter lies a park bench. The poor bench too appears to be a part of the litter. A man is sitting on it, his head drooped downwards. Elsewhere clustered with trees, the weedy semi-wilderness is cordoned off by a thing overwhelmingly picturesque—a wall of stone ramparts.

These ramparts lends to the lane a mood of mystery and foreboding. The stone wall is a rare souvenir of Old Delhi’s origins. When Emperor Shah Jahan built his capital of Shahjahanabad more than 300 years ago, he secured the new city’s five-mile-long circumference with a protective stone wall, fortified with 14 gateways. Most of those stone darwazas succumbed to Delhi’s violent past, along with most of the wall. But this fragment of the Walled City’s wall has not only survived to our times, it has also created a life of its own. It is in fact far livelier than the lane it overlooks, hosting green vines, pink bougainvilleas, plus birds, squirrels and insects. The day’s sunshine has illuminated parts of the wall to a golden translucence.

Suddenly, a peacock lands on the pathway. The large bird furiously moves its head left and right, and flies over to the top of the stone wall. Moments later, it goes over to the other side of the wall, towards the deputy police commissioner’s office.

Minutes pass. Now, a man in black overcoat enters the lane from the direction of Ansari Road. He abruptly gets off the paved path, his black shoes stepping over the littered ground. He walks over to the Walled City’s wall, and starts to relieve himself on Purani Dilli’s historic stones.