City Obituary – Bim Bissell of FabIndia, Delhi Life by The Delhi Walla - January 10, 2025January 10, 20251 Portrait of a life [Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi] Sunder Nursery has gardens, lakes, fountains, monuments, an amphitheatre, and even a restaurant. And then it has something which is barred to grownups. With its unique “charpai" swings and many slides, the Playhouse is wildly popular among children. This haven for the young-ones was the doing of a very grownup citizen who was lucky enough to have lived to see her ninth decade. The celebrated Bimla Nanda Bissell - Bim to friends - was a grand dame of Delhi society, to say the least. She died on Thursday, aged 93. She is survived by son, William, and daughter, Monsoon. "Bim helped get the funds to set up Sunder Nursery's Playhouse," says
City Landmark – Filmistan Cinema, Karol Bagh Landmarks by The Delhi Walla - January 9, 20250 Tajikistan, Turkmenistan… Filmistan! [Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi] The derelict building is a sprawl of pinkish red concrete. The outer walls are bearded here and there with dry grass. This afternoon, each spear of the long browned grass is trembling soundlessly in the winter’s cold breeze. Delhi is a city of tombs. This building too is a tomb. But it is not a tomb to some fakir or badshah. It instead eulogises an earlier age of movie watching. The vast edifice of Filmistan cinema evokes an era when there were no limitless Netflix movie options and multiplex audis. It was then a civilisation of the “picture hall” where a citizen would watch a matinee or a night show alongside hundreds of
Delhi’s Proust Questionnaire – Abdul Rashid, Central Delhi Delhi Proustians by The Delhi Walla - January 8, 20250 Portrait of a citizen. [Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi] A halwai shop cook in a central Delhi bazar, he churns out 1,500 samosas daily. This cold night, while at work, young Abdul Rashid agrees to become a part of our Proust Questionnaire series, in which citizens are nudged to make “Parisian parlour confessions”, all to explore our distinct experiences. The principal aspect of your personality. A hope in my heart to become kamyab (successful). Your favourite qualities in a man. Polite manners. Your favourite qualities in a woman. The talent to wear nice clothes, and for a courteous way of speaking. What do you appreciate the most in your friends? The ability to be useful. Your main fault. I’m illiterate. My parents tried to get me educated,
City Monument – Turkman Gate Darwaza, Old Delhi Monuments by The Delhi Walla - January 7, 2025January 9, 20250 Winter's hang-out. [Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi] Scores of men are sitting along a fence, their backs turned towards a scenic edifice. But the scene they are facing isn’t at all scenic—it is of impossibly chaotic Delhi traffic jamming up a smoggy T-intersection. So tough to crack the strangeness of Purani Dilli’s Turkman Gate Chowk. The place derives its name from the Turkman Gate darwaza, the aforementioned edifice that culminates into the said T-point. While the centuries-old stone gateway does have a small gate to slip inside the monument, the public chose to sit outside on the concrete ledge along the fence. These days the monument is undergoing maintenance, and a good portion of it is scaffolded from top to bottom
City Faith – Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti’s 813th Urs, Ajmer Sharif Faith by The Delhi Walla - January 6, 2025January 6, 20250 A Sufi occasion [Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi] Delhi is the city of Sufis. It is known as ‘Bais khwaja ki chaukhat’, the threshold of 22 Sufis. To understand the soul of this city, you must make a pilgrimage to a shrine six hours away in Ajmer, Rajasthan. It is devoted to Sufi saint Hazrat Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti, and today the Dargah is celebrating the saint’s 813th Urs. (The death anniversary of a Sufi saint is not mourned, but celebrated. Urs means “wedding” in Arabic and it symbolizes the union of the lover with the beloved, who is God.) Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti occupies a principal position in Sufism, the mystical aspect of Islam. He established the Chishti silsila (order) in the subcontinent;
City Food – Doorway Sheermal, Hazrat Nizamuddin Basti Food by The Delhi Walla - January 6, 2025January 6, 20250 A vanishing bread out of a vanishing architecture [Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi] During sunny noons, the cobwebbed strands veiling the door-latch would glisten like silken gossamers. The door itself lay padlocked, its wooden surface laden with decades of grime. Whatever, for a long time, the arched doorway has been evoking a disappearing style of residential architecture. (Although it must be said that the hurry-hurry locals rarely pause to admire the beautiful doorway, an everyday sight to them). Nestled within the historic enclave of Hazrat Nizamuddin Basti, the darwaza is adorned on both sides by an arched taak, itself a disappearing architectural element. The central Delhi locality in fact bears a good number of monuments that are significant to Delhi’s architectural
City Walk – Secret Passage, Old Delhi Walks by The Delhi Walla - January 5, 2025January 5, 20251 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
City Landmark – White Flower Tree, Lodhi Garden Landmarks Life by The Delhi Walla - January 3, 20250 The Lodhi Garden snowfall [Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi] The snow lay drifted on the park benches and on the clipped hedges, on the spears of the grass, on the tip of the tombs, and along the pebbled paves. It was falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, upon all the living and the dead. Well, these words are mostly fished out from the celebrated passage of a celebrated story by the great James Joyce. In the short story, the snow was falling all over Ireland. Here, the snow was falling upon Delhi’s Lodhi Garden. Correction: the snow had fallen only upon one tree in Lodhi Garden. Further correction: the snow is not really snow. These are white flowers. From a distance,
Mission Delhi – Aamir, Chelmsford Road Mission Delhi by The Delhi Walla - January 2, 20250 One of the one percent in 13 million. [Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi] The woman was walking along the lane, carrying a large bouquet of multi-coloured flowers. Her right hand was holding the flowers somewhat carelessly; the bouquet was facing downwards. The other hand had the mobile phone, glued to the ear. The flowers were frequently falling down on the pave, one or two at a time. After the woman disappeared from sight, young Aamir picked up each of the flowers from the ground. This was the only eventful part of his afternoon, in Aamir’s telling, here on central Delhi’s Chelmsford Road. He then used those second-hand flowers to decorate his rickshaw. The rickshaw is parked on the curb, as
City Poetry – Jonaki Ray’s New Year Poem, 1/1/25 City Poetry by The Delhi Walla - January 1, 20250 On a new year. [Photo by Mayank Austen Soofi] May the new year treat you better than the year just gone. This same wish goes for labourer Anand, who turned 65 yesterday and whose ageing body can no longer bear strenuous labour; for Bimlesh who is carrying on with her late husband’s legacy of a tiny food stall; for colony guard Saurabh, who is patiently waiting to get a job deserving of his graduate degree; for street hawker Shehzad, who recently lost his wife, leaving him alone to look after his young children; for elderly pavement hawker Rani who lost her husband and son, and earns for her grandchildren by selling trinkets; for Abu Noman, who in his 70s is single-handedly keeping