City Landmark – Bougainvillea Pave, Chelmsford Road Hangouts Life by The Delhi Walla - July 27, 20240 Changed, unchanged. [Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi] Things change profoundly. Yet, they stay the same. This is a brief sketch of a lane, a small stretch of it. Let’s go back to a log-ago July afternoon in the pre-Covid era. Barber Ishtiaq’s stall, on a lane off central Delhi’s Chelmsford Road, would briefly become among the city’s most picturesque shaving spots. It lay under a dense shrubbery of pink bougainvilleas, which for some reason, always bloom most gloriously during the rainy season (unlike many summertime bougainvilleas elsewhere in the city). The flowers would make such an overwhelming impression that the astonished eyes would register the modest stall underneath only a moment later. The middle-aged barber had been manning the booth
City Neighbourhood – Kucha Baqaullah Khan Hangouts Walks by The Delhi Walla - July 27, 20240 One of the two brothers. [Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi] Once upon a time there were “do bhai”— Rohilla Khan and Baqaullah Khan. Both brothers were Mughal nobles. The assertion is forcefully made by a handful of men idling this humid evening at Kucha Baqaullah Khan. (The same claim was asserted one afternoon months ago by a few men idling at the neighbouring Kucha Rohilla Khan—a street already featured on The Delhi Walla). The entry to Baqaullah’s blind alley is like a hole in the wall, sandwiched between the hole-in-the-wall shops of Chitli Qabar Bazar. Fortunately, the green-bordered signboard bearing the street’s name is easily discernible. The other marker is the huge black tank perched atop the tricoloured gateway. Inside, the unpainted
City Neighbourhood – Hamdadrd Chowk, Old Delhi Hangouts Landmarks Walks by The Delhi Walla - July 27, 20240 Circle of birds. [Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi] This humid afternoon the circular traffic island of Hamdard Chowk on Asaf Ali Road is filled, as always, with hundreds of pigeons. The traffic noise is reaching into the sprawling circle weakened and indistinct. A man in white kurta pajama is slowly walking about the circle, stopping frequently, picking up things from the circle’s surprisingly high platform, and he is putting those things… into his mouth! These are broken pieces of mithai that somebody must have placed for the pigeons, he says. He doesn’t give reasons for consuming these himself. ‘Partner in pain’ in Urdu, the chowk’s name comes from the facing headquarters of Hamdard Laboratories At night, the traffic circle’s surroundings--the
City Hangout – Live Music, Connaught Place Hangouts by The Delhi Walla - July 16, 2024July 16, 20240 Killing us softly with their songs [Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi] Late evening. A young man is strumming a guitar in a Connaught Place (CP) corridor, crooning the Ankit Tiwari love song Teri galiyaan. A small crowd swiftly gathers—see photo. Some start snapping the singer-busker. One woman is tapping her foot, in sync with the beats. Elsewhere in CP, an elderly man is often seen playing flute in an Inner Circle corridor, beside a handwritten placard stating: “I’m not a beggar. I just want to touch your soul with the help of music.” Live music in CP is a long-time tradition. The colonial-era commercial district was a jumble of pubs and restaurants as much in the 1960s as it is in the
City Hangout – Gali Teeke Wali, Old Delhi Hangouts Walks by The Delhi Walla - July 7, 20240 Doorway lane. [Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi] Sixty-paces-long, the narrow Gali Teeke Wali is a tributary of the much larger Gali Choori Walan. The lane is stamped with a few “car body parts” shops, along with a few printing presses. Sometimes a sweating labourer is seen hauling a mountainous stack of paper sheets on his bent back. This afternoon, the primary sound is of a printing press machine’s rhythmic rattle. People popping up infrequently along the street don’t have much to say on its name except that “the naam has passed down from the old times.” A woman in black burqa suggests that the lane must have originally been the “address of Brahmins who would apply sacred teeka on their
City Hangout – Monsoon Places, Around Town Hangouts by The Delhi Walla - July 3, 2024July 3, 20240 In Delhi rains. [Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi] The grey sky above the ITO crossing is growing darker. The sweating humidity is soon replaced by a cool breeze. It is starting to rain. Lightly, then heavily. Bikers huddle under the avenue trees. Bus commuters gawk out of the glass windows. An auto rickshaw’s rear-view mirror gets spotty with raindrops, resembling a pointillist Seurat painting. And now he appears--this young man skating in the rain, wheeling past cars and autos, his lithe figure swaying smoothly. See photo. He cheerily waves towards the camera and skates ahead into the thickening rain. The most intense place in the Delhi region to witness the monsoon is an old building in Gurugram’s Civil Lines. The Church of
City Hangout – Hindi Park, Old Delhi Hangouts by The Delhi Walla - July 1, 2024July 1, 20240 A Walled City escape. [Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi] In parks, people often loll on the grassy ground. This afternoon, scores of men (only men) are plopped down in Hindi Park. Curiously, not on the cushiony grass, but on the hard concrete of the walking tracks. Their pants are torn, the shirt buttons are missing. Some bear a gaze hauntingly vacant. Very much in Old Delhi, Hindi Park feels far from Old Delhi’s cramped chaos. Maybe because it happens to be in the vicinity of Ansari Road. Closer to the Yamuna, this part of the historic quarter is more spacious and less crowded. Indeed, a more well-heeled segment of the park regulars happen to be daily refugees from Purani Dilli’s congested
City Hangout – Early Morning Delhi, Around Town Hangouts by The Delhi Walla - June 19, 20240 Exploring the city in the time sof extreme heat. [Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi] In the early morning, just before the summertime sun of mid-June flames brightly on the domes of tombs and forts, on windows and balconies of suburban high-rises, and into the foliage of avenue trees, a sleepy Delhi lies snuggled in relative coolness. Take Hazrat Nizamuddin Basti. The quiet lanes are stirring up with the first round of chai in the chai stalls on boil. The courtyard at Ghalib’s tomb is empty, except for two homeless citizens asleep around the poet’s grave-chamber (see photo). Lying on a stone bench, one of the men is turned towards a marble slab inscribed with Ghalib’s verse. “When nothing was, then God was
City Hangout – Friendly Faces, New Friends Colony Hangouts Life by The Delhi Walla - June 8, 2024June 8, 20240 Different perspectives. [Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi] Are folks in New Friends Colony (NFC) friendlier? Seems so—at least in the market. The NFC Community Centre is an archipelago of interconnected plazas dense with mehendi stalls, cake shops, chai houses (shout out to Juhi’s Tea, the adda with 14 varieties of chai options!), eateries, groceries, stationeries, and denim outlets bearing grandiloquent names like Fashion Point-The Hub. Beyond these bazar businesses lie the bazar faces. Say salam-namaste to three friendly folks of New Friends. Their presence fortifies the Community Centre’s quirkiness, a trait borne out of the commingling of big city commerce with small town apnapan. The juice walla The friendly man’s modestly named Juice Corner is across the road from the Community
City Hangout – Khan Market Updates, Central Delhi Hangouts Life by The Delhi Walla - June 6, 2024June 6, 20240 Last houses. [Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi] The Khan Market sunset is seldom noticed. The sightings of the famous and the fashionable, strolling along the lanes, take away attention from the twilight sky. Then there is the market’s other sunset. It too is seldom noticed, though it has long been gathering about the market’s original character. Khan Market started with 154 shops and 75 flats. That was in 1951. The year 2024 began with only five of those flats, all the rest having slipped into history. One of the flats, a market tattletale informs, was vacated a few weeks ago. It too might be replaced by a cafe or a showroom. Named after the freedom fighter Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan’s elder