Small things of utmost happiness. [Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi] July in Ayemenem is not a hot, brooding month. The days are not long, though they continue to be humid. The river does not seem to shrink at all. Red bananas cannot be seen ripening either, and no jackfruit is bursting. Dissolute bluebottles fail to hum vacuously in the non-fruity air. These lines, mangled, are from the opening passage of The God Of Small Things, Arundhati Roy’s first novel. These are also the first lines The Delhi Walla wrote during a July expedition to Ayemenem, the village in Kerala that frames the novel’s backdrop. Almost 20 years after the publication of The God Of Small Things, Penguin Books in the UK announced

The world's first ghetto. [Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi] Butchers and blacksmiths, fortune-tellers and beggars, carpet sellers and cobblers, chickens and children... all of this made more frenzied by the great milling crowds. It could be Old Delhi. This is the world’s first ghetto, and it is not in India but Italy. The ancient Jewish district of Venice was the world’s first officially segregated quarter to confine a persecuted minority community into a limited space. It’s observing its 500th anniversary this year—the Most Serene Republic of Venice declared on 29 March 1516 that “The Jews must all live together... they do not move around during the night... let two doors be built which are to be opened each morning... and

On the world's first ghetto. [Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi] He is a scholar of the world’s first ghetto—the ancient Jewish ghetto of Venice is observing its 500th anniversary this year. One late morning The Delhi Walla meets Lucio De Capitani at Parco Savorgnan, a public garden not far from the ghetto. Despite this being a liquid city, there is no water to be seen. An old palace blocks the view of the park from the canal. The decorative pools are dry. Seated on a bench, the 20-something PhD student says, “I’m studying the works of authors who travelled to distant places and tried to describe other people and cultures. Amitav Ghosh is one such writer. He went to Egypt, Burma,

The last Mughal's grave. [Text and photos by Florian Morin] The tomb of Bahadur Shah Zafar, Delhi's last Mughal emperor, is just a few hundred meters away from the Shwedagon Pagoda, the most sacred stupa in Myanmar (formerly known as Burma) and the ultimate must-see monument in Yangon (formerly Rangoon), its largest city. Unlike its gilded and famous neighbour, however, Zafar's tomb was almost empty when I went to visit it, one Saturday evening in December, not long before its closing time. Only two men were seated at the entrance. The elder one, I think, was the guard. Because Bahadur Shah Zafar was not just a king, his tomb is not just a tomb. An Urdu poet and a devout Sufi,

A perfect world. [Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi] Tall rose bushes grow in every house. Walls are painted with most brilliant colors. A well is overgrown with wild grass. The Delhi Walla is in Puraini, a village about a hundred miles from Delhi. This is the heart of the sugarcane country in western Uttar Pradesh. The foothills of the Himalayas are somewhere very close. But the village has folded itself into its own world. The place is as unreal as a morning dream. Old houses are built as if they have been effortlessly weaved out from arched niches and carved doorways. Painted brick walls have metamorphosed to more interesting shades. In the courtyard of one such home, a blue kerosene lamp hangs

The best Taj property. [Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi] It is called the Taj Hotel but it does not belong to the famous Taj Group of Hotels. Actually, it is not a hotel, just an eatery. And it is largely patronised by fakirs and pilgrims who are too poor to dine elsewhere. The Delhi Walla visited the Taj Hotel in Ajmer, the Sufi town six hours away from Delhi. It is tucked next to a gateway to the great Sufi shrine of Hazrat Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti. The eatery looks like an art gallery. Its wall is decked with paintings of various Sufi shrines, including of Delhi's Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya. There is also a painting of Delhi's Jama Masjid, and also of

Glimpses of a sacred space. [Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi] An elderly pilgrim from Rajkot in Gujarat lovingly offers a rose petal to the lips of his wife. Nearby, rose petals are placed on an unknown person’s grave. The Delhi Walla is in the Sufi shrine of Hazrat Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti in Ajmer, Rajasthan. (I wrote about this shrine in great detail here.) Ajmer is a town with dream-like aspects. This is a place where the earlier ways of life are fleetingly glimpsed in fragments of old buildings, like in Delhi, too. But you see the old world also in the everyday dresses of the people of this town, in the quiet gestures of the fakirs, in the beautiful eyes of

Death of a bookshop. [Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi] Stop the clocks. Silence the pianos. The double-storey La Hune is to shut down permanently. Tucked in the heart of the most beautiful part of Paris, it is one of the most beautiful bookshops in the world. “We are closing very soon,” says the young man behind the cash counter at La Hune bookstore. “It’s our owner’s decision,” he adds, pointing to posters on the glass door announcing La Hune’s impending closure on 14 June, 2015 at 20.00 hours. The death notice feels as unreal as the evening sky of Paris during September evenings. Opened in 1949 (though not in its present address), La Hune is as much of an institution

The Italian nature. [Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi] Have you ever cycled through a daydream? The Delhi Walla did. I’m in Venice. One morning I left it for its surrounding country. The day was made of a blue sky. The Alps stood in the distance, the cool air was dense with bird sounds, and the narrow bicycle track was bordered on both sides by trees and streams. The strong breeze kept the clear waters of these streams in a continuous state of agitation. There was barely any other person to be seen on the pathway, though at one point it passed by a village with a church. The old church had a Murano glass chandelier painted in blue, yellow and