A Place Within (16 page)

In the days not long gone, before globalization gained pace and “IT” opened the door to an Alibaba’s cave of economic success and exuberant consumerism, you were told by friends before you left for Delhi where you should look for nonvegetarian food, should the craving come upon you, or, what was more likely, should the kids rebel, having had enough of mattar paneer, alu gobhi, and toor ki daal. There were the large tourist hotels, and one or two places in Connaught Place, and one or two at Khan Market, a five-minute walk from the India International Centre, which itself also served nonveg of a simple but consistent variety, but where you had to be a member or go with one. And finally, for the connoisseur and the committed carnivore, there was Karim’s, capital of Mughal nonveg, tucked away in Shah Jahan’s Delhi on Chitli Qabar Marg, a few yards down from his grand mosque. Nowadays nonveg has become so accessible and acceptable that many people don’t remember the days when asking a friend how to get to Karim’s could be an embarrassment, especially in the days of Hindu-Muslim tension following the destruction of Babur’s mosque. In any case, in the mostly vegetarian Delhi of the time, here was meat galore, cooking on spits outside a rather drab-looking establishment. With its reputation now established internationally, and the Delhi-wallah with even a more modest vegetarian palate nibbling at chicken or fish (as my friend Krishan Chander now does, convinced after an angiogram that they are not a bad substitute for veg cooked in ghee), Karim’s has branches outside the area, though people swear by the good old
plain Karim’s of the walled city. Any bystander will point out its small sign, and you say, Ah! and head towards it, as the owners of neighbouring establishments, their menus no different, peek out with looks of envy and wonder what could be so special about Karim’s. The claim is that Haji Karimuddin’s forefathers were employed in the royal kitchens of the Mughals; after the banishment to Burma of the last emperor, the Haji brought his culinary knowledge to the service of the common man and woman outside the walls of the Red Fort. Karim’s opened in 1913.

You enter a short alley and are greeted by a large red board and a counter where curries are cooking in metal pots, and to your right kebabs are grilled on fires. There are three dining rooms around the small courtyard, which allows parking for a few motorbikes, and another dining room a floor up. It’s all very informal, as you expect. Once seated on the bench seats, you can’t decide what to order. Succulent mutton curries, various kebabs, biriyanis, assorted naans and rotis pass you by. The menu is diverse, at variance with the typical north Indian. I find the shammi kebabs, as starter, perfect in texture and taste; the seekh kebab is good; the mutton burra a little too dry. The brain curry cooked in garlic and spices comes under a layer of oil, so you have to forget health warnings for the day. The lamb stew and Shahjahani chicken curry are wonderfully spiced but drenched in oil, so that after the meal a good jog back to Lodi Road is worth contemplating. The biriyani is disappointing, it is what we called pilau at home, and no better: essentially rice cooked with garam masala and meat, in this case two rather bony pieces of lamb.

As you return from Karim’s at night, Chitli Qabar Marg has lost little of its bustle from daytime and gained all the festive brilliance of neon and the aromas of foods grilled and frying. Even the children are about. But the woman with you is obviously from the suburbs—her clothes identify her—and even though her head has
been covered for the occasion with a dupatta, the stares are discomforting and the crowds seem perhaps a little threatening—this she will not admit but you can sense—so a rickshaw is called for, though this in itself draws attention.

The Jama Masjid is surrounded by mechanical ugliness: stores selling used motor parts—tires, brakes, engines and their parts, fenders and doors, all spilling into the greasy sidewalk, customers inspecting, shop owners looking on, attendants attending; the odd Urdu bookstand.

Instead of taking Chitli Qabar Marg out of the city you could take Chawri Bazar from Jama Masjid; the two are roughly, crookedly, parallel, both ending at Asaf Ali Road, one at Delhi Gate, the other at Ajmeri Gate. First comes the paper market, carts and rickshaws carrying away cartons of papers and paper products. We reach an intersection where Nai Sarak—the textbook market—takes off, and where, from first-floor windows, courtesans once upon a time looked down upon the street. At this corner is an old mithaiwala shop, selling kachoris, samosas, etcetera, with lassi; a shack that has been busy since 1837, so says the elderly man who runs a paper business from an even smaller area partitioned off from the main shop, while his nephews run the old snack shop. The children are studying hotel management and catering, to carry on the family’s food business. The paper merchant shows us greeting cards, wedding invitation cards, the latter always in demand. The conversation lingers on the subject of digital scanning and design copyright, and it is agreed that you can’t stop the pirates but ultimately it is the reputation that counts. Anyone can make mattar kachori, says the irrepressible Mahesh, to illustrate the point, but there’s nothing like the ones you sell here. The man is gratified, business cards are exchanged.

We push through the crowded sidewalks, Mahesh pointing out the various trades as the paper market gives way to hardware, plumbing, and plastic, calculating for me the millions of dollars of business transacted here every day—and pausing occasionally to answer his cell phone as he keeps track of his only living uncle’s declining health. Mamu—his mother’s brother—is only a few years older than Mahesh and more like his own brother; in the early days of Partition, still just a teenager, Mamu would fly kites with Mahesh in the neighbourhood and sold ice cream on Chandni Chowk to help his newly homeless family, refugees from what had become Pakistan. Banias—traders—by caste, they rebuilt themselves in Delhi, succeeding at a stationery business while living in the same house they were awarded by the city as compensation for what was lost, and Mamu is now at a private American-style hospital costing several hundred dollars a day, which would crush an ordinary Indian.

Chawri Bazar crosses Sitaram Bazar, then arrives at Ajmeri Gate. Across from the busy Asaf Ali Road is the Anglo Arabic School, founded as a madrassa in 1692 by a dignitary of the Mughal court named Ghaziuddin. It later became Delhi College, where in 1842 Ghalib came to be interviewed for a job; he declined it when he arrived on his palanquin and did not receive the welcome he expected from the English principal as the preeminent poet of Delhi. The college is the alma mater of several eminent Indians and Pakistanis, including Pakistan’s first prime minister. The British introduced English, mathematics, and the sciences here, and today it is the local school for the inhabitants of the old city.

The shabby arched front entrance opens into a quite handsome quadrangle with a green at the centre; the walkways which cross it are of red sandstone, and the cloisters on three sides are arched and painted an off-white. There is a look of recent repairs, apparently undertaken by the city. On the fourth side, directly in front, is a grand mosque next to the tomb of Ghaziuddin. The quadran
gle leads through a gate on the left into a run-down area where once Delhi College was located, where Mahesh finished his upper schooling. At the sight of the gate my friend runs through it gleefully, nostalgic, excited; he trots about with his camera, shows me the old library, the Hindi classroom—where he, the future Hindi translator, would make a point to miss his classes, answering the roll call while standing outside, chatting—the prep rooms, the girls’ room, outside which the boys would perpetually hang around, and the wicket where they would pay their fees. Delhi College has since moved, and these rooms are used by the Anglo Arabic School.

At the steps of the open mosque a shaikh sits reading the Quran; a few other men sit inside. No one knows anything about the history of the place; but, says the shaikh, people do come around asking.

It’s Saturday.

Asaf Ali Road, edging Old Delhi at its southern boundary, is moderately busy, its low office buildings effectively a containing wall, in place presumably of the original city wall. West of Delhi Gate on this road comes a quite remarkable sight: on the sidewalk outside a bank, a dozen or so men and a single woman are sitting on chairs at makeshift tables busily typing on old-style typewriters. They are law clerks, their clients waiting patiently around them for their documents to get typed. Further along the road comes the Turkman Gate. A few yards inside this gate appears the bead market, a row of stores selling loose and strung beads; further in, and the shop signs are no longer in Urdu script but in Devanagari. And suddenly there are no goats about. We are now in Sitaram Bazar, evidently Hindu in character. It’s not that Muslims do not use Devanagari in modern India; and in the past educated Hindus, of course, read and wrote Urdu and even Persian. But here in the
present, the sudden change is meaningful, denotes two peoples. My friend Mahesh calls this a recent phenomenon, reflecting the rise of Hindu communalism. The shops sell a variety of items, including circuit boards and Holi paraphernalia—heaps of coloured powder to dissolve in water and pumps for spraying it—for it is the eve of the festival of Holi, when people go about throwing or spraying colour at each other. Oranges, grapes, and bananas are also on display, occasionally guava, whose season, early in March, is ending.

There comes the Chaurasi Ganthi Mandir, the temple of the eighty-four bells, a cluster of which is visible from the street, hanging in the front hall. I have yet to find someone who can tell me what the bells signify, if there is a special story to this temple with such a lovely name. Otherwise it’s a simple building, blending in with the business-residences which are its neighbours, right in the thick of the shopping. I walk inside, into a small dark hall, to discover that the cluster consists of numerous small bells hanging around a large iron ring; there are also individual bells hanging from the beams, and large bells at the front and back entrances, which are vigorously rung by worshippers. I can’t help but raise my hand and follow suit. The shrine to the left, a brilliantly lit, colourful area in the otherwise dingy room, indicates by the icons present there that the temple is to the god Rama.

Almost next door in Sitaram Bazar is the building that’s become famous as the childhood home of Pandit Nehru’s wife, Indira Gandhi’s mother, Kamala. This used to be an old-style haveli in a neighbourhood of Kashmiri Hindus, who are known to eat meat. It is here that young Nehru’s barat, the wedding procession bearing the groom on a horse, would have come to take the bride away. Indira was the only child of that marriage, in which the husband and father was often away during the struggle for independence, canvassing or in prison. There is an outer gate with a massive door leading into a courtyard: cowpats on the ground; a communal
water pump; an arched doorway leading into an interior; all around us the back sides of apartments. Obviously the old property has been greatly rearranged. Through the doorway we enter a corridor opening into the offices of an advocate and of a realestate business that seem to belong to a single family. The corridor comes to an abrupt end at a wall, which could be of recent vintage. A man appears, understands our query, and shows us hooks hanging from the ceiling, from which apparently fans had once hung. He takes us to his office, offers us tea, but we decline. Evidently he is used to curious visitors. But there’s nothing else to see. Kamala’s haveli is oral history, her ghost haunting this location.

Outside, on the road, preparations are under way for the Holi celebrations tomorrow. At the crossroads, “holikas” have been constructed: piles of wood which will be burnt later, in the evening, to begin the celebrations. But this is also an occasion for spring cleaning, says Mahesh, with his knack for the little detail, pointing out how people have also heaped their junk—old furniture, baskets—on the firewood. Women and children come to stand worshipfully before the holikas.