City Improbable- Writings on Delhi

by Khuswant Singh

  When I returned at the end of the month to greet him on the day of Eid, he was not in the archway of the green door where I often found him. He was not on the stone bench smoking his huqqa, but he had stopped sitting there some time ago, even before his accident, since the banyan that shaded it had been chopped down by the new authorities of the dargah. ‘Whatever God wills must happen,’ he had said without any bitterness in his voice. I knew he had planted the tree himself when he first arrived in the dargah. It had grown old with him and was his friend. But he showed no signs of mourning or despair. He had planted saplings of flowering bushes on the spot where the great tree had stood. When I arrived that Eid, I saw the saplings bursting with spring flowers. But no one was around. No one was in the hall praying. No peacocks danced. The door of his room bore a small brass lock.

  ‘Where is Baba?’ I asked the man who would share with him the huqqa. ‘He’s gone back home to his village,’ the man said, betraying a certain glee. ‘I live in his room now.’ ‘But Baba’s home was this dargah,’ I said, but the man did not seem concerned. Even he should have known that Baba had no other home. He had lived much of his life at the shrine and wanted to be buried here, beside the grave of his saint. As I stood in the courtyard and watched the sun disappear behind the tomb, I felt desolate. ‘What is Baba’s address?’ I asked. ‘And his name?’ ‘You can send a card to Sipalai village in district Gajroula, Moradabad,’ the man replied. ‘Is there a house number, a street name? And his own name—what is Baba’s name?’ The man shuffled uncomfortably. ‘Just write Baba,’ he suggested.

  But what would I write? Not the regular queries that people exchange with each other. My friendship had nothing to do with his life or mine. Our bond was not the kind that demands an exchange of social pleasantries. It was forged almost out of air, a fragrant one that we both breathed when we met, alone in a city of thirteen million. That air, I told myself, will continue to bind us. Distances for a Sufi, as Baba would say, do not exist. Nor does a name. He was a dear friend. And I never knew his name.

  Lodi Garden

  BULBUL SHARMA

  The crows are always the first to wake up. The moment a shaft of grey dusty sunlight touches the main dome of the Lodi Tomb, they begin to call. Their early morning voices are quite gentle with no hint of the raucous and rude notes which come later as the day wears on and the gardens change their colours. Lodi Garden, spread like a soft green carpet in the heart of New Delhi, constantly changes its mood as hundreds of birds, schoolchildren, lovers, morning walkers and power-walkers troop through its vast lawns.

  The parade of people, some of them from far-flung corners of the city, begins as soon as dawn breaks over Delhi. The early morning walkers are a dedicated lot. Dressed in the combat gear of the health freaks, armed with walking sticks, water bottles and small towels, they stride with a purposeful air. They never stop to admire the flowers which line the walking paths though they may stop for a few seconds to do some deep breathing under the shade of an old neem or acacia. Like an orderly troop of victorious soldiers, the walkers, mostly elderly people, march on blissfully, fixing everyone who comes in their path to health and happiness with a polite but distant look. They do not want to disturb their breathing pattern by talking. Some spread out mats and practise complicated yoga asanas oblivious of the cheeky chattering mynas, while others stand and swing their arms about dangerously like lethal windmills.

  Once the morning walkers have inhaled their daily dose of oxygen and left, the Lodi Garden suddenly falls silent as if taking a short rest after all this energetic breathing and walking on its grounds. The trees stand quietly, their green, ochre and brown leaves painting a background of soft watercolour strokes beyond the rolling lawns and dark monuments. In winter the trees wear mostly brown and green shades, letting the flower-filled borders infuse the park with a range of colours, but as soon as spring arrives the flowering trees bring out their flashy blossoms. The silk cotton, coral, jacaranda, kanak-champa, kachnar and gulmohar are all here along with many handsome old neem, pepal, keekar, mango and jamun trees which were here long before many of the morning walkers were born.

  The Lodi Garden was once known as Lady Willingdon Park and its old trees have given shelter to many a solar topee-clad Raj official and his gently perspiring lady wife. The park was much smaller then with a road cutting across, and every evening ayahs would bring their charges to ‘eat the air’. An elderly friend remembers how she was not allowed to mingle with the babies with golden hair and had to keep to her side of the park. ‘It was the ayahs who were great snobs, who formed these rules and divided the park into gora and kala. On the rare days when the English mothers came along with their babies we all played together quite happily,’ she recalls. Those days the park bordered on vast acres of wilderness where foxes played hide-and-seek and grey partridges came out at dusk to call their mates home. There was nothing beyond the Lodi Road except for a tree-lined narrow road leading to Safdarjung’s tomb. The South End Road in those days meant what it said.

  The ruler of the Lodi dynasty who is buried here could have never imagined how popular this garden in the wilderness would become one day. The gardens are dotted with monuments which echo the rugged, no-frills style of Lodis like the Bara Gumbad Mosque with its calligraphic motifs, the unusual octagonal tomb of Sikander Lodi and the somewhat forlorn monument where Muhamad Shah—a ruler of the short-lived Sayyed dynasty—is buried. An old Mughal bridge built during the sixteenth century is my favourite. Called Athpula—eight piers—the bridge overlooks a shallow pond which is filled with tadpoles and tiny fishes during the monsoon. This cool area shaded by willows is also the favourite hunting ground of many birds. A paddy bird lurks amongst the foliage on the banks, its pointed beak ready for a kill, the white-breasted kingfisher is here too on most mornings searching for tadpoles and crickets. It perches on the edge of the stone bridge assuming an unconcerned stance but the minute it sights a potential quarry, it swoops down with a flash of brilliant blue. This shallow pond, which gets quite muddy when the summer dust covers its surface, sometimes has a few little green bee-eaters hunting from the treetops. These jewel-like birds have sharp beaks and wear tiny black masks like miniature bandits. They are restless creatures who cannot wait for their meals to arrive. With a quick, graceful turn of wings they fly out repeatedly from their vantage point on top of a branch to catch any insect that flies past. They hunt all day long, from sunrise to sunset, devouring countless winged insects despite their tiny size. Sometimes I think the bee-eaters hunt so relentlessly because they love the thrill of hunting and cannot resist a chase.

  During the winter afternoons the Lodi Garden gets no respite as crowds arrive from faraway areas of Delhi. Besides the dedicated walkers who claim the right of way in these gardens, there are families with hordes of children and giant picnic baskets. Weary servants and sullen children are made to carry huge tiffin carriers, two-feet-high thermos flasks, hampers, durries and wailing babies. Loaded like ants food-gathering for a rainy day, the picnic groups walk in single file, never venturing far from the gates. Their appetites whetted by all this weight lifting, they usually fall upon their food at once. For a short while a delicious aroma floats in the air around these groups but soon the elders fall asleep under the trees. The younger lot play cards or squabble with each other silently, afraid of waking up their parents, till it is time for tea and more food.

  Winter afternoons which bring crowds of people to Lodi Garden cause great grief to the courting couples who long for the quiet, sultry days of summer when they can sit safely under the shade of the neem tree and whisper sweet nothings to each other, watched only by a sympathetic pair of cooing doves. In winter the loving couples have to walk around the park looking for safe nooks and corners there they will not be disturbed by squabbling children, hawkers, walkers or a swiftly flying cricket ball. That is why in winter a major part of the population of courting couples migrates to less congested parks and returns only when the quiet days of summer
do.

  The migrant birds do just the opposite, arriving in the beginning of winter in Lodi Garden and leaving as soon as the afternoon sun begins to get hot. There are not many migrants here since most of then are water birds, but one can meet a few wagtails along with the cheerful black redstart out hunting on a winter morning. A flock of starlings may stop for a short break on their way to Sultanpur Lake but that is rare since they usually prefer the rocky landscape of Nehru Park.

  Many years ago, on 1 January 1982, I saw a dozen scarlet minivets on the keekar trees. According to my notes, the flock stayed there for half an hour and then flew away. I have never seen these birds or starlings in Lodi Garden again and I feel they have been chased away not by the picnicking crowds or the fierce exercising men but by their own kind—the mynas. These aggressive birds have made up their minds that they own Lodi Garden and do not give the right of way to even the most senior civil-servant-rank jogger. They know every bit of the park and gather to bathe, feed and fight in these chosen areas.

  The mynas like the evening mood of the garden when it wears a festive air as if a carnival were on. Hundreds of cars line the road outside as smartly dressed men and women step out and trot up the paths, their white Reebok or Nike shoes startling the parakeets about to roost for the evening. These walkers are as different from the early morning crowd as a starling is from a humble crow. They may wear similar tracksuits but the look in their eyes is totally different. These power-walkers who come to the gardens in the evenings believe they are very committed health-conscious people, and make sure everyone, including the mynas, know it. They look down upon the morning walkers who they think treat exercising somewhat lightly. The power-walkers have very little time and make the best use of it by planning their every move by the watch. The minute they enter the park they begin to count their pulse rate, taking care at the same time to fix their cellphones to their belts. Thus prepared, they hurl themselves headlong like raging bulls as everyone moves out of their path. They may wave occasionally, with a slight lift of their right hand, like the Queen, to another power-walker but everyone else they ignore. Like programmed robots they walk very fast, looking straight ahead, with a fanatic’s crazed look on their sweaty faces.

  As the day ends, the gardens empty out and only a few lonely strollers are left on the paths. The squirrels, bold and brash, retire for the night underneath the shrubs or bed down in their untidy nests. The sparrows have one collective round of chatter before settling down while above them the sky turns dark with huge flocks of homing parakeets. These long-time resident birds of Lodi tombs fly off to feed on the outskirts of Delhi and return at dusk to their shelters deep inside the broken stone walls. They match their green-blue feathers with the few remaining blue glazed tiles of the Shish Gumbad which was built sometime during Sikandar Lodi’s reign (1489-1517). It is not known who lies buried here in this tomb but it must have been an important person since the tomb was originally decorated with beautiful blue tiles that were rare in those turbulent times. The tiles which must have shone an intense blue in the sunlight now survive only in fragments to remind us of the glitter and glory of a forgotten personage.

  The Lodi Garden has seen many dynasties of Delhi rulers rise and fall, and the park can match its ever-changing light to suit its audience. Broken blue tiles for old parakeet families to roost on, pretty borders of annuals for gardeners to admire, neatly marked jogging tracks for power-walkers, shady groves of trees for truant schoolboys and secret lovers, sweet and bitter fruits for fastidious coppersmiths and vast green lawns for happy picnickers. This park where people come to rest their eyes, to quicken their pulse rate, to network with important people, to play with their children, to soothe their lovesick hearts, is one of the last remaining symbols of what Delhi once was when it was at its best.

  Dilli ka Dastarkhwan

  SADIA DEHLVI

  It was in the late 1950s that my grandfather, Abba, moved from our ancestral home in the gali kuchas of the walled city to a sprawling bungalow in the plush Diplomatic Enclave in New Delhi. The house had large lawns and fountains and came to be known as the Shama Kothi—Abba had by then made a tremendous success of Shama, the Urdu literary and film magazine which he edited and published. To his first name Yusuf, he added Dehlvi, meaning ‘from Delhi’, which stuck on as the family name. As was the tradition with the Dilli nobility, Abba hosted mushairas, qawwalis, and dance and music mehfils at the bungalow. Mahmannawasi—hospitality—was almost a religious virtue with Dilliwalas, and Abba was known to have the finest cuisine of all Dilli in his house.

  Abba did not interfere with his architect Kanvinde, who was renowned among his contemporaries, except when it came to the kitchen or bawarchikhana. He was convinced that no one but a true Dilliwala could ever understand what was required for the Dilli style of cooking. Like all Dilliwalas, he believed that the kitchen is the soul of the house, especially for the womenfolk. That is not to say that the kitchen was beautiful, in fact it was perhaps the shoddiest part of the house. The walls were made of pindole, a yellowish substance made from kuchi mutti, and looked patchy against the marble floor. It was always filled with smoke and under my grandmother’s supervision, the old bearded khansama Badruddin would be blowing away with a heavy iron pipe called phukni at the wood shavings over the coal in the earthen stoves to raise the flames. Food was cooked in silver-plated copper utensils and asli ghee was used for all cooking. The lawns were perpetually dotted with large round seems filled with washed spices drying in the sun before being ground or with earthenware jars in which fresh pickles were being sunned.

  In the dining room, the twelve-feet-long table was pushed to the side of the room and only pulled out for parties. Usually we sat around a long rectangular tablecloth called dastarkhwan, placed on sheets which covered most of the floor.

  The usual lunch or dinner consisted of at least five or six main dishes. Like most Muslim homes, all of these were meat-based. Vegetables were rarely served on their own: seasonal vegetables were usually made into salans, cooked with mutton. Some fruits like bananas, pears and apples were occasionally also prepared with mutton. Amma cooked karelas and capsicums stuffed with mince and sewed together with needle and thread. These dishes were called dulma. With karelas, the test lay in completely getting rid of their bitterness. Pasandas—chunks of lean meat, flattened and cooked—was another speciality. All varieties of kababs, especially shammi, were popular, and tikkas were made from the heart of a goat and the tongue of an ox. Occasionally there was rice with lal masor, chana or yellow moong daal. Other daals never entered our kitchen, nor did vegetables like parval, brinjal, cabbage and pumpkin. Among the elite, barbecuing whole dumbas, hill goats from Khorasan in Afghanistan, was common till their disappearance in the late 1940s. The dumbas with their high proportion of fat needed no cooking oils and the aroma of the melted fat was supposedly addictive. Meals concluded with paan made by Amma from her silver-plated paandaan which was always beside her.

  We were taught that different parts of the goat had distinctive properties. Eating the neck cured fever, and the trotters helped bone fractures to heal. Kapoora and gurda (kidney and testicles) were known for their aphrodisiac properties and fed to the bridegroom at weddings. The men of the house purchased the raw meat from the qasal shops. Dilliwalas were finicky about the cuts of the meats and prefer adla (upper back), dast (forelegs), put (lower back) and raan (thigh). Lamb meat was never used as it is hard and turns blackish after cooking. If someone served tough meat, people would comment with derision: ‘Bhed ka gosht khila diya (They have fed us lamb).’

  Favoured birds on our dastarkhwans were chicken, partridge, quail and pigeon. Murg musalam, a whole chicken stuffed with dry fruits, was prepared on special occasions. The broth of choosas (young chicks) was drunk to regain strength after any illness.

  As a child I loved to visit relatives in the old city as it meant access to eats unavailable elsewhere. My favourites were daulat ki chaat, the froth of lassi served on leaves, and
malai ki baraf, layers of frozen cream carried in a quaint wooden box filled with ice. After dinner we would go to buy milk warmed in large kadhais and garnished with pistachio and almonds. The milk was served in terracotta abkhoras, which added the delectable fragrance of clay. I always looked forward to tasting the dahibadas, kachoris, halwas, paranthas and other famous vegetarian delights of the old city, reminders of the composite culture—the ganga jamuni tehzeeb—of Dilli.

  Dilliwalas were extremely particular about taaseer, the effects and properties of each food. Spices like cardamoms, cloves, cinnamon and peppercorns were garam taseer and believed to have warming effects. Dishes where these are used extensively were cooked in winter. Unmarried girls were prohibited from having egg yolk or large quantities of heavily spiced dishes lest the garam taseer put their hormones into overdrive.

  Shabdegh, nihari and haleem were dishes cooked exclusively in winter. Haleem was made with mutton, whole wheat and chana daal. Making it was a lengthy procedure: washing and drying the wheat, cooking all the ingredients separately, and then deboning the mixture and pounding it to a sticky paste. Shabdegh (literally, night-cauldron) was made of mutton, koftas and chunks of carrot or turnip, and simmered all night over a low fire. Nihari, traditionally a beef curry, was also cooked all through the night and eaten just after dawn. The meat used was from the hip joint, and the brain, marrow and tongue were also put into the pot. It was garnished with slices of lemon, finely sliced ginger pieces, chopped coriander, chopped green chillies and freshly ground garam masala. A few kilos from each day’s leftovers were added to the next day’s cooking. This was called taar, and gave the unique flavour. There are still some nihari shops in old Delhi which boast of unbroken taar going back more than a century. Other winter favourites were biryani, qormas and siri paya (head and trotters).