A souvenir, gone

On the end of a ruined Walled City edifice

The arches have gone. The shelves have gone. The taak, the traditional niches so rare to see these days, too are gone.

The remains of this collapsed mansion have finally been disposed off. Its ruins had been left untouched for over two decades, on this street, near Chitli Qabar Chowk, close to Wali Hair Cutting Saloon.

And so one more souvenir of Old Delhi disappears.

The deserted building was of lakhori, the narrow bricks of bygone structures (this photo is from early this year). The skeleton framework vividly conveyed the mood of the imagined life that must have existed inside the house. For instance, those shelves on which poetry books on Ghalib and Daagh might have been stacked. That taaq—maybe it was the place to keep the candle during power cuts. And that sequence of arches, which rippled out like soft music—it must have separated the drawing room from the family’s private quarters.

This afternoon, the area is hidden from the street by a metal barricade. Inside, a dozen labourers are at work. The area has been flattened, the rubbles removed. A meat shop owner nearby remarks that the building had collapsed more than 25 years ago. “It had gotten too old, its foundation gave away.” He recalls a kabutarbaz (pigeon collector) who lived in the house. Another shopkeeper shares details on the owner and on the reasons why the ruins were allowed to stay for so long — complicated circumstances that don’t need to be detailed here.

In the course of time, locals had come to treat the ruin in a practical way. They would dump the household rubbish into its vacant centre.

In fact, that garbage had become a small hill over the years, and recently labourers were especially employed to dig out the garbage (it was taken off on the back of mules). In the past years, the area’s dogs, tired of loitering about the streets, would take shelter in it at night. Cats would perch on the most remote parts.

The house, or whatever was left of it, stood as a material witness to the earlier times that shaped the Walled City. Despite its lack of doors, windows, balconies and roof, it looked more elegant than the contemporary housing that besieged it from all sides. It was tempting to concentratedly gaze upon the ruin, as if that could miraculously bring it back to the world of its heydays, much like the computerised effects in the film Titanic, when the sunken ship recovers its original splendour within moments.

This evening, the labourers working on the site say a new building will come is to come up here.

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