Dante’s CP.

[Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi]

Per Dante’s Inferno, each of the Hell’s nine concentric circles in the epic poem denotes a distinct tier of sin and damnation. Similarly, in Delhi’s Connaught Place (CP), each of the colonial-era market’s four concentric circles maintains a distinct tier of sights and sounds. The initial two circles were tracked over the previous weeks. The first runs along CP’s heart-core: the Central Park. The second is a white colonnade crammed with showrooms and restaurants. (To most Delhi wallas, this is the circle the mind’s eye envisages when thinking of CP).

Now to the strangest part of CP: the Middle Circle. It contains a half of CP’s quintessential essence, the half that gives the shopping district its perennially dishevelled appearance, no matter how many renovations it has undergone. The long-looping passage is actually a traffic-heavy road, but equipped with wide paves for aimless strolls. Whatever, despite sprinkled over with shops, restaurants, cafés, chai kiosks and even office complexes, the circle is permeated with a mood of desolation. Discoloured walls, peeling paint, rusting locks, cobwebby doors, green plants straying out from concrete crevices. A massive facade is pockmarked with broken windows; one is choked up with bricks. While in another block, a shuttered shopfront is standing profoundly forlorn. The legend on the damaged hoarding calls it I Chan Thim Furniture. Nobody in the vicinity is able to tell any bit on the haunting relic, although a dated bhooli-bhusri story on internet hails the shop’s founder as a distinguished cabinet-maker from the 1920s and 30s, his services certified by the British administrators.

The Middle Circle’s most picturesque corner is made of a dense shrubbery of white bougainvilleas. It is literally a hanging garden, cascading down from the roof of a building, all the way down to the iconic Nizam’s Kathi Kabab. Steps ahead lurks another Middle Circle icon —the modest Anil Book Corner. It has been selling used books since 1972, valiantly surviving the death of its founder, the much-missed Anil Kumar.

Some years ago, a historic Delhi icon quietly shifted its corporate headquarters from the Walled City, settling down anew in M Block, Middle Circle. It is the company that produces Rooh Afza sherbet.