The Walled City encyclopaedia.

[Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi]

Old Delhi’s Gali Than Singh stays unseen in Bazar Seeta Ram. Steeped in serenity and quietude, no crowd intrudes into its solitary akelapan. Occasionally, a labourer surfaces, breathing hoarsely, carrying hefty cartons on his head.

Nobody encountered on Gali Than Singh this evening has anything specific on long-ago citizen Than Singh, except for assuming that he must have been important enough to have the gali named after him. With no disrespect to the forgotten figure, the street ought to have been instead named after a super-special landmark here. Truly rare in the entire Walled City, it is a little workshop hidden behind a blue door, in a darkened courtyard.

Inside the workshop, the elderly Ramesh Chandra is hammering a huge brass cauldron. The rhythmic thak-thak is echoing off the courtyard walls. The man is surrounded by many of these cauldrons. The cauldrons are all over the place. Some are stacked upon one another. Some are lying upside down in the corners, or by the staircase. Some are huge. Some are not so huge, but even those are big enough to look out of place in any household kitchen.

These vessels are called deg, the man says.

Indeed, deg is a common sight in the historic quarter. Professional “bawarchi” establishments employ such degs for slow-cooking traditional dishes like korma and birytani. What is not common is a workshop dedicated to the deg.

Pausing his hammering, Ramesh Chandra shows the deg he is repairing. He taps on its bottom, explaining that this part of the cauldron tends to soften after long years of use. The base is then hardened with a new layer of brass.

Ramesh Chandra says matter-of-factly that bawarchi cooks from across the Walled City come to him to get their old degs repaired. He now closes his eyes, and faintly smiles, saying he inherited his skills with the deg from his forefathers. He gestures towards an adjacent room. The wall within is crowded with sacred posters of devi-devta, along with a painted portrait of… Jawaharlal Nehru? No, Ramesh Chandra laughs. The face on the frame is of his “pitaji,” he says, admitting that his father did look like India’s first prime minister.

On returning outside to the ordinary world, the spell cast by the workshop feels unreal. The gali continues ahead in a straight line. Some hundred steps later, it swerves right, soon passing into Gali Bajrang Bali.