On a colonial-era legacy.

[Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi]

Here’s a thing to mull upon. If all the columns of Delhi’s Connaught Place (CP) are pulled out from their foundation, and installed one upon another, could they then reach the altitude of Mount Everest?

The stately white colonial-era columns constitute CP’s signature sight. They support the ceilings of its colonnades, rooting them to the good earth. Identical in their circular shape and height, the columns line the market arcades of the Inner and Outer Circles, as well as the corridors that link the circles.

Last week, the first part of this series conducted a survey of the Outer Circle columns. Today’s the turn of the Inner Circle columns. The following observations culled out from an afternoon stroll along the circle give a sense of the daily life of the columns, and of the self-contained worlds they harbour (photo above is from a late night excursion).

A little bronze peacock is neatly clamped on to an otherwise bare column. The sight is beautiful in a minimalist manner. The peacock belongs to a trinket seller who daily sets up her stall beside the said column.

A municipal poster plastered beside a column warns—“spitting person will be fined.” The same column is stained red with paan spittings of times past.

A white-haired woman, full of grace and grandmotherly demeanour, is sitting cross-legged outside a cake shop, silently selling pen—her back supported on a column.

A bookstall man is leaning against a column, quietly staring at his mobile phone screen. A dog leaning against the column’s other side is quietly staring towards the next column.

And this column here is the only one of its kind. It is imbued with the nostalgia of letter writing. The column stands outside the Connaught Place post office, and is sandwiched between a red letterbox, and a green letter box (”only for local mails”).

The Inner Circle is lined with very many trees. Obviously then, many of the columns are currently patterned with the shadows of tree leaves. The afternoon’s strong breeze is making the leaves, and their shadows, tremble softly, causing the columns to give an illusion of movement.

Finally, the figures obtained on manually counting the exact number of Inner Circle columns. F block has 65 columns. E block has 65. D block has 28. C block has 28. B block has 65, and finally the A block—65. In all, the Inner Circle has 316 columns. One of these bears a tattered poster showing the mugshots of “Terrorists that the Delhi Police is searching for.”