The Walled City dictionary.

[Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi]

Heer & Ranjha are among the many star-crossed protagonists of our tragic love fables. But Katra Sheikh Ranjha in Old Delhi has nothing to do with love, passion or heartbreak.

Unless you find romance in nuts and bolts.

The lane teems with shops selling these mechanical fasteners. Take Ganpati House. It specialises in “all kinds of machine screws, nuts, bolts, self taping screws, spring washers, stainless steel screws and brass screws.”

Such is the irony. Once the world had a Ranjha bursting with mohabbat-pyar. Today the world has a Sheikh Ranjha bursting with machine-parts. That said, the place has its own idiosyncratic poetry. A beautifully illustrated hoarding of Bhola Ram & Sons, for instance, is showing a range of unfamiliar metal tools (see photo), each accompanied by its name: wood flat bit, T.C.T Holesaw, Flat Disc, Carbode Glass Drill, Magnetic Nut Socket, etc.

To think of it, even the word “katra” is embedded with its own unique enchantment. In the terminology of Walled City neighbourhoods, katra refers to living quarters built around a courtyard with a single narrow entrance, and inhabited by people of the same caste or occupation. A bit of snooping reveals Katra Sheikh Ranjha to bear a similar setup. It starts as a narrow street from Chawri Bazar, and opens inside into a courtyard. Plus, most folks here share the same occupation.

Sheikh Ranjha, however, isn’t a residential quarter. Post sunset, the shopkeepers and their employees return home, leaving the katra deserted until the next morning. Some of these men live far outside the historic quarter. One merchant commutes all the way from distant GTB Nagar. This moment, he is sitting behind his desk, under the garlanded portrait of his departed father. His shop is slightly different from other businesses in the katra. It isn’t crammed with nuts and bolts, but with a diverse range of bulky locks. “We get our taale from Aligarh, Rajkot, and Jamnagar,” he says sleepily, before nodding off again.

Meanwhile, nobody in the katra has any insights on Sheikh Ranjha, the man who gave his identity to the locality. One shopkeeper conjectures katra’s Ranjha to have been an “honourable” nobleman. His actual name had to be something else, he insists—“Sheikh saheb was likely to have had the colourful life of a lover, because of which people must have started calling him Ranjha.” Minutes later, he is seen showing his collection of nuts-bolts to a customer: “This is flange bolt nut, this is hex bolt nut, this is SS bolt nut…”