Season’s luminosity.

[Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi]

The Amar Colony shop is shuttered at the moment. Being mid-morning, the sun has already risen. A small triangle of gold light is glistening on the shop’s corrugated metal shutter. In that fragment lies a persistence and fragility.

Delhi’s daylight turns exceptional twice a year. In October, after the monsoon clears the sky, and before the winter smog arrives. And now, in February, after the cold haze lifts, and before the summer dust could alter the texture of the air. The daylight becomes almost glassy.

You cannot notice this light by looking up at the sun. It is perceived where it is interrupted—on walls, cloth, stone. Then the light breaks into a pattern, showing its creative powers. Let’s begin the tour with a monkey-ridden boundary wall along north Delhi’s Bungalow Road, where the tree leaves tremble in the breeze, casting shivering shadows across the wall’s white plaster.

Near Haryana Bhawan on Copernicus Marg, shadows of roadside trees fall with precision on a red-brick wall. Each branch-shadow seems sharply drafted, each cluster of shadow-leaves sharply composed—like paper cut-outs pasted on brick. The shadow of a passer-by might glide across these for a moment, before the original composition restores itself. (The scenes on the wall are truly stunning; visit around 5pm).

On central Delhi’s Hailey Lane, spotlessly white hotel bedsheets are hang to dry right outside the gate of the Devi Prasad Sadan Dhobi Ghat. In the February light, they blaze. Sunshine ripples across the fabrics, arranged along the roadside.

Atop the ramparts of the old Ghamand Sarai gateway in Gurugram, evening twilight strips the rough stones of solidity; jagged surfaces flare under a red-and-purple sky. Some lanes away, in a beautiful small mandir in the crowded Sadar Bazar-Jacobpura area, sacred idols in the homely courtyard receive ample sunlight during February’s clear weeks.

Last Thursday evening, exactly a week ago, during the rush-hour on Lodhi Road, the sky above the Oberoi Hotel flyover traffic light transformed into a sea of cumulus clouds. Each cloud glowed with hidden sunlight, though the sun had probably dipped below the horizon. It was a super-rare Delhi spectacle. Sadly, the phenomenon did not repeat itself over the following evenings.