The Walled City encyclopaedia.

[Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi]

The dead-end street is narrow, cramped and dark. Late evening has settled over the place, but the darkness is not entirely because of the hour. At noon as well, daylight enters reluctantly. That is the peculiarity of Chatta Abdul Hakeem.

There is a solid reason why the street stays dark even after the sunrise. It is short and tightly hemmed in on both sides. The main cause is the structure from which it takes its name: the chatta. In Old Delhi, a chatta is a bridge-like structure that connects buildings across a street. Usually covered and so very private, it links the upper storeys of the same house while hanging suspended above the street below. The bridge thus doubles up as a shade for the street.

Whatever, the street opens into the bustling halla-gulla of Turkman Gate Bazar, constantly alive with motion and noise. In fact, from the outside, the street is easy to miss. Its entrance, wedged between Bhallu Halwai and Choudhary Sadiq Dairy, looks less like a street than a narrow crack. Few people notice it except those who live there. Even nearby shopkeepers do not know the street’s name. The absence of any identifying signage adds to its obscurity.

A young man now steps into the street. Mujib, a resident, is returning home from a two-hour workout at a gym near Pataudi House, several streets away. Soft-spoken and unfailingly polite, he says he has grown up in this very Chatta.

“Nothing has changed here,” he says. “Not an inch.” Six families live on the street, he says, most of them here for generations, running businesses in different parts of the Walled City. He adds as an afterthought that the number of residents has declined over the years. Members of some households have moved elsewhere within the historic quarter. Mujib’s own brother, an enthusiast of Persian poetry, has shifted to Lal Kuan. Mujib himself runs a “hardware” shop in that market. Standing midway in the street, he gestures first ahead and then behind him. The street, he says, has been built in such a way that a breeze is always passing through it, whether outside it is breezy or not. As for the name Chatta Abdul Hakeem, he believes the entire stretch may once have belonged to the hakeem in question, a practitioner of traditional medicine. But nobody can now say with certainty who Abdul Hakeem was. Today, no hakeems exist in the neighbourhood either.

Mujib walks further down the street towards a long staircase that rises sharply to his family home. The street falls quiet, the ensuing sannata as eerie as a grave. Nobody remains, but a cat scavenging at the discarded peels of a musk melon.