The curious world of a city bazar.

[Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi]

In Old Delhi, people often remark that there is hardly any open and serene space within the Walled City’s now non-existent walls where one can spend time outdoors. Public space survives mostly inside mosque courtyards and temple compounds. Indeed, this small little-known unnamed park is one of the very very few Purani Dilli places where one can come to be with themselves.

This oppressively humid rainless monsoon afternoon, seemingly exhausted citizens are scattered across the park as randomly as fallen leaves on the ground. Along one edge of the park runs a red sandstone parapet overlooking the congested Meena Bazar, a world of dense patchwork of tin roofs and tangled cables. Through a gap appears the white canopy over Maulana Abul Kalam Azad’s tomb.

It is the view on the park’s other side that defines the park’s character—the Jama Masjid. Its eastern facade, gateway, domes, and minarets rise above the park’s trees, close enough to dominate the skyline while remaining detached from the quiet below. At this moment in the park, however, the grand monument is going unnoticed, fading into the background like white noise. A man is sitting beneath a tree listening to a news podcast on his phone. Another is sleeping beside a flowering bush, sharing its shade with a sleeping dog. A widely wakeful flock of brown ducks marches past another sleeping man’s feet. One man is asleep on a woven string cot.

The park’s flora is modest. Frangipani, neem, pilkhan and a few other trees cast islands of shade over grass worn thin into patches of bare earth. Above, big black birds are circling in the hot air. Their shadows drift across the dusty ground.

Until a few years ago, there was no park here. This was the site of a so-called clinic named Rahat Open Surgery, whose elderly lungi-clad healer practised a course of bloodletting that drew people from across India. Resigned patients usually arrived after exhausting hospitals, medicines, and pilgrimages, hoping that the relief might lay in the unscientific ritual of standing under the sun before a shallow cut was made in their arms and legs with a razor blade to let out what the healer called “impure blood.” Today, the only trace of that blood-dripping world is the red stains of paan smeared across the grass… and also the name of the clinic itself. For people living in the surrounding area, many of whom are homeless, this has become a place to sit in the shade, rest, and hopefully experience a bit of rahat, or relief.