On Khan Market’s 75th anniversary.

[Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi]

Delhi’s notorious place for spending obscene amounts of money has, for its next-door neighbour, an enormous population of folks who are done with money. The dead.

Khan Market is 75 this year. Through its anniversary year, this series will keep poking about the market and its immediate world, trying to understand just how it acquired so large a personality. This is the third story in the series. This time, step out of the shops and cafés and look beyond. The market lies in the lap of a vast cemetery, divided among Parsis, Christians and Jews.

Start with the Parsis.

Called Aramgah, or House of Rest, their cemetery belongs to a community numbering fewer than a thousand in the Delhi region. Within lies white stone graves. Trees, shrubs and grass grow between the graves. Several headstones bear the Faravahar, the winged symbol of Zoroastrianism.

The cemetery has a building in striking red. Inside is a hall with a portrait of Zarathustra. The body is perhaps kept here briefly allowing mourners a final farewell before the burial. The red building’s corridor walls are lined with marble plaques recording donations to the Aramgah. Older inscriptions list sums of 501 and 1,001 rupees. Recent ones run into far higher figures. The money has been given in “loving memory” of parents, spouses and other family members. One plaque thanks jurist Soli J. Sorabjee for his “kind contribution.”

Beside the Parsi cemetery lies the large Christian Cemetery. Among those buried here are former President K.R. Narayanan and his wife Usha Narayanan. Their single gravestone is also inscribed with the First Lady’s Burmese name, Ma Tint Tint. Another grave belongs to Stella Mudge, the English cabaret dancer of Paris who went on to become the Maharani of Kapurthala. Her headstone is inscribed with just these words: “Stella of Mudge, a fable.”

The Jewish cemetery is the smallest of the three, and the most heavily guarded. Delhi’s only Jewish graveyard has about 40 graves. Among them are those of Lt Gen Jack Farj Rafael Jacob, associated with Pakistan’s surrender in the 1971 Bangladesh war, and Ezra Kolet, former president of the Indian Council of Jewry and founder of the Delhi Symphony Orchestra. On some gravestones, the lettering and Stars of David are fading.

Back at Khan Market’s front lane, a clock stands above Bahrisons Booksellers. It faces the market’s main entrance, through which people head towards the cafés, restaurants and showrooms. The upper floors of these hangouts have their own graves: the flats of long-ago residents for whom Khan Market was home.