Son of Sharif Manzil.

[Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi]

The drawing room is dense with carpets, wooden cabinets and a pendulum clock. Black-and-white portraits of men in topis hang high on the walls. The presence of a window AC fails to disturb the room’s older air. And on the striped sofa he is sitting with an arm along the backrest. He has short white hair, a grey-white goatee and distant eyes. He is speaking softly and unhurriedly, with light pride but without arrogance, while talking of his family and its Old Delhi past.

This was an afternoon scene in the upper-floor drawing room of Haveli Sharif Manzil, the 300-year-old family mansion in the Walled City’s congested Ballimaran neighbourhood. Its patriarch, the aforementioned Hakim Masroor Ahmed Khan, died early yesterday morning, aged 80, following a brief illness. Old Delhi has subsequently lost a citizen who seemed to belong to an earlier city—a world of embossed copper bowls for drinking water, of taaks, gaon-takiya pillows and slatted chilman curtains, of manually lit street lamps, of mushairas and mehfils.

That earlier city was never far away in his telling. A door in his drawing room opens on to a narrow balcony, with Ballimaran below. Standing there, he would point out Mirza Ghalib’s last haveli, directly ahead. For him, Ghalib was first a tenant of his forefathers, then a great poet. That haveli had belonged to his family, and Ghalib had been his great-grandfather’s father’s kiraedar.

But there is no hiding what Old Delhi outside Sharif Manzil has become, its crowded lanes overwhelmed by battery rickshaws and overhanging cables. The world of yesterday, at least as it existed in his head, seemed more like his serene drawing room, which is always quiet, ordered and crammed with objects remembered.

Historians and scholars visited him there, sometimes bringing books in which his family was mentioned. He would fondly mention that his grandfather, whom he called dada-bawa, was a nephew of freedom fighter Hakim Ajmal Khan. In the long-ago summers of old Sharif Manzil, dada-bawa would sit with books on a teakwood bed in the downstairs hall, the floor covered with cooling Yamuna sand, a giant slab of baraf khana ice slowly melting before a pedestal fan. Lately, nobody would sit in the hall. Life had moved upstairs, where he lived with his wife Saeeda, their four children and five grandchildren. He would often praise Saeeda’s cooking, particularly her Rampur ki karhi.

One afternoon, he was having iced shikanji with a visitor in the darkened drawing room, even as blinding sunlight was torturing the smoggy city outside. The world within seemed peaceful and stable. Much of that sense came from the man himself. A few minutes in his company could make a vanished Old Delhi feel less vanished. And now Masroor Ahmed Khan himself has vanished.