Passing of a Connaught Place icon.

[Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi]

He was there every day, presiding over India’s oldest toy shop. He had looked after Ram Chander & Sons in Central Delhi’s Connaught Place (CP) for more than seven decades. One of the last people who remembered the colonial-era CP as it was in its early years, Satish Sundra died this Tuesday, aged 88.

The shop at Odeon Building, in D Block, Middle Circle, opened in 1935, and its teakwood shelves and sliding doors have stood there ever since. Even as the rest of CP changed, with legacy showrooms and bookshops giving way to ever-changing restaurants and cafés. But he remained behind the toy shop counter.

On any given day, he would be found talking to a visitor, sometimes over chai and Parle-G biscuits. With a teeka on his forehead, he would raise one hand to make a point. Then both hands would move together. He used to speak in complete sentences, as if reading from a book. The eloquence perhaps came from his passion for Shakespeare; he recited Macbeth lines by heart.

The toy shop was an inheritance, and was named after his grandfather. The family began selling toys in Ambala Cantonment in 1890. His father brought the business to Delhi. For its first two years in CP, the shop was also their home. His mother would cook meals on a coal-fired angeethi behind a curtain. Despite being completely illiterate, she successfully helped the 17-year-old son keep the shop going after his father’s death in 1954.

Back then, tin soldiers were the most popular toys, followed by train sets and wooden yachts. Years later, children wanted video games, racing cars and flying planes. He kept up by listening to children. Later, they would return to him with children of their own.

But there was a world beyond toys for him. He loved the food of Old Delhi and, until age slowed him, made regular visits to Chandni Chowk eateries. On every visit to Dariba Kalan’s Old Famous Jalebi Wala, he would consume at least 100 grams of jalebis. Not to be skipped was a golgappa stall off Esplanade Road, beside a drain where men urinated. He strongly felt the decline in the quality of parathas in Parathe Wali Gali. A steady consolation was homemade arhar ki dal with basmati rice, mango pickle and plenty of desi ghee, eaten with fingers for the fullest flavour.

One October afternoon last year, a traveller from Slovakia entered the shop. Dávid Grünvaldský had been hunting for a plastic model assembly kit of a Ferrari 458 Italia, which he had failed to find in several other countries. He found it here, posing with the box beside Satish Sundra. See photo.