The Old Delhi encyclopedia.

[Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi]

The name leads you elsewhere. Say Rakab Ganj and you think of the great gurdwara in New Delhi, near the old Parliament. But there is another Rakab Ganj, and it is in Old Delhi, behind Delite Cinema. Gali Rakab Ganj happens to be a centre of the meat trade. The name is printed on many of the meat shop signboards here, although the street is better known as Gosht Wali Mandi, the market for meat.

This afternoon, many of the shutters are down. The shop-names above the shutters remain on display: Inam Ilahi, Kullu, Haji Mohd Qasim, Haji Shokat. One board gives the address as “Rakab Ganj, behind Delite Cinema”. A romantic might have preferred the more evocative “Rakab Ganj, beside the now-vanished walls of the Walled City.”

The meat arrives each day at Gali Rakab Ganj at dawn from Ghazipur Mandi near the Delhi-UP border. From here it goes across Old Delhi and on to Okhla, Noida and other parts of the capital region. By noon, the busiest hours have passed, but one shop is open, even though it is 3 pm. Large cuts of meat are hanging from hooks above the counter. A man in a red T-shirt is holding a cleaver beside the muddi, a chopping block made from a thick, upright section of a keekar tree trunk. Another man is sitting below the hanging meat, talking on his mobile.

On the counter are smaller meat cuts and a bowl of pale offal. Folds of tripe fill a steel basin, brains lie in a shallow tray. The man in the red T-shirt says rakab in the name Rakab Ganj means the stirrup in which a rider places his foot when mounting a horse. He says people once made stirrups in this gali.

Outside another shop, a muddi stands on its own, two sections of trunk stacked one above the other.

The gali has smaller lanes running off it, beneath tangles of cables, balconies and windows. These by-lanes too are crammed with meat shops. A weighing scale hangs from an iron hook in one shop, its empty display facing the street.

Back near the shutter of Inam Ilahi’s shop, a few boys are hanging about. One of them, little Ayan, has a riddle:
Kala ghoda safed sawari,
Ek ke baad ek ki bari.

The black horse of the riddle calls to mind the street’s name. Before anyone can ask the boy for the answer, he is already running down the lane, dodging the slippery pieces of raw meat and bone littering the ground.