The Walled City enyclopedia.

[Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi]

It is five in the morning. Most shutters are down, but Ansar Store is aglow in the pre-dawn darkness—see photo. The grocery stays open all night, says the young man at the counter. This is Old Delhi’s Gali Madrasa Hussain Baksh, a dead-end street opening into Matia Mahal Bazar.

Only Chacha Chaiwale’s stall is also open this moment. Chacha himself died last year. One of his sons is presently sitting cross-legged beside the stall’s coffee machine. It also serves coffee, a rarity among the Walled City’s chai establishments.

The dispatch is a part of The Delhi Walla’s weekly series exploring both the present and past of Old Delhi streets.

At the gali’s far end, where it branches left and right, an arched doorway leads to the mosque and madrasa that give the locality its name. But Chacha’s son insists that the gali’s original name is Haveli Bakhtavar Khan. Before azadi, he says, this was all Bakhtavar Khan’s haveli. The son, however, knows nothing more of the Khan, his descendants or the haveli. The haveli is long gone, its grounds now a neighbourhood of homes and shops.

As for the chai stall, it has stood at the street’s mouth since Chacha, real name Haji Waziruddin, founded it in 1992. He would sit daily beside the coffee machine, his long white beard tied with a band. Rings decked all his fingers. His politeness in conversation made one stay at his stall long after finishing the chai.

Now run by Chacha’s family, the stall still opens at four each morning, closing at midnight.

Opposite, also at the gali’s mouth, is another noteworthy landmark: Bhai Pappe’s shop, once crammed with Hindi film music cassettes. Having a passion for old film songs, he would buy audio cassettes from street stalls outside the Red Fort. Those stalls have long stopped stocking the cassettes. In recent years, almost nobody bought his cassettes either. He eventually stopped selling music, and now runs a television dish antenna business, but rarely comes to the shop. A customer’s faulty antenna brings him back.

This morning, Bhai Pappe’s shutter is down. Across from it, Chacha’s son is sitting quietly at the chai stall, hands clasped, waiting for a customer. Deeper inside the gali, a chipkali is crawling across the red banner of Fun Club Pizza Point.