The Walled City enyclopedia.

[Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi]

This is Gali Shakeel Artist, just off Old Delhi’s Urdu Bazar.

Dear reader, forgive the misleading introduction. The severely weathered marker for the street beside the tea stall calls the street Khidki Tafazzul Hussain—see photo. But surely it would be fitting to name the street after one of Old Delhi’s great living artists, whose workshop stands here and whose art is seen in almost all parts of the Walled City.

Our weekly exploration of Old Delhi’s streets, their present and past, begins here with a mystery. The said marker points into the street. Khidki means window. But which window? And who was Tafazzul Hussain? The marker offers no explanation.

The name is nowhere else to be seen in the street. Has it become extinct in everyday speech? Most people encountered in the vicinity are unaware of the name on the marker. Some call the street as Jagat Cinema Wali Gali, after the single-screen theatre that once stood nearby. But that is another street, already chronicled in this series. One person calls it Koore Khatte Wali Gali, explaining a large dumping ground once occupied a spot here.

Chai man Noor Muhammed, manning the tea stall beside the street marker, has no answers. Eager to help, he points at an establishment opposite. A painter sits there, he says. Perhaps he knows.

The painter doesn’t know either. But the painter is the aforementioned sign painter Shakeel Artist, whose painted signature appears on shopfronts across the Walled City. Citizens looking for medicines, mithai, flowers, meat, or a hotel room, or a local dentist, have been inadvertently looking at his calligraphed art on the banners. Among the historic quarter’s few surviving signboard painters working by hand, Shakeel Artist paints in Hindi, English, Urdu and Arabic. Before computerised printing reduced his assignments, he also painted cinema banners.

This street, however, shows little of his work, except for the banners of India Medical Store and Iqbal Halal Meat Shop.

Farther along stands the locality’s another landmark, bearing a name too European for Purani Dilli. Hotel De Romana! Inside, the small lobby has a disproportionately majestic staircase. You imagine the elegant Anna Karenina running down in agony, the cinematic sweep of the stairs befitting the tragic arc of her life. The staircase curves gracefully around a large golden pot overflowing with flowers.

Outside on the street, cables crisscross beneath the sky. Handcarts stand beside ragpickers’ bundles stuffed with scraps. Old brickwork shows through broken plaster. A dog is resting on a parked car’s roof.

Back towards the street’s mouth, Shakeel Artist’s sign fronts a tea stall. The sign painter’s workshop is just behind the stall.