Home sweet home. [Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi] Room no. 72 in a hostel in Delhi University’s North Campus has something many hostel rooms don’t. A fireplace. The building dates from British times, when fireplaces warmed rooms in winter and high ceilings cooled them in summer. This room has both. The hostel, Gwyer Hall, is named after a former Delhi University vice chancellor, and is the university’s oldest men’s hostel. The room is presently occupied by PhD student Sanjay Kataria. While the fireplace goes unused even during Delhi’s super-brief winter, Sanjay has given it other duties. Its mantel holds framed photographs of his beloved poet Jaun Eliya. Elsewhere, Mona Lisa smiles from a metal cupboard. The Mona Lisa magnet came from Belgium.

Door Sutra. [Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi] Metal bars run horizontally across a doorway’s width, a mosquito-proof jaali fitted behind. Another door has a cloth bag hanging limply from its handle for the delivery man to leave a 1-litre double-toned milk packet or half a kilo of masoor dal. Neither has a place outside to sit with chai. The Delhi Walla has frequently looked at Old Delhi’s disappearing doorways. Beyond Old Delhi, vastly different doorways flourish across the many new Delhis, in the capital’s suburbs and housing sectors of Gurgaon, Ghaziabad, Faridabad, Noida and Greater Noida. They rarely receive the attention given to a haveli doorway. Yet most of us Delhiwale come home through them. These doorways generally have no patience for

A home of windows. [Text and photo by Maynak Austen Soofi] Delhi’s outdoors have grown increasingly hostile. Extreme pollution is poisoning the air, summer heatwaves are becoming inhumanely intense, and every year the monsoon inflicts a renewed threat of dengue fever. One victim of this triple whammy is an element of multi-floor housing architecture that is commonly taken for granted. The balcony. Once a cherished outdoor space at home for breathing, observing, and relaxing, the balconies in the city’s residential towers are losing their relevance. Today, they survive mainly as decorative relics. Even those citizens who have the luxury of balcony rarely step into it, keeping themselves secured in AC rooms equipped with air purifiers. Many balconies, in fact, tend to be sealed

Writer and the city. [Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi] Gulmohar Park was until recently known to have the bungalow of film star Amitabh Bachchan. Years earlier, the same south Delhi neighbourhood was home to another illustrious figure. Author Anita Desai lived in a bungalow just across the road from Gulmohar Park Club. In fact, Anita Desai wrote the novel Clear Light of Day in Gulmohar Park—this being artist Vinita Chawla’s recollection. She says Anita Desai was her parents’ tenant. The white-haired Vinita conjectures that her parents must have rented out their Gulmohar Park bungalow to Anita Desai’s husband, Ashvin, a business executive. The couple lived there perhaps during the mid-1970s, Vinita says, as she tries to remember those long-ago days

The way we were. [Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi] Drawing room, bedroom, dining room, pooja room, kitchen, balcony… these are the angrezi words many of us Hindi-speakers employ to map the geography of our houses. The earlier terms—Hindustani terms—detailing the domestic interiors have fallen out of use. Perhaps because the language of our daily life has evolved with the times. Maybe also because we don’t live in the kinds of houses that existed a century ago. Thankfully, those terms haven’t been lost. They lie preserved in the memories of citizens of a certain age, and also in books, such as the Gazetteer of the Gurgaon District 1910. Published in a new edition by Daryaganj-based Aryan Books International, it has a

On domestic architecture. [Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi] Purani Dilli merchant Saeed Mirza lives with his siblings and their families in a 150-year-old house. It possesses architectural elements of a quintessential Walled City mansion. Every room for instance has at least one taak, the arch-shaped niche scooped into the wall. The joint family is set to move to a recently built residence on the same street. The new “flat-style” house has no taak. Indeed, the taak, that has so long been an integral part of the Walled City’s old-fashioned household architecture—it is almost a family member!— is now nearing extinction. (The custom of taak of course isn’t limited to the historic quarter). In a typically traditional Walled City mansion, the taak would