Seeing the city. [Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi] If only you can sneak into this art gallery to visit the tapestry embroidered with a panorama of our city. At first, it looks merely a messy maze of roofs, balconies, windows, staircases. Moments later you notice the maheen detailing. The artist’s insertion of black and white pani ki tankis is particularly clever in evoking the everydayness of life. While the barely perceptible glimpses of citizens ensconced within their homes express urban solitariness as profoundly as any Edward Hopper. This Delhi is more familiar to us than the Delhi of Instagram crammed with tombs, gardens and filtered sunset-selfies. Finally, an honest recreation with ho hum realities. This however isn’t a gallery, but

Their temporary address. [Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi] Nizamuddin East is too posh. The dwellers include a nawab’s daughter, a former chief minister, another former chief minister’s politician son, a jet-setting film director, a top notch hotelier, a retired chief justice, and some of the country’s most expensive lawyers. Since the quiet “colony” prefers to stay estranged from the rest of our chaotic city, 8pm here is feeling like 11pm. Residents Shaan, Sehwad and Zafar have just settled down for the night. The young men’s shared bed is a sheet of tirpal, unrolled along a neighbourhood lane. Excerpts from their chitchat. Shaan: We have been here for some days to demolish a bangla. (He gestures to the blue barricades behind.) Sehwad: A

Home sweet home. [Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi] The small cooking gas cylinder is limply hanging down the wall, as casually as a cotton gamcha from a wardrobe hook. A chequered gamcha is hung similarly, in fact. There’s also a few pants and shirts, as well as a pithu bag. It is a dimly lit one-room home, and quite extraordinary. The entire floor is piled up with metal pipes, the kind used in construction. The house itself is improvised inside a van. “We live here,” says one of the men in a matter-of-fact tone. The four roommates are labourers, and are stationed today in a monument-facing part of tony Hazrat Nizamuddin East, across the road from the book-lined apartment of

Roomies, a portrait. [Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi] So dark, so musty. It’s like a cave. As the eyes adjust to the dimness, this mysterious world exudes even more mystery. The jagged walls—unpainted, bare— are of long-ago lakhori. These hefty columns—hewed out of stones. The floor—all sand. “It’s Badarpur sand,” clarifies one of the men. This is the extraordinary residence of a bunch of men who haul construction material on wooden carts. Their home is without doubt the remnants of a haveli, here in Old Delhi’s Galli Chooriwallan. But it’s just an old ruin, they mumble, dismissing it as a “purana khandahar” owned by a local builder. The place has partly the look of a godown. Sacks of Badarpur sand are stacked

Home sweet home [Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi] Here, the white cord of a mobile phone charger. There, a blue-rimmed handheld mirror. On a hook, two jackets. On the floor, a blanket. This room is an entire house, tucked within a congested enclave, next to a dhobi ghat, behind GB Pant Hospital. The room is the size of a train compartment, or perhaps smaller. There is no window. Some daylight is entering through the half-opened door. It is the only door. This afternoon, Irshad is at home. In his mid-20s, he is a street hawker of coconuts. So are his older brother and his father. The three men live jointly. The house rent is 3,000 rupees monthly; they have been living here

Home sweet home [Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi] An entire household is contained in this room. This household contains a life that has largely disappeared. The second floor apartment in Old Delhi’s Gali Chandi Wali houses a family of zardozi karigars (workers) who “design, embroider and manufacture fabrics of zari thread by hand.” This afternoon, Muhammed Afaq is finishing an embroidery on his traditional “karchup” wooden desk. His younger brother Irshad is doing something similar. Both are perched on the floor. Afaq’s wife, Saira Bano, is sitting on the double bed, combing her hair. Their elder daughter Neha is attending a mehndi-design class at Fatima Academy in Lal Kuan. The younger Ilma, a 10th standard student, is at Anglo-Arabic School in

Old home glossary. [Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi] Suburb-like flats are taking over Old Delhi’s traditional makaan, or houses. Here’s a glossary of domestic spaces soon to be lost to legends. This afternoon, building material merchant Fareed Mirza and his generous family give a tour of the house his pardada (great-grandfather) built 150 years ago on Bazar Shah Abul Khair Marg. It possesses many of the aspects of a quintessential Walled City mansion. (The tenses pretend that all these features are still in use, but they aren’t, reflecting alterations in architectural styles, and in social etiquettes.) Devri: Narrow corridor connecting the outer door on the street to the door opening into the residence. Mardana Kamra, or Baithak: Room for visiting mard, or

The vanishing rain shelter. [Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi] It is raining hard on the terrace of an 18th floor flat in Gurgaon’s Golf Course Road. Monsoon is giddily beating down on this multitude of high-rises. Yet, it feels like a draught—to a connoisseur of the barsati. Stealing its name from the Urdu for rain, barsati was a tiny room with a large terrace that went on to spawn a bohemian Delhi civilisation. Holed up high in these airy bubbles, eclectic migrants from small towns came of age in style and sensibility. Many barsatiwallas became famous. MF Husain had a barsati in Jangpura. William Dalrymple, who lives in a farm house, spent early 1990s in a Golf Links barsati. Pankaj Mishra,

A deserted home. [Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi] The metal gate is splotched with red dots of rust. The pane-less windows on the first floor stare out like open wounds. Cobwebs are hanging from window grills. It is said you can see the world in a grain of sand — in the same way, you may see your teeming city in an empty house that once was full of life. Such as this deserted bungalow, somewhere in Delhi. No need to know its GPS. You’ll find versions of this scattered across the city. Such residences lie in this state because either the owners are living elsewhere, or due to a host of other reasons. The point of this story is

Inside an artist's studio. [Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi] Dayanita Singh lives amid moving walls of her books. This afternoon, at her second floor studio in Vasant Vihar, the artist appears by sliding away one of the walls. These moving things make the space as full of possibilities as a kaleidoscope. The hall’s fixed (brick) wall is equipped with four sliding walls. As Ms Singh pushes away one, the chamber behind —her archive room—slowly comes into view. It’s like a two dimensional panorama gaining its depth. On the other side stands another book wall, leading to her printing room. “These are two of my books,” says Ms Singh, referring to these walls. “This side is File Room, and that side