A new house. [Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi] The mattress is spread across the floor. The cooking gas cylinder is in the kitchen, already connected to the double-burner gas range. Two plastic buckets are in the bathroom. All their clothes are still inside the suitcase, though. The couple moved into the new house some hours ago, with their infant daughter, here in Old Delhi’s Chitli Qabar Chowk. Tailor “Master” Javed Iqbal is 34. His wife, Rubina Khan, is 26. Their daughter, Rida, was born in August last year. It is evening. The baby is asleep on her mother’s lap. The mother is sitting cross-legged on the mattress. The father is standing in the corner. The first-floor room is filled with sounds

A woman's house. [Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi] The evening is mildly cold. Abida and Raja are at home, sitting by the fireside. Raja has their month-old son, Piraili, on his lap. Wrapped in layers of woollens, the baby is asleep. “He was born here - at home, not in the hospital,” Raja says. Abida nods. The couple live in central Delhi, under the Oberoi Hotel flyover. Their house comprises a small white tent, with a roof so low it is impossible to stand up straight. “That’s why we sit outside when awake,” explains Raja. The rush hour shows no sign of slowing down. The beam of the headlights from passing cars are occasionally falling on their faces. The vicinity is home

A home for the houseless. [By Mayank Austen Soofi] The floor is of plywood. The roof appears to be of white tarpaulin. The walls, too, are of the same white material. There are no windows. This is a home to many men, including Sanjay, Danish, Jawed, Hasim, Asif, Satish and Ameeruddin. These are actually some of the names that were jotted down last evening by the caretaker in the entry register of this night shelter for the homeless. It is 2pm and the place is empty, here in central Delhi. It permits free admissions only for the night. Although one person seems to be fast asleep on a bed. “He works here and is resting,” explains Ankit Sharma, the caretaker attending to his afternoon

Dwellers in a posh neighbourhood. [Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi] The daughter of the last nawab of Rampur resides in this neighbourhood. Author Vikram Seth has an apartment here. A neighbouring flat belongs to former Jammu & Kashmir chief minister Omar Abdullah. A stone’s throw away is filmmaker Mira Nair’s apartment. Celebrated social theorist Ashis Nandy lives nearby. So does hotelier Aman Nath. Hazrat Nizamuddin East is also home to Muhammed Mintullah. A rickshaw puller in his 60s, he has been a resident of this central Delhi locality for 40 years. “I always sleep on this same spot,” says Mr Mintullah, sitting on a pavement in the neighbourhood’s market, which primarily comprises of a cafe, a boutique, two salons, and a

Housing on the pave. [Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi] They literally live in the shadow of the Jama Masjid. Right under the Mughal-era monument’s west-facing wall, towards which the attendees inside the mosque offer their prayers. This late night, the men are lying — head to feet, head to feet — on the pavement that runs along the mosque’s boundary wall. Only one man has his eyes wide open. He is sitting on a low wooden chest, staring expressionlessly at the road in front. “We are 200 people,” says Nizamuddin, 52. Dressed formally at this late hour in pants and full-sleeved shirt, he informs that “we are mazdoor”. The generic description doesn’t give justice to the specialised skills that distinguish these

So open, yet secretive. [Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi] The doors are locked, their wood rotting. The window jaalis are cobwebbed. The balconies are blocked with bricks. The weather-beaten building must be empty inside. Yet, it shelters very many people. Outside. Those people are nowhere to be seen this late afternoon but their residences are as visible as daylight. Their possessions—all the essential stuff that makes up a house—are laid out in a great display across the length of this building, on the footpath, here in central Delhi’s Ansari Road. One of the doors is clipped with a string on which are hanging shorts, pants, a pithu bag, and a hand bag, which has a white banian (vest) coming out of it.

Season's space. [Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi] There are many beautiful terraces in Delhi, but this one might be the most beautiful of all—at least at this time of the year. When semal trees are still in bloom, and that their red flowers set alight every surface they fall upon. Kiran Bhushi’s second floor apartment lies right under the branches of a gigantic semal, in south Delhi’s Khel Gaon. And this evening the terrace is covered with semal’s pulpy flowers, dropping one after another. “The other day one fell on my friend’s wrist, and she said it hurts,” mutters Ms Bhushi. Wearing a peach-coloured tussar silk sari, she has just returned from work. A sociology professor, she reigns alone in this

Her stay-at-home consolations. [By Mayank Austen Soofi] Dressed in a many-hued hand-woven Murshidabad silk sari, craft activist Laila Tyabji, 73, is sitting in her book-lined drawing room in south Delhi’s Shantiniketan. Behind her sofa is a huge glass window through which all you see are sky, clouds and trees. As she chats, the birds fly past the window—like fish swimming in the aquarium. During the lockdowns last year, “my drawing room window reminded me that looking out is as important as looking in,” she says. “Things have their own beauty, but also the beauty of memory and the people with whom you associate them.” She tells The Delhi Walla about 5 cherished objects that were a source of comfort during the homebound

A house of windows. [By Mayank Austen Soofi] It’s midnight. Her fourth-floor house is quiet. Her daughter, husband and ma-in-law are sleeping. She settles down on the durrie by the window, lights a diya, pours herself a glass of red wine, and opens her much-scrawled copy of Madame Bovary. Sugandha Sehgal, 36, teaches this novel to grad students. An assistant professor in Delhi University’s Jesus and Mary College, she has taken leave from work to finish her doctoral thesis on “bodies out of context: politics and aesthetics of social media feminism.” Late last month, she shifted from her longtime house in Delhi’s Dwarka to Gurgaon, in Sector 62, Golf Course Extension. Trying to strike a friendship with the new home, she tells

Old house, new home. [Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi] It looks like a museum. Nothing like this old-fashioned balcony exists anywhere else in the immediate vicinity. What is it like to actually live in this building? It turns out that this elegant Walled City mansion is a rent-free home to a dozen labourers. They work for a construction material supplier who sits in the shop below, here in Mohalla Qabristan neighbourhood. The building belongs to him. “It’s at least a hundred year old, but our family moved to a bigger house, nearby, a long time ago,” he says. The entry is dramatic. The steep unlit staircase abruptly opens into a tiny, cluttered courtyard. It doesn’t feel like the same building — that from the