A perfect world. [Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi] Tall rose bushes grow in every house. Walls are painted with most brilliant colors. A well is overgrown with wild grass. The Delhi Walla is in Puraini, a village about a hundred miles from Delhi. This is the heart of the sugarcane country in western Uttar Pradesh. The foothills of the Himalayas are somewhere very close. But the village has folded itself into its own world. The place is as unreal as a morning dream. Old houses are built as if they have been effortlessly weaved out from arched niches and carved doorways. Painted brick walls have metamorphosed to more interesting shades. In the courtyard of one such home, a blue kerosene lamp hangs

The best Taj property. [Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi] It is called the Taj Hotel but it does not belong to the famous Taj Group of Hotels. Actually, it is not a hotel, just an eatery. And it is largely patronised by fakirs and pilgrims who are too poor to dine elsewhere. The Delhi Walla visited the Taj Hotel in Ajmer, the Sufi town six hours away from Delhi. It is tucked next to a gateway to the great Sufi shrine of Hazrat Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti. The eatery looks like an art gallery. Its wall is decked with paintings of various Sufi shrines, including of Delhi's Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya. There is also a painting of Delhi's Jama Masjid, and also of

Glimpses of a sacred space. [Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi] An elderly pilgrim from Rajkot in Gujarat lovingly offers a rose petal to the lips of his wife. Nearby, rose petals are placed on an unknown person’s grave. The Delhi Walla is in the Sufi shrine of Hazrat Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti in Ajmer, Rajasthan. (I wrote about this shrine in great detail here.) Ajmer is a town with dream-like aspects. This is a place where the earlier ways of life are fleetingly glimpsed in fragments of old buildings, like in Delhi, too. But you see the old world also in the everyday dresses of the people of this town, in the quiet gestures of the fakirs, in the beautiful eyes of

Death of a bookshop. [Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi] Stop the clocks. Silence the pianos. The double-storey La Hune is to shut down permanently. Tucked in the heart of the most beautiful part of Paris, it is one of the most beautiful bookshops in the world. “We are closing very soon,” says the young man behind the cash counter at La Hune bookstore. “It’s our owner’s decision,” he adds, pointing to posters on the glass door announcing La Hune’s impending closure on 14 June, 2015 at 20.00 hours. The death notice feels as unreal as the evening sky of Paris during September evenings. Opened in 1949 (though not in its present address), La Hune is as much of an institution

The Italian nature. [Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi] Have you ever cycled through a daydream? The Delhi Walla did. I’m in Venice. One morning I left it for its surrounding country. The day was made of a blue sky. The Alps stood in the distance, the cool air was dense with bird sounds, and the narrow bicycle track was bordered on both sides by trees and streams. The strong breeze kept the clear waters of these streams in a continuous state of agitation. There was barely any other person to be seen on the pathway, though at one point it passed by a village with a church. The old church had a Murano glass chandelier painted in blue, yellow and

Inside a Venetian home. [Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi] The first floor window usually remains open during the day. A pedestrian walking on the street outside just have to crane his neck upwards to have a glimpse of jam-packed bookshelves. This is Pia Nainer's drawing room. One early afternoon The Delhi Walla enters her dimly lit apartment. She lives in Calle delle Canne, near the Bridge of the Three Arches on the west side of Venice. Ms Nainer is a painter, though for many years she gave flute lessons in a music school. She shares this 4-room apartment with her husband, Giovanni, daughter, Giulia, and dog, Lilla. Her husband is a professor of architecture. Her daughter attends college. The ground floor consists

The precious relics. [Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi] Allahabad is the land of the Sangam. This meeting point of the Ganga, Yamuna and mythical Saraswati rivers in eastern Uttar Pradesh has been attracting pilgrims for centuries. But one should also make a pilgrimage to Allahabad to see its Raj-era bungalows — those crumbling mansions so atmospheric, so superior in beauty to their modern cousins in Lutyens’ Delhi. While every district headquarter in India has been a beneficiary of the Raj’s architectural projects, this town astounds with the number of bungalows that survive to this day. It’s difficult to give an exact count of how many have lived to tell the tale but old-timers know that over the last decade, many

The prodigal poet [Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi] Posing in a camouflage jacket and faded denims, poet Arvind Krishna Mehrotra looks like People magazine’s sexiest man alive. He has long black hair, a five o’clock shadow, a cigarette between his fingers, and an intense look. The 1973 photograph is on the cover of Mr Mehrotra’s 2014 book, Collected Poems, 1969-2014. The picture was taken on a farm in Wisconsin, when the 26-year-old Mr Mehrotra was on a two-year writer’s fellowship in the US. Forty-one years later, Mr Mehrotra is posing for The Delhi Walla in his drawing room in Allahabad, Uttar Pradesh. He still wears jeans. He has a long white beard and looks like the American poet Walt Whitman. Mr Mehrotra’s latest offering

A Delhi writer in spirit. [Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi] One November noon, The Delhi Walla met Shamsur Rahman Faruqi at his bungalow in Hastings Road, Allahabad, a historically rich town 600 kilometers east of of our city. The 79-year-old Urdu writer recently returned from Delhi to launch The Sun That Rose From The Earth, his collection of novellas and a novel, that he himself translated from Urdu to English. He also underwent a series of medical checkups in the capital. A retired officer of the Indian Postal Service, Mr Faruqi commands unchallenged reverence among literary-minded Delhiwallas. His last novel, The Mirror Of Beauty, was a weighty Mughal-era epic set largely in Delhi. His new book, containing fictionalized stories of

An Indian in a post-Partition world. [Text and photos by Aanchal Malhotra] Lahore was wild today. The sky had suddenly turned dark and it felt like late evening though it was barely noon. Rain poured hard against my window pane. But before the unexpected arrival of the clouds my morning had been spent exploring the beautiful Wazir Khan Mosque with a friend. We parked our car outside the Dilli Darwaza and walked through the grand gateway that pointed to my beloved city of Delhi. The glorious sunshine of the subcontinent poured over us. As we walked to the mosque a strange feeling of déjà vu possessed me, like I’d been down these lanes before, the narrow uneven roads and dusty path. But