A Day at the Ruins

Ya rahey hissar* oosar, ya basey gujjar (May [this place] remain unoccupied, or else the herdsmen may live here).

I will admit I started with doubts. Don’t get me wrong, I love to wander around ruins and love seeing new parts of the city even more. But Shalabh can sometimes be a little over enthusiastic about history. So when he told my friend Johnny that we were going off to a far corner of the world to look at a fort with no ceilings, no complete structures to speak of, surrounded by villages and used as a grazing ground for the local goats, I felt it was my obligation to explain to Johnny that he should keep an open mind and just enjoy the metro/auto adventure until we saw what we were really up against.

The metro ride itself had to be an hour. It was January of 2011 and the Tuqhlaqabad stop (second to last stop on the purple line) still had a film of new station dust. After twenty minutes on a corner, we convinced an auto to take us to the fort. Feeling generous and desperate, we agreed to pay his way there and back so he didn’t have to wait for us to finish to pick up another ride. Bumping along, I wondered if we were leaving the authority of the MCD. Just a bit further and we would be in Faridabad.

Even after we piled out onto Mehrauli Bedarpur Road, and I saw the huge walls of the Tughlaqabad Fort looming above us, I was pretty skeptical. The entrance looked hokey, there were fake stone stairs, an ASI board, polished towers, and a ticket booth.  The warning signs of an uninteresting afternoon.

I could not have been more wrong. Three hours later and I was convinced. There is no better way to appreciate the grand, artistic, spiritual, and destructive history of Delhi than within the walls of Tughlaqabad. Here is a simply recipe for how you might spend the day.

1.    Take twenty minutes when you first enter to sit on a hill and look to the far reaching walls and the desolate inner grounds of the fort below you. Despite missing roofs it is easy to conjure up dreams of history and life pacing streets. A grain grinder looks as if it is waiting for the operator to come back from a long harvest season. Perhaps it’s because the ghosts of this disserted city were abandoned here, disconnected from the growth and destruction of Delhi, undisturbed even now.

Climbing through secret tunnels.

2.   Take a walk with the ghosts. Legend has it that this city is cursed. When Ghiyas-ud-din began building his fort city, the famous Sufi dervish Nizam-ud-din was completing a step well for serving the needs of the local people. Although Ghiyas-ud-din decreed that all craftsmen should be dedicating their time to the fort, many snuck out at night to volunteer on Nizam-ud-din’s well infuriating the ruler who already mistrusted and disliked the spiritual leader. During their struggle Nizam-ud-din proclaimed, Ya rahey hissar, ya basey gujjar (May it [Tughlaqabad] remain unoccupied, or else the herdsmen may live here).

Whether curse or prophesy, Nizam-ud-din's words were remarkably accurate. Tughlaqabad, which took four years to build, was only occupied for six years before a lack of clean water and the ambition of Ghiyas-ud-Din’s son, Muhammad, forced the capital to shift to the new city of Jahanpanah.

3.     Get into the walls. I won’t tell you where it is but somewhere, perhaps a kilometer from the entrance, there is a crawl space in the fort walls that will lead you outside, and leave you standing on the edge of fort and forest in what used to be a mighty water way. Perhaps an escape route, or something less interesting, it is definitely human sized (well, small human sized). If you find it, keep in mind you will be sharing the crawl space with bats and the only option once you have reached the other side, is to turn back around through the tunnel, or scale the fort walls. You don’t need ropes but you may want to bring a friend. We found it perfectly safe, but promise nothing.

Reaching new heights.

4.     Play a game of tag. Ever since visiting this site I have a recurring fantasy of playing laser tag or paintball at the fort. Of course, that is impossible, but a game of simple tag is not. If you steal this dream from me, tell us tell us how it goes!

If you haven’t figured it out yet, Tughlaqabad is sort of like a giant sandbox. If you can allow yourself to regress into childlike imagination and restlessness you might just have the best day you’ve ever had in Delhi.

*Struck through and corrected after the comment by Arghanoon-e-aashiqaan at 05:05 on 24th May 2012

The One and Only Rahim!

Rahiman dhaga prem ka mat todo chatkay

Tute se phir na jude, jo jude to gaanth pad jaaye

Don't snap the thread of love, O Rahim,

Once broken, it cannot be mended. If mended, there will always be a knot

I came across this as a boy of twelve, in a remote village of Himachal. For good measure, our Hindi teacher conveniently displaced the word 'love' with 'friendship'. Fair enough, twelve year olds are perhaps not supposed to understand love, of any kind whatsoever. In the same courses, we had couplets by Kabir Das. Kabir was a 16^th century 'low-caste' weaver who transcended his background, education (or the lack of it) and recited some of the most beautiful things ever in Khadi Boli and Hindi. Most of his work was documented much later through oral tradition. For some reason, the image of a poor man sitting in his hut by the Ganga in Banaras weaving away and reciting nuggets of wisdom stuck in my head and I associated it with everyone writing couplets in Hindi, Urdu or Khadi Boli. That another well known poet Raidas (also known as Ravidas) was Kabir’s contemporary, a poor cobbler, and very wise did not help matters.

From there on, I imagined Rahim to be an impoverished mendicant dressed in tattered clothes, wandering through the world. I never associated a profession with him but he could have been a potter or an iron-smith. He would slave away for subsistence and, in his daily struggles, manage to see profound wisdom that escaped the mortals around him. Imagine my surprise then, when I learned that Rahim was a noble in Akbar's court, a wealthy governor, one of the navratnas, an accomplished warrior among much else. He was also an accomplished writer and translator, he translated Babar's autobiography from Chagatai to Persian.  And he has a tomb in Delhi, right next to the tombs of Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya and Humanyun. He is clearly keeping exalted company even in death. His resting place has been ravaged by time and the makers of Safdarjung's tomb, but that does not take anything away from its impressive size. With a little imagination, you can still see the delicate carvings on the walls, the ornate jharokha work on some of the small windows, and the grandeur of the grounds in the centuries past. Feeding off of the ghost story told to me by a security guard in Masjid Moth, I even imagined Rahim's ghost procession joining Humanyun's to seek Nizamuddin's blessings.

What has continued to hound me though is how could a blue blooded man, a noble and a wealthy man have the time, the depth, and the perspective to be such a profound thinker. Not taking anything away from Kabir (who I already called The Winner), it was probably easier for a Kabir to brood over life, for he did not have many other cares, no provinces to govern, no wars to fight and win, no autobiographies to translate and no emperor to please. For Rahim to have achieved what he did in literature is truly outstanding. It is perhaps fitting then that there are two Rahims in my mind and the two exist in different worlds. And lest I forget, when we met him in December, even Sam Miller was not aware that there was only one Rahim!

Bade badai na karen, bade na bole bol,

Rahiman heera kab kahe, lakh taka mera mol.

The truly great never boast about themselves or talk about their worth,

O Rahim, when does a diamond ever say it is worth a million.

Goodness! Forgot to mention, all photos above courtesy Wanderfool of A Date with Delhi.

I found Delhi's attraction at Masjid Moth

I first visited Delhi as a boy of nine on a 'Bharat Darshan' trip with my family. It was supposed to be a trip for the kids to see the country’s landmarks, but I was mostly taken aback by the sheer crowd, dirt, dust, noise, loudness and crowds of Delhi. We lived in a mountain village of four hundred back then. I still remember looking down from the 4^th floor balcony of a hotel (called Neelkamal or Kamal Hans or something with a kamal in it) in Chandni Chowk and seeing more people in one sweep of the eye than I had perhaps seen in my lifetime. I could not find anything appealing in the city. Yes, Gandhi's memorial was cool, so were Jantar Mantar and Red Fort and so on but they weren’t Delhi, they were more like things that had been mentioned in school and had seemed unreal or far away. Textbooks in 3D form.

As I went to college and then to business school and then worked in Chennai and abroad, Delhi was the airport I flew from, the bus station I boarded the bus to Himachal from and the second choice railway station. It was my gateway to the world beyond Himachal but it was one I did not look forward to crossing through. Delhities were rude and seldom answered my questions, auto drivers seemed to be out to fleece me. I was a simple mountain boy in a place that was out to get me, trample me. Someone once said, 'Delhi is cut-throat'. That it is and it almost cut my throat so many times. Only masochism or love could have driven me to move to and walk around the city I most dreaded.

The truth is it was a little bit of both, but that is a different story. Over nine months of wandering, I found many things that made Delhi tolerable. But it was only after I paid ten grand last Diwali to fly to Delhi for just two days, that I realized that I, like so many sceptics before me had become a Del-mantic. Sure I was partly there for the friends, but the truth is that something else draws me back to Delhi. I can’t put a finger on what it is. The city hasn’t changed, it is still as dusty, loud, and polluted as ever so it must be me. I have a theory that over all of these centuries, the city never really changed. The loved tortures, subdues, and changes its lovers without ever once moving itself.

On Diwali, over a pontificating session, we discussed how Diwali might have been celebrated a few centuries ago without reaching a conclusion (this was pontificating after all). But the next day I went with Varsha (who writes here and is still wandering around Delhi) to Masjid Moth. This was the first time someone else had taken me wandering around Delhi. I had often seen the signage from a flyover on the Outer Ring Road reading 'DDA Masjid Moth Flats'. Often I had imagined that there must be a Masjid Moth and a couple of times even thought of venturing there.

The first surprise came with the realization that Masjid Moth is not anywhere near those DDA Flats. It is a good 3-4 kms away near Hauz Khas. We got off an auto and, expertly, Varsha led me through a maze of streets. I have often noticed and never mentioned that there are many Old Delhis in Delhi. You can go anywhere in an older neighbourhood and find an old fashioned market where a grocer sells only limited goods, a stationer only stationery, there are a couple of shops for fixing the punctured tyres of bikes, a couple of cheap eateries and a doctor who calls his business a 'dispensary'. Old Delhi just happens to be the biggest such neighbourhood and the most chaotic. But that is beside the point. We were now in the heart of something somewhere in Hauz Khas with chaotic criss-crossing lanes in an old fashioned market place. I could not believe I had missed a site this close to where I took Spanish classes.

After walking a few minutes, we came upon a stone structure to our left. It was ruined and dilapidated. There were a few cars parked next to the walls, which stank slightly of urine. We walked through a small gap, past a wall, turned right and then saw a gate. Stunning. Carved with delicately carved floral patterns and geometric figures, it has to be the most ornately carved gate I have seen in Delhi. Once inside, I was surprised again with the carving in the second picture below.

It is very un-Islamic to have a life form carved in a mosque, infact it is prohibited by the Quran. This is however a case of a mixing Hindu and Islamic architecture: a Hindu arch laid within a Muslim arch. The story of the mosque's origin is also fascinating and can be found at this Wikipedia link.

As we walked in and wandered around the courtyard, the quintessential Delhi ruin quiet caught on and I just sat on a parapet mulling over life. It is amazing how repeatedly, Delhi can throw old buildings your way which really transport you back into time, where the sound of the traffic seems to come from a distant place and age. I was thus lost in a reverie when I was interrupted by a voice. It was the security guard at the mosque talking to Varsha. She was asking him questions about the history, which he did not have concrete answers to. I got up from my seat and walked over to them. He was clearly a recent immigrant from either Eastern UP or Bihar, like most of the security guards in Delhi these days. Slowly, as he got talking, he mentioned his previous job at Humanyun's Tomb. In a soft tone, he said

'There are ghosts there.'

Varsha was almost livid. She does not like nonsense. However, before she could interrupt him, I cut in, 'Really? How do you know?'

'I have seen them. All the guards in Humayun's tomb are scared of going anywhere near the crypt in the night. Sharp at midnight, when everyone is asleep, and the tomb is absolutely silent and dark, the royal procession of Humayun makes it way out clad in royal shining fine silk robes and mounted on beautiful steeds.'

I was already in dream ghost land when Varsha, who could take no more of such nonesense, pulled me away. To this day, I have been imagining how the plot would have developed. Would Humayun's procession cross the road and be joined by a procession of Abdul Rahim Khan-i-Khana and, together, would they meet the spirit of Nizamuddin and seek his blessings? Or would the procession just wander around lamely within the tomb walls? Damn you Varsha!

The guard also sheepishly mentioned something about ghosts in Masjid Moth but I did not get to hear about them either. Instead we sat down under a tree and read a little from a book which describes the mosque. I climbed the top of the gate to see if I could get a good picture (I couldn't) and then we heard the creaking of an opening door. Right opposite us, in the courtyard of a small shanty sharing a wall with the mosque was an old man with a newspaper. The courtyard had a line with laundry hanging on it. Casually, the old man sat down on a chair, appraised his surroundings with a slow movement of the neck, looked towards us and the courtyard of the mosque, and finally faced the mihrab and started reading his paper. It’s only in Delhi that someone can so casually share a wall with history while a visitor from another city stands across the way appreciating the finesse of the fabric hung out to dry, and fantasies of royal phantoms march through the courtyard between them.

I couldn’t capture the word, but I almost understood what pulls me back to Delhi.

The Gate

The Blasphemy

The courtyard

The Mosque and............The Ghost

A Trip To The More Recent Past

India coffee house is the stuff of cosmopolitan legend. The great leaders of India’s independence movement and the philosophers of modern India dreamed, argued, and conspired at its tables throughout the (1950s and 60s). This coffee house was part of a chain, the most famous of which is in Kolkata, which was taken over by its employees in the 1950s after the British abandoned the venture. For the independence generation, the coffee house represents the center of a movement and a generation.

Accounts of the place’s degradation abound. Still, with every trip through Connaught Place the Coffee House crept into discussion. India Coffee House. A chance to sit at the same table as history, not see its objects behind ropes and glass, but simply to stare in thought at the same dull, stained, walls as generations before. Finally last May we found the perfect morning to make it happen. Not too hot, dry, and mostly fog free.

Khushwant Singh paints the Coffee House in Delhi as a kind of leftist farting man's club. But even this description of the place is generous. The wait staff’s tattered uniforms are not only fading but also crusted with weeks of food. The sadness in their faces is striking. Some chairs are missing backs and their leather is torn. The bathroom is difficult to find and when found, it is difficult to bear the stench. Rumors in 2009 were circulating that the coffee house would be closing down and management seems to have taken that to heart.

While there are a few older patrons sitting silent with their stories, the life that these walls once inspired is gone. It has been replaced by bureaucrats. 15 of them were huddled around a laptop on the veranda congratulating each other. The menu is extensive and the prices fine but most items aren’t available. Luckily the building does provided a pretty decent view of Connaught Place. But when the food finally arrived our group declared with enthusiasm, “Pathetic!”

I’ve eaten food served from a plate cleaned with roadside dirt just outside the toxic shipbreaking port of Alang and I still hesitated with the plate before me. Probably the worst of it, the coffee was bad.

I descended the stairs with the feeling of visiting a distant relative dying at the hospital. You know the place through its stories and you want to honor the life it hosted, but you’re pretty sure there is nothing left to say goodbye too.

Sam Miller and The Blue Guide

Sometime last year, I read Sam Miller's Delhi: Adventures in a Megacity and promptly fell in love with it. It was because of sweeping statements like 'Anyone who has not eaten a freshly made dhokla has not truly lived'. I too like to teach people exactly how they are missing life and I absolutely agree, a freshly made dhokla makes it all worth while. But, on a serious note, Sam makes me want to get out and see stuff out of the ordinary. His Delhi is not only the monuments, which in Delhi's cliched context are ordinary, but small everyday pleasures too.

After reading the book, I dropped him an email. Last weekend, Rachel and I met him at his office in Panchsheel Park. There was a lot of conversation about Delhi, its monuments, and books that Sam is working on now. Finally, he gave us a signed copy of Blue Guide: India, officially launching on the 12th January 2012. As it happens, this is the only guide focused solely on India’s monuments and historical sites. It covers all states. From the oldest monuments to the least visited to the well known ones, it covers huge ground. What takes the cake is it took Sam three years to cover them and while I cannot vouch for him having seen every single of these, I am inclined to believe it is as first hand an account as an account ever got. It has detailed site plans for some sites and hundreds and hundreds of sites covered. I can say from my Himachal, Delhi and Chennai experience that it covers as much as there is to cover. If you were waiting for small teasers on the historical places in your state but did not want any spoilers, this book is it. Just the right amount, not more, not less.

Qudsiya Bagh

 In my last post about the wanderings on the ridge, I made a brief mention of Qudsiya Bagh and then promptly forgot about it. That was until this Sunday. Browsing the internet for something random, I came across a website of old Indian photos. It had a photograph of the Qudsia Bagh masjid from just after the mutiny (war of independence) of 1857. Taken in 1858 by Dr. John Murray from the Western side, it shows the collapsed or collapsing arches of a bridge on the right and the main building of the mosque, all holed and battered perhaps by the gunfire.

The Qudsiya Masjid in 1858

In some ways, the Qudsia Bagh of today stands in a very similar setting. First of all, it is, amazingly, still a bagh i.e. a garden. It still is an island of silence and serenity right next to the bus station. Unusual for such a setting, there are no amorous couples here. All we came across were the caretaker of the mosque and a couple of old ladies sitting under an old gate. The mosque is still alive, the domes in the exaggerated late Mughal style. The damage to the standing walls has been covered up with plaster but none of the collapsed walls have been rebuilt. The gate has ornate red sandstone carvings and decorations with floral patterns and vines.

Qudsia Bagh is not a place I would recommend a standalone visit to. However, if you are around the bus station with a few minutes to spare, do walk over. It is short, it is sweet and it is stunningly serene and detached. The mosque, the old gate, and one later structure (which looks like a mansion but we could make nothing further of) are the bonuses.

Qudsiya Masjid in July 2011

The gateway

Floral patterns on the arch

On the Ridge

In City of Djinns, William Dalrymple briefly mentions a bungalow that William Fraser built for himself on a hill. The mention is only about a sentence or two. Read carefully, it yields two things important enough to hold my attention any day. That it was built by William Fraser and that it was atop a hill. For the uninitiated, my love for William Fraser is documented here and that for the hills much more extensively at Trek Himachal. Obviously visiting the bungalow immediately became a personal quest. So, when one July morning a friend, Varsha, expressed a desire to see the Northern ridge, I had every reason to accept.

We got into the swanky Delhi Metro from Hauz Khas and got off at Kashmere Gate. After stopping briefly at Qudsiya Bagh and wandering around a city park we quibbled over which direction to take, (and sadly, I lost the argument) before we finally got into an auto for the Hindu Rao Hospital.

It was a surprisingly short auto ride. Towards the end it got really interesting, weaving through a couple of small lanes before eventually climbing up a steep hill. I had no idea such steep slopes existed in Delhi. Eventually, we were dropped off at the entrance of the Hindu Rao Hospital, and had no clue what to do. Dalrymple had said Fraser's bungalow had been converted to Hindu Rao Hospital, named after a Maratha merchant of that name, who had bought the bungalow after Fraser's death. An ASI book we were carrying said the same thing. We had assumed we would get off the auto and bingo, bang in front of us we would see a charming building from early Raj with fluted columns and colonnades. Instead, there was a 1980s, dilapidated, typical stinky hospital looking at us with sleepy, disinterested, eyes. Lost of purpose, we walked around a bend in the narrow road and spotted a police post. But Varsha refused to use her womanly charms to quiz a policeman for the whereabouts of the haveli so we moved a little further down the road trying to orient ourselves while sifting through the pages of the ASI book.

Just before we passed the last of the hospital grounds, we spotted another guarded gate. Just to prove a point I had been making (that I am a very charming man), I politely asked the guard on duty for a baoli in the area which the ASI book mentioned. People are more likely to know old, unused baolis than re-used havelis. After a bit of apprehension, he actually led us inside the gate. While I was basking in the afterglow of having proven my point, Varsha looked around and whooped at having possibly found Fraser's haveli. I am not sure why she got so excited. What stared us in the face was a sad, half mossy, stinking, unkempt building showing multiple failed attempts at renovation. We tried going inside but were blocked by a pile of broken chairs. Anyway the room stank like a public loo in Kashmere Gate. I lost all my enthusiasm.. I have been to many a ruin covered in shit but this building was supposed to be in use. You could see name plates outside doors and yet it was stinking of pee. It was unbearable!

Walking a little further down the road, the baoli was not much different either. Parts of the walls had caved in and it was fenced off. Tall grass grew around it and, moss settled into the empty places left by fallen stones. ASI had fenced it off physically and fenced it off their minds as well. A little further after the baoli, was Pir Ghaib and it was a completely different story. It is a curious structure. I didn’t know what to make of it. Actually, no one does. One legend goes that a sufi resided here and one day just disappeared. Disappear is ghaib in urdu, hence the name. Who the Sufi was, when he lived, how and why he disappeared, no one seems to know. There is no mihrab anywhere to indicate a place of worship. The couple of graves inside are not conventionally oriented. The ceiling has a couple of openings which seem to be part of an astronomical observatory. Then there is the theory that this could have been a part of Kushk-i-shikar, Feroz Shah Tughlaq's hunting lodge on the ridge. There are very steep staircases with very narrow stairs on the first floor leading to the rooftop. From there, you can peer down through the holes to the ground floor and also look around many parts of North Delhi. It is two floors high on a high hill in Delhi and in a green area with very little haze. This is about the best view you can get in the city.

The curious Pir Ghaib, of the Pir who disappeared curiously

After Pir Ghaib, we went to the Asokan Pillar on the ridge. Truthfully it was nothing but another thin, strong column of special iron with Asoka's edicts on it. This one had been taken off from somewhere, reassembled somewhere else, then blown to fragments in a blast, collected and pieced back together again and then placed somewhere else. I wonder if Asoka would be able to read what edicts are left on it!

The Asokan pillar! Yet Another!

One of the charms of the Northern Ridge (and I say this with the benefit of hindsight) is many small monuments littered in a small area, all a short walk away from each other. They come in all shapes, mostly small sizes and encompass about eight centuries of Delhi not counting the Asokan Pillar. The latest of them all is the Mutiny Memorial built by the British in memory of the Mutiny of 1857.

Mutiny Memorial from the foliage

The search for the Mutiny Memorial took us on one of the most pleasant walks I have ever been to in Delhi. Varsha, with her aching feet, would probably not agree. We strolled down a slope on a narrow road with woods all around. It was rainy season, the forest was lush green and calm. An auto plodding up the slope with a few school kids looking curiously at us accentuated the far away feeling. It could have been in a small village in Himachal.

A close up.

Finally, we turned back up the slope, much to my disappointment, and found our way towards the Mutiny Memorial. While the memorial was closed for renovation, the staff allowed us to poke around the outside. Whatever else people may say about it (it has been renamed Jeet Garh with new inscriptions about how 'those referred to as traitors here were the freedom fighters'), the British taste of location was perfect. Perched on the top of a small hill, itself on the top of Northern Ridge, there could hardly have been a better location for placing a memorial to victory. It is not grand and is slightly understated but, placed where it is, it does not need to be any of those things.

We walked around a bit more and were surprised to find amongst other things a clean loo in a public park. The park itself is full of monkeys, has a water channel, a small pond, Flagstaff Tower and some other remains of Kushk-i-Shikar. Finally, exhausted and in search of an auto, we walked past Rajpur Road, which I had recently learned was the poshest of the posh residential neighbourhoods in Delhi. Yes, more upmarket than anything in South Delhi. You only have to walk on that one road lined by huge bungalows and mansions situated back in their own grounds and guarded by tidy greenery to believe that this exists in Delhi.

Flagstaff Tower. British officials' families hid in during the mutiny.

The afternoon was topped off by a sumptuous Korean meal, courtesy of a friend Jamal Mohammad, who is the single most reliable source of food information in Delhi and a lecture on moderation by Varsha, which she herself did not follow when faced by a chocolate fondue at AIM Cafe in North Delhi and the most wonderful waffle I can ever hope to have.