Delhiwale: Mukesh’s inheritance

So omnipresent on Delhi’s summertime roadsides, the refrigerated cold water trolley doesn’t trade only in refrigerated cold water. The cart vendor also keeps dozens of yellow-green lemons, which he employs to spike up the flavour of his bottled banta drink. That said, some vendors do condescend to serve simple shikanji on request, squeezing lemon into a glass of cold water, stirring in with a pinch of black salt.

Delhi’s traditional shikanji cart, however, is an altogether different apparatus, in which the ice of the shikanji is prepared manually. This demands strenuous physical labour. Such an old-fashioned “shikanji machine” is made of a cylindrical vessel usually wrapped in a red cloth (the red is to instantly catch a passerby’s attention in the day’s white-hot glare). The vessel has a steel jar within. The jar is filled with sugary shikanji, prepared hours earlier by the vendor. The jar’s lid has a handle, which is called kulfa. The vendor has to hold this kulfa like a motor car’s steering wheel and rotate the heavy vessel in quick successions, both clockwise and anti-clockwise. The continual churning cools down the drink, forming a wafer-thin sheet of transparent ice atop the lemon paani. Incidentally, the little bit of space separating the jar from the outer vessel lies packed with pieces of “baraf-factory” ice, which too help the shikanji stay cold.

Although many traditions of our street life are slowly, but surely, disappearing from the street, this preparation of street shikanji is refusing to fade. A lane in Old Delhi’s Lal Kuan is dedicated to shops selling shikanji machines, each priced at ₹5,000.

The old-fashioned heritage of keeping the drink icy appears to have passed on smoothly to a new generation of vendors. Take the youthful Mukesh (see photo). Among the many shikanji-wale in the city, he arrived in Delhi three years ago, becoming a parking attendant in the New Delhi railway station area. During summer, he temporarily shifts to the “more lucrative” shikanji. This afternoon, manning his cart—named “Best Summer Gift”— on Netaji Subhash Marg, he draws a quick sketch of his career. “I am B.Sc. Maths honours. I finished my higher studies in my Bihar state, and found a job in finance, but circumstances forced me to move to Delhi… here, my chacha being a street vendor…” In two years, Mukesh will quit this career—he says determinedly. He will return to his village to start a business. Meanwhile, on receiving a customer, he begins to rotate his shikanji cart’s vessel with practised hand motions.