Delhiwale:This way to Mohalla Niyaryan, part 1

Tucked behind GB Road’s red light district, this street is privileged with a parallel existence. Mohalla Niyaryan is in Old Delhi, but it also lives outside time and space, inside a classic novel, enjoying the distinction of being the only Walled City gali to have been exhaustively chronicled in a work of fiction.

First published by Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press in 1940, Ahmad Ali’s Twilight in Delhi commands its status as the most evocative English language novel devoted to the historic quarter. Indeed, the book’s Mohalla Niyaryan is conspicuously relatable to the actual Mohalla Niyaryan as it is today. The pages percolate through Purani Dilli bowels as effortlessly as rainwater through parched earth. The trusting reader walks along, faithfully following the directions in the novel: stroll through Lal Kuan, turn to Kucha Pandit, keep straight, turn right, finally stepping into Mohalla Niyaryan. The novel’s central address, this gali has its own labyrinths of by-lanes, the fictional one among these “growing narrower like the road of life,” climaxing into a wall with a door. This door marks the family home of the novel’s patriarch.

Truth be told, any Twilight in Delhi reader, even the one sitting in Timbuktu with no links to India, must feel as intimate with Mohalla Niyaryan as any Niyaryan walla. The novel is permeated with an impressionistic sense of the street’s daily life. Dawn breaks with sparrows twittering, stray dogs searching for food in the last night’s garbage, and the sky filling up with racing pigeons. Gradually, the street and its many by-lanes are claimed by beggars singing sad verses. Since the story is set in and around “the terrible summer of nineteen hundred and eleven,” the hot dusty winds lay siege to the street even before the morning has a chance to make a dignified exit. By noon, it becomes so unbearably hot that the discoloured sky turns “dirty and bronzed,” and the lanes become vacant. The street’s deathly desolation dissipates only in the evening, when hawkers arrive. With hands clapped on their ears, these men sing melodiously of their offerings: melons and cucumbers; mulberries, plums and vegetables;, ice chuskis and sherbets.

This summer evening in the three-dimensional Mohalla Niyaryan, it is naturally wondrous for the novel’s reader to come across ordinary shop banners bearing an extraordinary street name—the very street of Twilight in Delhi. Flipping through this reader’s well-worn paperback in mild awe, stall owner Asif Mobile Wale (see photo) admits his ignorance of the book, although his family has been living for generations in Mohalla Niyaryan. “I read in Hindi and Urdu.” After patiently hearing out the novel’s synopsis, his face lights up. “I know the house!”

Can this be real? Will he show the way to the house?

Wait for Mohalla Niyaryan, part 2.