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Mayank Austen Soofi aka Delhiwale picks six tales that seize the essence of what has been misplaced, as life in Delhi endures throughout the pandemic: a pair holds a non secular studying with out group, for the primary time in many years; cellphone numbers on partitions inform the story of small companies hit the toughest; a younger poet finds the elegant in the peculiar; a fortunately married autorickshaw driver and home assist grapple with the fallout of the lockdown.
Which one touched you most? What’s your story? Mail, tweet or share to tell us.
Yellow Pages on Walls
When the markets shut down, Metro trains stopped operating, and people who had the luxurious of a home exiled themselves inside it, some left their telephone numbers behind.
Mobile telephone numbers etched on boundary partitions or on makeshift boards hanging from tress and light-weight poles stared at masked passersby on visitors-much less streets.
A wall in Green Park was scrawled with the variety of a mat vendor. One a wall close to Nehru Place, the variety of a tailor. The barely perceptible variety of a ‘Bijli Walla’ or electrician scratched on a wall in South Extension, etched in desperation.
TO MEET THE VOICE BEHIND ONE SUCH NUMBER, GO HERE
ALSO SEE | Photos: Stories informed in pictures from a capital in lockdown
From choir to duet
Every July, Kshetra Pal and his spouse, Pushpa, maintain A Ramayan Paath, a 24-hour studying of the Ramcharitmanas, at their house in Ghaziabad. Every yr, their drawing room can be transformed right into a makeshift mandir. Sofas and low desk cleared, flooring coated in mattresses topped with clear sheets. Hosts and friends would take turns to learn the verses aloud, ‘with emotion’.
In the pandemic, one choice would have been to postpone the studying, however “that was out of the question,” Pushpa says. Instead, they each stayed awake for 20 hours straight and completed the studying of the epic themselves, sitting head to head.
TO SEE THE PALS AND READ THEIR ACCOUNT OF THIS YEAR, AND YEARS GONE BY, GO HERE
Vowels of the road
Each door on the lengthy winding avenue of Old Delhi’s Chatta Sheikh Mangloo is marked with an ‘O’ or ‘E’ painted in yellow. “O stands for odd and E stands for even,” a chai stall proprietor explains. “Our market’s pradhan got these signs painted.” So everybody knew once they can open store. That was in May. It is now September and all outlets are free to open day by day. The hand-drawn indicators have remained.
Curiously, some are even drawn on doorways of residences. “It’s because the man painting just went along without bothering what kind of door it was,” says an aged man, gazing upon a inexperienced doorway painted with an O.
TO SEE THE DOORS, AND MEET SOME OF THE RESIDENTS, GO HERE
ALSO SEE | Photos: Artist Sudhir’s Patwardhan’s Mumbai
Her elegy to the peculiar
She is in purple palazzos and pink kurti. And a masks, after all. Jonaki Ray has a day job in an IT firm, as a technical editor. And a ardour for poetry. She wrote a pandemic-era poem for HT, titled The Art of Not Losing Breath (after Elizabeth Bishop)…
At the nook of the market was Maxim’s
with its air mixing butter into rising truffles.
Outside, on the crescent-formed avenue, automobiles honking
at walkers evading rickshaws, passengers hopscotching
with potholes, the three brothers’ self-proclaiming
their ‘permanent’ vegetable retailer—
twenty-5 years and counting—
the diners queuing for Belgian chocolate shakes,
whereas handing leftovers to the ready kids…
TO READ THE FULL POEM, GO HERE
ALSO SEE | Watch: Javed Akhtar recites Hum-safar (Co-travellers)
Housekeeper of Hauz Khas
Her husband makes an excellent rooster curry. “But we haven’t had it for a long time,” says Kamni, who goes by just one identify. “I no longer earn as much as I used to before the lockdown so we can’t afford maas-machhi.”
For 20 years, Kamni has labored as housekeeper to scores of 1-room pads in Hauz Khas Village, rented largely by singles. Most of Kamni’s employers gave up their lodging in the lockdown, due to job losses or wage cuts, leaving Kamni with a shrunken earnings. “I used be responsible for more than a dozen rooms… now just 3 or 4,” she says. She has two
“Every day I pass in front of those empty rooms. These people I have worked for… I hope they are fine wherever they are.”
TO MEET KAMNI AND READ MORE ON HER LOSSES AND LIFE IN LOCKDOWN, GO HERE
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