Delhiwale: This way to Mohalla Niyaryan, part 2

Hindustan Times

03-05-2025

The narrow street is splintered into narrower cul-de-sacs. One ends into a wall. The wall has a door. The door opens into a vestibule. The vestibule opens into a courtyard, showing rooms beyond.
This particular residence isn't real. It exists in Ahmad Ali's Twilight in Delhi. The novel is set in Mohalla Niyaryan, which is real. This Old Delhi street lies behind GB Road's red light district, crammed with houses, chai khanas, roti bakeries, and very many stalls of all kinds.
One of these stalls specialises in repairing mobile phones. The proprietor, the justly named Asif Mobile Wale, is a dweller of this very street, but he had never before heard of the novel that put his gali on the pedestal of world-class literary fiction. Twilight in Delhi was published in England in 1940 by Virginia Woolf's Hogarth Press.
After patiently hearing out the novel's synopsis, Asif Mobile Wale's face lights up. 'I know the house!' He swiftly gives directions to the address. Moments later, on knocking at the house, women's voices are heard. The tall arched door opens slightly, revealing a man in white kurta-pajamas. The house has nothing to do with any novel, he says, shutting the door.
Apologetic about the expedition's failure, Asif Mobile Wale offers tea-stall chai as consolation.
Perhaps it is vain to seek in reality a place anchored in literature. This evening, as if to emphasise the point, Mohalla Niyaryan seems disconnected from Ahmad Ali's novel, wholeheartedly immersed into the minutiae of its current three-dimensional existence. The busy cooks at Abdul Aziz Bawarchi, the alert client at Sajid Tailor, the resigned goat tethered to Rafi Medicos, the hurried passersby — one with a pigeon on his shoulder.
Mohalla Niyaryan is changing fast, Asif Mobile Wale says cheerily, waving his chai glass towards a construction site. 'A time was when our gali had no tall building, and we could see all the way to the pahari of Paharganj.'
The chitchat gradually returns to Twilight in Delhi. The mobile phone repairer wonders at the fact that the author of such an iconic Delhi novel moved to Pakistan following the partition.
'During the batwara, my dada refused to desert the Mohalla Niyaryan of his dada-pardada.'
Meanwhile, the evening has ended, but Mohalla Niyaryan's hectic nightlife is refusing to fade. In that, it is the opposite of the night life in Twilight's Mohalla Niyaryan, where, per the novel's last line, 'night came striding fast, bringing silence in its train, and covered up the empires of the world in its blanket of darkness and gloom…'