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Hindustan Times
03-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Hindustan Times
Delhiwale: This way to Mohalla Niyaryan, part 2
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…'
Hindustan Times
25-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Hindustan Times
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. 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.
