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The view from Wuthering Heights!
IT IS (or was) something like Wuthering Heights, except that the Ring Road passes close by and fishmongers sit under a peepal tree with lamps and lanterns off Naraina village. A gnarled tree uprooted by last summer's storm lies a few yards away. It provided shade to many a wayfarer but now it awaits the woodman's axe. This tree, now dead and soon to be cut into pieces, must have stood for several years and seen the area being transformed from wilderness into a habitation. But something of the old days still lingers in the evening vegetable market of which the fish sellers are a part.
When the sun sets behind the FCI building the fish sellers get busy. They sell their stuff by weight and the scales they use are old, dingy ones that have been long off-balance. But that hardly seems to make a difference to the trade. The seller weighs, keeping one scale down, almost touching the ground, and the buyer seems to be satisfied that he's got a bit extra stuff. It's only the fish that keep staring all the time!
You walk up and down the rugged terrain behind. There are bushes and babool trees and a winding way leading to the temple. Gradually this place will become like any other colony for they are building flats to house the ever-growing population. Looking down across the road yousee a sentry tower. That is part of the Cantonment area. In the day donkeys and mules used to canter round it - that's if a cricket match was not on. If it was, the players used the tower as a pavilion and the umpire sometimes came and stood below it. But late in the evening the sentry tower evoked other thoughts - like the futility of maintaining a watch over something that would eventually need no vigilance and harbour only vagabonds at night. Now barbed wire cordons off this area.
Coming back to the fishmongers they are in a hurry to dispose of their stuff. A woman dangles a rohu and asks, "How much?" "Rs.20 a kg," says the seller. "No Rs.18," says the woman throwing the fish down"Take," says the man and throws the fish back at her. She picks it up and is soon speeding away on the scooter. A few fish remain with no more customers in sight, except a couple walking up the incline in the pale moonlight like Heathcliff and the girl he loved.
Now over to another exciting place: The staircase of the Paharganj bridge close to New Delhi station must be one of the strangest staircases anywhere, for here dwells and thrives a diverse cross-section of humanity.
Petty salesmen who cannot find a platform to display their goods, palmists in search of the gullible, sellers of beads and semi-precious stones attached to rings of dubious quality, men and children with deformed limbs out to cash in on the sympathy of the passers-by, mendicants, leprosy patients, boys sitting with images of Gods and Goddesses soaked in mustard or rather a mixture of all the oils one can think of, women with sick babes, a sturdy sadhu with a haunted look - and many more are to be found here.
The Paharganj bridge was not there always. The British constructed it when they extended the Railway and built the New Delhi station. When the railway lines were not there one could just walk towards the walled city past the old thana where Sir Theophilus Metcalfe found refuge in 1857. Sir Theophilus had raced on his horse from the Kashmere Gate, pursued by sepoys, and just managed to get through the Delhi Gate in his undergarments. He then galloped towards Paharganj until he reached the police station where the Thanedar recognised him and managed to save his life till he could escape to Rajputana.
One other staircase may vie with the one at Paharganj. This leads to the Kauria bridge near Delhi main station. But the Paharganj one leaves a lasting impression. From early morning to late night the dwellers of the staircase try to earn whatever they can for a meal, being prepared down the stairs near the public convenience by a man who feeds not only them but also many others.
If this staircase were to be cleared of all those who have encroached on it over the years, one would certainly feel relieved. But paradoxically one would miss a large slice of life in the raw, which at one time attracted even the hippies, who found it a safe enough to smoke the prohibited pipe.
Drug fumes probably still rise here on the quiet but in that one may see history repeating itself. Even during the last days of the Moghuls the poet Zauq, on his way home from the Red Fort, used to swing his walking stick so that his palki bearers could make way through the ganja-smoking sadhus who congregated on the outskirts of the garden that once bloomed where hundreds of railway lines now criss-cross each other. The staircase is a reminder of sorts of those far-off times when no trains ran in Delhi.
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