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Postcards from the past

Arya Durg in Karol Bagh is one place where thankfully the history has not been razed. R.V. SMITH tries to join some broken images

Arya Durg at New Delhi's Karol Bagh is a building which makes a passer-by hold his breath. It seems to be over 104-year-old, perhaps when Queen Victoria died this place was a new mansion with the paint still fresh on its doors and the hum of the city far away. In those days there was no Karol Bagh as such and Ajmal Khan Road a dusty track through which donkey-boys raced up and down. Hakim Ajmal Khan, after whom it is named, was alive then and regarded as the physician with the golden touch.

You remember the story of how they tried to test his skill by making him feel the pulse of someone in purdah. The hakim recommended a diet of green grass and gram because he had rightly concluded that the "patient" was a goat. Such was the hakim's fame that even the fastidious Ahmed Ali could not help getting the hero of his novel "Twilight in Delhi" "treated" by the legendary physician.

Well, to come back to the old mansion, one feels that it has acquired a new character. On the top dwell a host of people, mainly from Rajasthan. Cots hang in balconies, along with the clothes put out to dry. A woman like the panghat girl in "Jahan-e-Khusro" combs her hair in a window, oblivious to the people in the street below. In another window a child plays with a rag doll in between fits of crying.

Broken teapot

In a door stands a man with a cup of tea in hand, there is a broken teapot near him but he doesn't seem to mind so long as the brew is hot. A few doors away a couple are having a row. A TV antenna perched precariously on a pedestal of unplastered bricks helps the neighbours to drown the quarrel in Doordarshan's evening programme.

Right below this rabbit warren are rows of shops, some of them renovated in style. Cheek-by-jowl with a tandoori chicken "dhaba" and a dispensary, is a liquor retail shop with a queue as long as the one at fair price shops. Not far away is a "chaat" seller and in between a general merchant's store. Just across the road one can buy bridal saris and other fancy stuff. But even those who drive up to the place in their Marutis cannot help glancing at the ramshackle building, which presents a vivid image of life in the raw.

Royal memories

There are families there, which still maintain their links with their ancestral Rajasthan. Phooli was born in Alwar and lived in Kaptan Sahib's compound, which was not far from the railway station. She liked the sounds and sights of Alwar, where people led simple lives and were nostalgic about the days when a raja ruled the state and led a life of pomp and show. But he was benevolent to his subjects too.

Laliya came from Jaipur, where his father Nathia, was the orderly of an army doctor. His mother died when he was young. Nathia remarried and Laliya found it difficult to adjust in a house run by his stepmother. He wed Pudina, a girl from Rewari, whose family lived in the Railway quarters near the old church built by the Italian Capuchin fathers. The church fell into disuse, was taken over by a Protestant denomination, but is now back with the Delhi Archdiocese and quite popular too. Pudina, of course, doesn't know the history of the church. She only remembers the old girja ghar where a padre lived.

One gets to talk to these people after a great deal of cajoling, for they are wary of strangers. This building is the subject of a lawsuit and so they are all the more suspicious. But once they begin to trust you, they open up and out comes a flood of memories.

Meanwhile the `panghat girl' has finished combing her hair and is ready for the household chores. After having stared at herself in the broken mirror so long, you don't expect her to admire the half-moon peeping over the peepul tree.

And yet this girl, with comely features and a face like Kareena Kapoor's, has her secret admirers, who cast amorous glances as they pass by on their way back from work maybe she's not even aware of this - or maybe she is, reminding one of those lines about Lucy: "Fair as a star when only one is shining is the sky".

Here the balcony is the sky and Lucy is probably Maya of Arya Drug.

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