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In the corridors of a nightmare

Blending the past with the future, R.V. Smith conjures up a tale around the fate of good old Connaught Place

Connaught Place is a vastly changed place by night, gone is the sick hurry of the day and gone too are the people responsible for it.

It's so quiet and peaceful with the corridors dreaming of the past, when this fashionable market came up as a memorial to the Duke of Connaught.

In reality, however, it was imperial Britain's addition to the bazaars of Delhi, quite different though from the narrow, congested ones of old. Connaught Place then was considered the newest promenade. But that was in the day.

Suspicious characters

At night things were different. Even as now, when you find the chowkidar reclining on his stick, keeping an eye on suspicious characters moving in the shadows, a dog sitting under a tree, a pigeon asleep on a parapet or a cat taking a royal walk through deserted roads - a link of sorts with the wild past of the place, where once jackals, foxes and wolves roamed in search of prey.

Archaeology of the future

That was a long time before Barakhamba came up. Who knows in the distant future, the jungle may reclaim what originally belonged to it, with the animals back in their old haunts and some enterprising archaeologist stumbling through the thicket covering our fab bazar and imagining it to be an example of decadent Moghul architecture or the place of a king, with apartments for his begums and rooms for his retainers!

Or some Prince Charming may come on his horse (would they have this noble animal then?) and find a "sleeping beauty" of brick and mortar. He may climb our high-rise buildings and wonder whether we perished while constructing a Tower of Babel.

The fancy fountain may seem to him an ancient water supply system, the cinema houses like procreation temples or halls of Satanic rites and the Minto Bridge a poor imitation of the rainbow.

A morbid pipe-dream, no doubt, but not incredible. Decay has laid its withered hand on seven Delhis earlier, so why not on the eighth?

Think of Athens and Troy and the lost cities of the Incas, the old Jerusalem, and nearer home Fatehpur Sikri, the once mighty capital of Akbar the Great.

Nature does take back its own somehow, and Connaught Place may not be an exception despite the renovation. Just think how it would be in the centuries to come, when its pseudo-British architecture becomes a maze of wonder!

Could its discovery be compared by some civilisation to that of Mohenjodaro or Harappa?

Would it be a flattering comment if they were to say we knew how to build pillars and that our roads were quite wide but that we did not have the knowledge of proper traffic arrangements - the Metro tracks not withstanding.

Hoary place

Walking through Connaught Place at night one cannot help wondering what time holds in store.

The darkness makes this modern mart a hoary place, whispering from every nook and corner that when everything else is gone, the cats, the pigeons and discarded buildings would be our grim talebearers to a future age. But let's look back at the past again.

Before Connaught Place was built, people from the Walled City, Nizamuddin and Mehrauli used to come here for partridge shooting for it was a wilderness with a profusion of babool trees. In 1857 many of the so-called mutineers hid here after escaping from Shahjehanabad via the Delhi, Ajmeri and Turkman gates, until they could escape to the Punjab, Rajputana or the United Provinces.

Original site

Had Lutyens built the new Capital towards Kingsway Camp, the original site chosen after the Coronation Durbar of 1911, Connaught Place would have been located in North Delhi and not where it is.

In that case Raisina Hill would probably have been the site of Delhi University and its campus colleges and not Rashtrapati Bhavan, the North and South Blocks and the Central Secretariat. That's a C. P. reverie for you!

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