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DOWN MEMORY LANE

Ashiq Ali was a very old man. Nearly all his 80 years he had lived in the Civil Lines area, where he was born. He used to recall that at the turn of the 19th Century the place was lively; he even remembered the names of the beauties of those days. &# 8220;Mind you there were six Miss Jenkins and as sure as Allah is in His heaven, each of them had a sahib to take her out.”

At that time Ashiq Ali was scarcely 15 years old and was being groomed into a sais in Hamilton Sahib’s household. But curiosity led him to indiscretions and as a punishment he was transferred to the garden. Recalled Ashiq Ali, “I was glad of the change for a groom’s life suited me the least. Quite a few of my evenings were spent at the hackney carriage stand (now a taxi stand) in front of Delhi Club where the sahibs gathered every evening”. The grooms had to wait for hours sometimes.

Life in the garden over 100 years ago was bliss, said Ashiq Ali. The area was full of bungalows and the mali was an important man because the Civil Lines area was famous for its well kept gardens and lawns. The houses of the sahibs all contained a green house where the mali held court during the day and sold flowers and vegetables on the sly to servants of any Hindustani sahiblog who might be too lazy to go to Subzi Mandi or Kashmere Gate.

Although the sahibs were very secretive about what they did at their club, the memsahibs were not. They encouraged their servants to learn the secrets of other memsahibs from their servants. The garden was of course the favourite topic of discussion and sarcastic comment when those nosey females met; as a result the mali was much petted. Ashiq Ali used to recall that he was almost spoilt by his memsahib.

But those days trotted away and eventually Ashiq Ali had to work in a school as a head mali. He fretted about the changes in his locality – the schools and the new sahibs and nourished a secret grudge against Connaught Place, the upstart which had taken over all the charms of the Civil Lines, once the hub and centre of all activity in town.

Another old timer, Rasool Khan, remembers the heyday of the Civil Lines and of the tonga which was once a status symbol. Those were the times when the well connected owned a tonga or phaeton and paraded it with pride in the fashionable centres of Chandni Chowk and Kashmere Gate, not to speak of Jama Masjid where some of the best tongas in the country could be seen on any Friday. Those tongas belonged to the nawabs and nawabzadas of pre-partition days who came to offer Jumma prayers at the mosque, dressed in sherwanis of the finest cut, along with their retinues of servants and flatterers.

The tonga was not confined to the Indian gentry alone. The British residents of the Civil Lines were just as enamoured of the horse-drawn carriage. He nostalgically recalls those colonial days when the British Officers’ Club was the rendezvous of the elite of Delhi. And listening to him one gets a picture of the tongas and phaetons coming racing to loud hurrahs and cracking whips and breathless rivalry as to who got to the stand first.

And then there were the slower tongas in which memsahibs came arrayed in their evening best to become the cynosure of the young officers standing near the hackney stand. But times do change and the splendid tonga of yesterday with its daredevilry does not bear comparison with the rickety old rake today. Swifter modes of transport have spelt the doom of a once ‘smart carriage for smart people’ and thus Delhi has lost another old association with its romantic past.

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