Delhi is a city of histories, and of stories. That might be said of any place, if examined closely. But Delhi’s allure is unusually tenacious. It draws the historian and the fabulist, the conqueror and the politician, the bureaucrat and the exile, the chronicler and the essayist. Its ruins whisper, its avenues deceive; power and poetry jostle for attention, often in the same breath.
As a thought experiment, while reading Basti & Durbar, one might focus the imagination on a single neighbourhood, and consider it across time. Take Majnu Ka Tila. Once the endpoint for swimming competitions in the Yamuna, it is recalled briefly in Manzoor Ahtesham’s ‘A City That Was’, excerpted from Basharat Manzil. The piece, suffused with an elegiac tone and drawing on anecdotes familiar from Altaf Hussain Hali’s Hayat-e-Jawed, evokes Delhi before the Revolt of 1857, a world of fading nobility and intimate loss.