The one-dish meal

This is hearty food, different from the subtle confections of traditional Mughlai cuisine, like koftas and pulaos. Yellow and with paste-like consistency, haleem is a one-dish meal of wheat, lentils and meat. Cooked in sufi shrines and served in Muharram gatherings, the best haleem in Delhi is found in the home kitchens of Muslims. The second-best version is found in Gali Kababiyan, the lane behind Kareem’s restaurant in the Walled City’s Matia Mahal Bazaar. Mr Naeem sets up his stall there daily at noon. A ravenous crowd gathers around him immediately. Two and a half hours later, the man’s deg (giant bowl) gets empty. Mr Naeem inherited the business from his famous father, Bundu Haleem Walla.

Haleem’s recipe is deceptively simple: boneless meat, usually of burra (buffalo), is cooked with oil and spices; soaked wheat grains (or broken wheat used for breakfast porridge) are boiled in water; channa lentils are boiled and mashed, or pulverized in the food processor. All three are then mixed together and cooked some more. Haleem could be made in two hours, though unpractical purists insist on slow cooking it for ten hours. Onions, tomatoes, green chillies, coriander leaves and lemon juice are added before serving. At homes, mothers top the bowl with deep-fried onion rings.

A true haleem should be fibrous with a sticky texture. Because it has wheat, pulses and meat, the wholesome dish needs no accompaniment. The roadside sellers, if the customer demands, serve it with biryani.

The haleem sold in the stalls of Meena Bazaar lane, in front of Jama Masjid, have no sophisticated spices like mace and nutmeg, which are always used in the homemade variety. Priced at Rs 10 a plate, the stew is kept hot in a deg, which rests on a wood-fired stove. The hungry customers – usually labourers, rickshaw wallas, street children and pilgrims on their way to the area’s sufi shrines – stand around the cart, waiting to be served with a dish that would give them strength to last an entire day.

The haleem that The Delhi Walla ate was made by 23-year-old Muhammad Yusuf. His ladle was of wood and his spice box had a sticker printed with ayatul kursi, a verse from the Quran. Living in a two-room house in Turkman Gate, Mr Yusuf is from a family of haleem cooks. His father sells haleem in Turkman Gate and his two older brothers hawk the same near Red Fort and Kasabpura (near Idgah). Mr Yusuf’s haleem was redolent of wheat, had a strong flavour of burra meat and was hot with garam masala. I was energised.

Nearest Metro Station Chandni Chowk Note Mr Naeem’s stall is closed every Friday

[Text and pictures by Mayank Austen Soofi]

A plate for you

Haleem around Jama Masjid

It’s in the deg

One more ladle

Meal for the hard-working

With rice

Coriander leaves, sliced tomatoes and dirty nails

The music of the peepal tree

Life is a series of disappointments. And then you see something grand and noble, which surpasses life. The other morning The Delhi Walla came across a giant peepal tree in Deer Park, Safdarjang Enclave. The tree was a forest. It thick branches were covered with dry dead leaves; many had fallen on the ground. A few buds were growing on the upper branches. The spectacle of both death and the new-born life sharing the same space was dramatic, like the final movement of Beethoven’s ninth symphony. Delhi seemed large than life.

Soft melodies

Up the trunk

The tree is a forest

People of the peepal

Read the tree please

The spring season oddities

Smelling a pink silk tree flower, Raluca Sidon, a visitor from Bucharest, Romania, says, “I’m seeing it for the first time. It doesn’t grow in my country. I have only read about them in books.”

The Delhi Walla is with Ms Sidon in Humayun’s Tomb. It is her first day in Delhi. It is also her first day anywhere in Asia. The winter has just ended. The morning is sunny. “In Bucharest, it is still very cold, about zero degree Celsius. There is ice on the streets and the wind is chilly, which is unusual for March. There is no sign of spring.”

Delhi, however, is in the midst of its short spring spell. Jasmine flowers are blossoming. The branches of semal trees are covered with thick pulpy red flowers, which, when grown too heavy, fall on the ground with a thud. The day temperature is cool, not cold. In the noon, there is a feeling that summers are around the corner.

“Spring in Europe is very explosive,” says Ms Sidon. “When it arrives, ice melts and water in the nature starts to flow. It’s like the blood coming back to the body. First you see the flowers of apple trees and cherry trees, and then you discover that leaves have started growing.”

In Delhi’s spring, leaves fall instead, heralding the coming of summer when the water will be scarce and sandstorms from Rajasthan will be a daily occurrence. “For a tree to survive in prolonged drought, it needs to shut down,” says Pradip Krishen, author of the book, Trees of Delhi. “The best way for it to do that is to drop its leaves and stop transpiring water.”

A year ago in Bucharest, Ms Sidon wrote in her diary:
“The purple lilac is smelling fresh and bitter. The trees are in perfect state of youth. Thee leaves are as fresh as my one-year-old nephew Jacob’s ears, transparent and soft. This spring is perfectly directed. Its beauty has no equal.”

Watching the gardeners sweep away the fallen leaves from the grounds of Humayun’s Tomb complex, ” Ms Sidon says, “In Romania, all trees shed all their leaves during the autumn. They become stark naked. Here in Delhi, the leaves are falling now, but not all the leaves are falling and not from all the trees. It’s like as if this is not a seasonal thing but something that goes on all the year round.”

Picking up a dry leaf, the Romanian woman says, ” In Bucharest I missed the sun. Here I’m happy seeing it everyday.” Walking towards a mango tree, she says, “Delhi’s trees have so much life in them. May be because of the birds. I feel life in the grass too. Maybe there are snakes.”

Although we are in the second week of March, Ms Sidon, looking up at the blue sky, says, “This is feeling like late August in Bucharest.”

Raluca Sidon looks for Delhi’s spring

The silk tree pink

Fallen leaves

Fallen flower

Gathering fallen leaves

Gathering fallen leaves

Gathering fallen leaves

Gathering fallen leaves

Blossoming flowers

Blossoming flowers

Smelling spring

Searching for the stylish

The Delhi Walla saw this man at an alley in Bulbuli Khana, a congested neighborhood in the Walled City, the historic district established by the Mughals.

His outfit was elaborate and rooted to his culture: a black karakul cap, a grey kurta, a grey jacket, a grey pajama and a bluish grey sherwani. His beard was white; his shoes were light brown. There was no one dressed like him.

The man’s sherwani and inner jacket were unbuttoned, which did not interfere with his formal grace. Walking slowly towards a nearby mosque, he looked like as if he had stepped out of the pages of a tragic Urdu novel set in 19th century Delhi. That was a time when two worlds were colliding. The Muslim gentry that ruled the Mughal India for more than 300 years was losing control to European colonizers. We know what happened next: The British Empire in the subcontinent ended with the country’s partition. India became a Hindu-majority democracy having more Muslims than most Islamic nations. Pakistan, the dream land of India’s Muslims, turned into a nightmare. This Muslim man with his traditional clothing – now rarely worn – symbolized the era when the disintegration of his people had just started.

The melancholy deepened when I contrasted the man’s sartorial nobility with his immediate surroundings. The dress was clean and creaseless; the alley was filthy and rutty. Old Delhi, one of the city’s few Muslim-dominated neighborhoods, is a civic disaster. Streets are claustrophobic, drains remain uncovered, gutters stink, monuments are unkempt, and everyone spits everywhere. By clinging on to his unembroidered hand-stitched sherwani, the daily uniform of the extinct Muslim aristocracy, this man rose above the squalor. For a while, he brought back the flavor of the Walled City’s past, a period prettier than its present.

Stepping out of the history book

Since 18th century

Elegance in his blood

Truly stylish

The ‘untouchable’ gods

One of the many gods worshipped in Delhi is Guru Ravidas. The Delhi Walla spotted him near American Center on Kasturba Gandhi Marg. Guru Ravidas was polishing shoes. His hair was long and he had a flowing coal-black beard. He resembled the popular image of Jesus Christ. The colored portrait pasted on the pavement wall was garlanded with plastic flowers. Ramesh Kumar, a 42-year-old shoe shiner, had purchased the poster from the Sunday Book Bazaar in Daryaganj. Pointing to Guru Ravidas, Mr Kumar said, “He is 634 years old. He is our saint.”

Mr Kumar lives in Seelampur, north Delhi, and commutes to his pavement stall on KG Marg in the metro train. He is stationed here daily from 11 am to 7 pm. “I charge Rs 5 for shoe shining. Sometimes, good people give me double that amount.”

There were two posters of Guru Ravidas at Mr Kumar’s stall. One was so old that its colours had faded. There were other gods too: Krishna, Sai Baba, Vaishno Devi. “These are our gods as well but Guruji is the most special.” Guru Ravidas, a shoemaker who belonged to the chamar caste, was a 15th century mystic and is the patron saint of menial shoemakers. The position of shoemakers – a hereditary profession – in the Hindu caste system ranks towards the bottom of the list.

Mr Kumar told me a story about Guru Ravidas: “One day a Brahmin was walking towards the holy Ganga when he passed by Guruji’s hut. He was sewing a shoe. Guruji gave a coin to the Brahmin and asked him to offer it to the river. The Brahmin did just that and he got a gold bracelet from the river. It was encrusted with gems. The Brahmin gave the bracelet to the royal family. When the queen desired another such bracelet, the king personally went to Guruji to make a special request. The saint closed his eyes, mediated for a while and the river Ganga appeared in female form. She produced another bracelet and presented it to Guruji who gave it to the king.”

The remarkable thing about the story is that a Brahmin and a Khastriya – both being upper castes – were obliged to a shoemaker, an ‘untouchable’.

Mr Kumar, whose ancestors were ostracized as ‘untouchables’, hails from a village in the Khandwa district of Madhya Pradesh, a state in central India. His family has been in the leather footwear trade for generations. His father was the first member to leave for a city. The migrant’s son doesn’t remember being treated as an ‘untouchable’ in Delhi. However, when he visits his ancestral home, the high caste people of the village do not come close to him.

“Earlier, even in cities, people won’t touch us,” Mr Kumar said, “but this great man changed things for us.” He pointed to a portrait next to Guru Ravidas. This ‘great man’ was wearing spectacles. He was clean-shaven and his hair was short. Dressed in a suit, he looked like a strict professor. Born into a family of ‘untouchables’ in 1891, Dr Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar is an icon of modern India. He famously rebuffed Mahatma Gandhi’s patronizing gesture of renaming ‘untouchables’ as ‘Harijan’, meaning people of the God. Dr Ambedkar studied in the US and UK, practiced law in India, and inspired millions of his fellow low caste Hindus to convert to Buddhism. The chief architect of India’s constitution, he was awarded Bharat Ratna, the nation’s most prestigious honour, 34 years after his death. “Because of this man we are able to mingle with the rest of the society,” Mr Kumar said. “Before him, people would not touch us. He spoke for our equality. I worship him.”

Though Guru Ravidas looks content with the shoes, Mr Kumar is more affected by Dr Ambedker. He does not want his children to follow the leather trade. “I’ve four sons and a daughter. I want them to study and get regular jobs. My life is over. They must have it better.”

Ramesh Kumar, the shoemaker

Guru Ravidas

Dr Bhimrao Ambedkar

Telling the story of Ganga and the Brahmin

Hereditary, not by choice

Income

Not for my children

One of the one per cent in 13 million

Gazing at her husband’s photograph, she says, “He taught me a lot.” A pause follows after which Sakina Mehta, 80, continues in her soft voice, “He gave me the courage to go out into the world.” Tyeb, Mrs Mehta’s husband, was one of India’s most celebrated modernist painters. In 2009, he died of a heart attack. Since then Mrs Mehta has been dividing her time between Bombay, where her son lives, and Delhi, the home of her daughter. The Delhi Walla meets her at her daughter’s second floor apartment in Greater Kailash-II. Thanks to a wall-sized glass window, the living room is filled with the clear light of the sunny afternoon. Mrs Mehta is in maroon kurta, cream shalwar and an embroidered dupatta.

A Bohra Muslim from Bombay, her bonds with Delhi are old. In 1965, after a five-year stint in London, Mrs Mehta and her husband moved here with their two children. He was a struggling artist. It would be after 32 years – at his Lokhandwala apartment in Bombay – when he would paint Mahisasura, the work that was sold at Christie’s in New York for $1.58 million, the highest price ever paid for a living Indian artist.

One reason why the Mehtas chose Delhi over Bombay on their return to India was because they could not afford to live in their home city. “We did not want to stay with our joint family in Bombay and we had no money to buy a flat there,” Mrs Mehta says, talking slowly as she recalls the past. “Hussain suggested us to come to Delhi since the barsatis (terrace houses) here were cheap to rent.” She is referring to the iconic painter MF Hussain, her husband’s contemporary, who was living in Jangpura, south Delhi, at the time.

The Mehtas’s new home was in Nizamuddin East, a neighborhood of bungalows, apartments, servant quarters, ruins and trees. The house consisted of one room. The bathroom was under a staircase. The kitchen was in the courtyard. It had a tin roof. The passage that connected the entrance door to the room was where Mrs Mehta’s husband painted. Being the family’s breadwinner, she had to find a job.

This was a remarkable transformation for a woman who grew up in a conservative Muslim family of Bombay and who studied only till high school. When Mrs Mehta was 16 and her parents announced that some people were coming to finalize her engagement, she knew that the boy would be one of the three sons of her paternal uncle. Her only question to her father was: “Which of the three brothers I’m getting married to?” It could have been Nooruddin or Zoeb, but it was the eldest, Tyeb, a diploma student at the J.J. School of Art.

During the five years of engagement, Mrs Mehta – chaperoned by her younger sister – dated with her fiancée in Shivaji Park and Marine Drive. They watched films at Arora cinema in Matunga. At his school, Tyeb introduced her to his fellow artists SH Raza, Vasudeo S. Gaitonde and Akbar Padamsee. “Initially when he talked about painting and how he intended to paint,” Mrs Mehta says while holding a cup of Earl Grey, “it would all go over my head. Slowly, I started understanding about art. I listened, and didn’t resist anything.” The marriage happened in 1951. The son, Yusuf, was born three years later. The daughter, Himani, arrived in 1961.

In Delhi, after Mrs Mehta started working as a stenographer at an ad agency in Jorbagh, the family was assured of a monthly income of Rs 1,000. Her husband received commissions from art galleries. Down the years, she switched to other jobs, including one in FabIndia where she was fired after reaching a day late from a long leave. Her husband painted daily and sold his works absurdly cheap. “Those 8,000s took us through many months.”

Money was spent only on books, music and the education of children, who were enrolled at the elite Modern School, Barakhamba. The living room had no furniture except a straw mat, a rocking chair and an oval brown dining table that was gifted by a friend. Children watched television at the neighbor’s house. The family had no car. “Every month I made an expense list. The cash for each thing, including the breakfast bread, would be inserted in separate envelopes. We couldn’t spend more because we didn’t have more. Our children knew the situation. We were happy.”

The week Mrs Mehta’s husband managed to sell a painting, the family would celebrate the event by dining out: either at Moti Mahal, a Mughlai restaurant in Daryaganj, or at Aka Saka, a Chinese eatery in Defence Colony. On weekends, they picnicked in monuments where they ate and read. Some mornings, painter Hussain would come to pick the Mehtas in his fiat car, which he had painted himself, and drove them to Karim’s in Old Delhi for a traditional Muslim breakfast of nihari. Every night the Mehtas hosted an open house where friends argued art over meat curry and rumali rotis.

The couple walked a lot – to Jangpura, Jorbagh and Lodhi Garden. In evenings, they watched plays at the National School of Drama and visited art galleries at Triveni Kala Sangam and Lalit Kala Akademy. They would have aloo tikki chaat in Bengali Market. Once they spent an entire night listening to Ali Akbar Khan, a sarod player, at a concert held in Modern School, Barakhamba. “Khan sahib started with the evening raga and ended with the morning raga.”

The family had its base in Delhi for 14 years before moving back to Bombay. “In Delhi, we continually struggled as far as money was concerned.” The life became comfortable, financially, during the nineties. Mahisasura was sold in 2005. It was the first time a piece of contemporary Indian art had crossed the million-dollar mark, though the money went to the seller who had bought it at a lesser price from the painter. The following year, another Tyeb sold for $2 million.

Checking the Facebook messages on her iPad, Mrs Mehta says, “Times have changed. Now when I’m driven around in Delhi, I don’t know where I am. Every place looks unfamiliar except Nizamuddin East.”

Yet, the woman has adapted beautifully to this new Delhi. She meet friends in India International Center, attend classical music concerts in Nehru Park, buy gifts in Dilli Haat, and shop for salwar suits in Select Citywalk mall. At the Big Chill restaurant in Khan Market, she treats herself to smoked chicken salad. Her art tours have expanded from Triveni Kala Sangam to the National Gallery of Modern Arts. In February 2011, she was spotted at Vadhera Art Gallery, Defence Colony, which was holding an exhibition of her husband’s works, the first after his death.

Immediately after their marriage, Tyeb considered working at a bookstore. Mrs Mehta protested, saying, “Then when will you get the time to paint?” She took that job instead. Today she says, “I’m what I am because of him.”

[This is the 38th portrait of Mission Delhi project]

Mrs Mehta and her husband, Tyeb

In search of lost time

Her Delhi struggles

Recollections

With her daughter, Himani

With her iPad

[Text and pictures by Mayank Austen Soofi]