Delhiwale: A beauty spot on Ansari Road

The grandest building in an Old Delhi neighbourhood of antiquated structures

The building is stately. Its walls have taken the colours of the early sunset. You half-anticipate the main door to open at any moment and the head of the household to step out, a retinue of butlers behind him, one of them holding an umbrella over the master.

Set apart from the busy road, it is located at the centre of an enormous compound.

The door doesn’t open.

Old Delhi’s Ansari Road is famous for its publishing houses — and also for its numerous old dwellings. On the main street, one house has a balcony made of exquisite lattice screen, like an embroidery woven in concrete. Another house consists of a network of delicately raised corridors that seem suspended in the air. One notable residence has a staircase designed so artistically that it evokes cloud puffs piled one upon another.

But this building stands out from the rest. It is the grandest, and among the most beautiful. Set apart from the busy road, it is located at the centre of an enormous compound. This evening, the gate is open, but since the mansion appears to be a private property, it is best to view the place from outside. The long car parked in the driveway and the air conditioners fitted on some of the windows seem to be the only 21st century touches to this souvenir of an earlier architecture — from the middle of the last century, according to a book distributor in the area.

The changing light of the evening is making slow, moving patterns on the long windows. The main door is arrayed into dozens of panels, outlined with shadows of a bare tree on the porch. An adjacent wall is embossed with a design, showing what appears to be the Star of David.

Cloaked in the gold glow of the dusk, the mansion appears otherworldly, as though it did not belong to the world existing immediately outside it, which comprise a Mother Dairy booth, a tea stall, and the bedding of a homeless rickshaw puller, stacked under a pavement bench.

A shopkeeper, passing by, talks of the mansion’s owners in a respectful tone. He has no idea of the building’s age.

Meanwhile, a white cat is watching the goings-on from a window upstairs.