Delhiwale: A shrine in GB Road

A city never leaves its place on the map, yet time alters its character

A city never leaves its place on the map, yet time alters its character. It remains the same city, though never quite the same. This is also true of its landmarks. Take the Sufi shrine of Laddu Shah Baba. It was always suffused with quietude, but its silence now feels different.

Delhiwale: A shrine in GB Road

The shrine stands discreetly on a corner of GB Road, almost unnoticed by most passers-by. The locality itself is well-known, long known as Delhi’s red light district. This rainy afternoon, the road outside the small shrine is messy with keechar (slush), and is stinking of urine. Traffic is just managing to crawls through. Across the road, a few women are sitting in the shaded corridors outside their establishments, waiting as they always have. Meanwhile, the steady noise of GB Road is continuing without pause.

On stepping inside the darkened shrine, the noise falls away. It is a small chamber built around the trunk of a neem tree. The tree rises through the ceiling and spreads into a dense canopy overhead. The walls inside are painted deep green. Their lower half is lined with patterned tiles. The saint’s grave is covered with a shiny green cloth woven with gold motifs. In a niche beside it, a small oil diya burns before a marble panel draped with marigold garlands. Naturally, someone has been here today to light the lamp. Even so, the shrine feels deserted. It exudes the stillness of a place that was recently occupied but now stands empty.

Indeed, years ago, a group of men, women, and children lived within the shrine. They were the family of the shrine’s caretaker. A door beside the grave-chamber led into their tiny quarter. The makeshift residence held a refrigerator, a gas stove and a sewing machine. During that long-ago encounter, the family had talked of the daily life of the shrine, speaking of devotees from every faith who came here to pray. They pointed to the walls; the tiles were donated by a trader from Punjab following the fulfilment of a wish. The family admitted they knew nothing about Laddu Shah himself because, they explained, those who had carried the shrine’s history had already died. They reluctantly spoke of the women from the establishments across the road, who regularly came to offer flowers and coins at the saint’s grave. “We never talk to them,” they had said.

This rainy afternoon, the door to the family’s living space is partly open. A few men standing outside the shrine inform that the people who lived within left some years ago. The older members died, they say; the young settled elsewhere.

A little later, a visitor walks to the shrine from across the road, palms joined. She slips off her hawai chappals, stepping inside.