Delhiwale: Dante’s CP, third circle

Delhi's Connaught Place features four circles, each with unique sights. The Middle Circle, despite renovations, retains a desolate charm with its peeling walls and forgotten shops.

Per Dante’s Inferno, each of the Hell’s nine concentric circles in the epic poem denotes a distinct tier of sin and damnation. Similarly, in Delhi’s Connaught Place (CP), each of the colonial-era market’s four concentric circles maintains a distinct tier of sights and sounds. The initial two circles were tracked over the previous weeks. The first runs along CP’s core: the Central Park. The second is a white colonnade crammed with showrooms and restaurants (To most Delhiwale, this is the circle the mind’s eye envisages when thinking of CP).

A massive facade is pockmarked with broken windows; one is choked up with bricks. While in another block, a shuttered shopfront is standing profoundly forlorn. (HT Photo)

Now, to the strangest part of CP: the Middle Circle. It contains a half of CP’s quintessential essence, the half that gives the shopping district its perennially dishevelled appearance, no matter how many renovations it has undergone. The long-looping passage is actually a traffic-heavy road, but equipped with wide paves for aimless strolls. Whatever, despite sprinkled over with shops, restaurants, cafés, chai kiosks and even office complexes, the circle is permeated by a mood of desolation. Discoloured walls, peeling paint, rusting locks, cobwebbed doors, and green plants straying out from concrete crevices. A massive facade is pockmarked with broken windows; one is choked up with bricks. While in another block, a shuttered shopfront is standing profoundly forlorn. The legend on the damaged hoarding calls it I Chan Thim Furniture. Nobody in the vicinity is able to recollect any information on the haunting relic, although a dated bhooli-bhusri story on internet hails the shop’s founder as a distinguished cabinet-maker from the 1920s and 30s, his services certified by British administrators.

The Middle Circle’s most picturesque corner is made of a dense shrubbery of white bougainvillaeas. It is literally a hanging garden, cascading down the roof of a building, all the way down to the iconic Nizam’s Kathi Kabab. Steps ahead lurks another Middle Circle icon — the modest Anil Book Corner. It has been selling used books since 1972, valiantly surviving the death of its founder, the much-missed Anil Kumar.

Few years ago, a historic Delhi icon quietly shifted its corporate headquarters from the Walled City, settling down anew in M Block, Middle Circle. It is the company that produces Rooh Afza sherbet.