Delhiwale: His monumental childhood

Shourya, a fifth-grader from Hauz Khas Village, plays daily at the tomb of Emperor Feroze Shah Tughlaq, a cherished part of his life and heritage.

People from across the world come to see this fourteenth-century reminder of the city’s past. The tomb of Emperor Feroze Shah Tughlaq is among Delhi’s great monuments.

The tomb of Emperor Feroze Shah Tughlaq is among Delhi’s great monuments. (Mayank Austen Soofi)

For Shourya, the monument has never been a destination. It is in fact as much an article of his daily life as the wallpaper in his drawing room. By an accident of birth, he is among the city’s most fortunate residents. 11 years ago, he was born into a family that has been living for generations in Delhi’s tourist-heavy Hauz Khas Village, in a house that directly overlooks the monument. He shares the home with his grandparents, and “Mamma and Papa,” plus a dog capable of instilling hair-raising fear in unsuspecting visitors.

“Every day I go to the gumbad to play on the lawn,” he says, using the word for the monument’s dome. The sofa on which he is sitting this evening faces the wall-sized poster of a distant world—Dublin’s Ha’penny Bridge. But it is the adjoining wall-to-wall window that dominates the room. Through it, the monument appears within arm’s reach. Shourya politely shakes his head. The arm actually cannot reach all the way to the gumbad, he says seriously.

The monument is ticketed, but since the villagers are exempt, Shourya enters whenever he wish. In the evenings, he plays badminton there with Angad and Arjun, his friends in the village. Now, his grandmother joins him on the sofa. When he was a baby, she says, she would take him to the monument complex every evening, where she would feed the stray dogs that loiter inside. She still does so, and Shourya sometimes accompanies her. That’s why he knows every dog within the monument grounds. The grandmother informs that Shourya learned to first walk on his feet in the monument lawn. “Wahin par isne chalna seekha,” she says.

A fifth-grade student, Shourya is said to perform well in Social Studies, a classroom subject that includes bits of history. His historical understanding of the “gumbad” is presently confined to the fact that it contains the grave of a “raja.”

Now, his grandfather enters the drawing room. This being their ancestral property, the grandfather, too, has lived alongside the monument all his life. “When I was a child,” he says, “I used to believe that every house in Delhi must face a monument.” Shourya looks on gravely. Agreeing to a request, he steps out onto the narrow balcony outside the monument-facing window, and poses for the camera. He mentions a school project that required him to plant a tree near the home. He planted a papaya sapling, in the monument complex of course.