Delhiwale: Remnants of a pandemic...

Life in and around an iconic monument in the age of the coronavirus outbreak

The five tents are in red. A flap of cloth sewed on one of them says: “Covid 19 Vaccination Center”.

The existence in Jama Masjid of the vaccination camps shows that the monument has acclimatised to the coronavirus as intrinsically as it did the other great episodes of the past.

The tents are set up at Jama Masjid as a material souvenir of Covid-19 in this place of history.

The 16th-century monument in Old Delhi can be experienced multifariously.

You may see it as a mosque, a historic edifice of red sandstone, or as the Walled City’s signature landmark, visible from numerous rooftops and back alleys.

You may also apprehend the building by familiarising yourself with the disparate worlds it shelters in its folds — the kebab stalls on the northern face; the Sufi shrines on the eastern side; the scores of labourers from Uttar Pradesh who sleep at night in front of the western wall; the struggles of a young gym owner who runs a small cafe on the mosque’s northwest corner.

You may also view Jama Masjid as a receptacle of historical events. It was on its steep stairs that freedom fighter Maulana Abul Kalam Azad famously spoke against the creation of Pakistan after India’s Partition.

And now, the existence in Jama Masjid of the vaccination camps shows that the monument has acclimatised to the coronavirus as intrinsically as it did the other great episodes of the past.

This afternoon, some parts of the staircase going up to the mosque are crowded. Citizens have thrown caution to the wind as far as social distancing is concerned, and strangers are sitting next to each other with their face masks under their chin. The tip of the mosque’s southern tower is packed with visitors.

In the first lockdown, exactly two years ago, it was almost impossible for Old Delhi dwellers to approach the mosque. The many lanes that led to this ancient edifice were barricaded.

The otherwise-crowded world around the Jama Masjid was nowhere to be seen.

By now the pandemic has grown to be such an integral fabric of our world that these vaccination camps seem firmly entrenched to the Mughal-era edifice, as if they were always here like the metal handrails along the stairs.

Indeed, many years later, some of the Walled City’s young citizens might boast to their grandchildren saying: “Once upon a time, I went to the Jama Masjid to get myself jabbed against the coronavirus.”