Delhiwale: Room of the rain

This Tuesday morning, rain is lashing a Delhi terrace

This Tuesday morning, rain is lashing a Delhi terrace. Seen through a room’s raindrop-speckled window, the terrace is drenched and deserted, see photo. This was what the room was meant for: a place to run to when the barsat arrived. A barsati.

This Tuesday morning, rain is lashing a Delhi terrace. Seen through a room’s raindrop-covered window, the terrace is drenched and deserted, see photo. This was what the room was meant for: a place to run to when the barsat arrived. A barsati. (HT Photo)

As the monsoon season reaches its final stage, let us invoke a dwelling that has almost disappeared. Taking its name from Urdu for rain, the barsati was a small room on a house terrace, intended as shelter during sudden rain. Later, these rooms began to be rented out, giving rise to Delhi’s barsati civilisation.

Barsati rents were cheap, and tenants were often young migrants with bohemian tendencies. Some barsati wale went on to become famous. Painter MF Husain and artist Zarina Hashmi lived in Jangpura barsatis, writers Amitav Ghosh and Pankaj Mishra in Defence Colony, and sculptor Mrinalini Mukherjee in Nizamuddin East. In the classic 1981 comedy Chashme Buddoor, three friends share a single barsati; the film was shot in a Defence Colony barsati.

The barsati arose from building regulations that permitted only a small room on the roof. As regulations changed, bungalows gave way to multi-storey apartments. Several floors of rent made a single and small rooftop room financially worthless for the landlords. Indeed, walk through these colonies today and most bungalows have been replaced by multi-storeys, with no terraces to suggest that a barsati might exist. A real estate agent in tiptop Nizamuddin says only one barsati remains in the area. It comes with two bedrooms and a monthly rent for 35,000 rupees. A true barsati would never have commanded such a gentrified rent. In any case, the people who created the barsati way of life could never have afforded this steep price. Nor probably would they have known what to do with more than one room.

By the 1970s and 80s, barsati dwellers had become a type. They wore purani jeans, sang along to the Beatles, recited Faiz, sympathised with Marxism, and kept themselves up to date with Pauline Kael’s movie reviews. Swaddled in sutta smoke on the terrace late into the night, they gossiped about yaar-dost, blasted the unfair system, and railed against Henry Kissinger and similar symbols of the US foreign policy. Their rooms might have a gadda on the floor for a bed, chik curtain for the window, a Madhubani painting on the wall, and a bamboo bookshelf stacked with Penguin UK paperbacks.

(True, these are generalisations, but they have been drawn from conversations with barsati dwellers of times past.)

The Chashme Buddoor barsati lately reappeared in an Instagram post by @imvcpramod, who tracked down the Defence Colony address where the film was shot. The post first shows the film clip of the actors standing on the barsati terrace. It then cuts to the same address in May 2026. A multi-storey is standing at the site. As if the terrace never existed. RIP, beloved barsati.