Delhiwale: The mystery behind the trapped moon

As Ramzan nears, Matia Mahal Bazar in Old Delhi adorns itself with lights, but overhead cables create a claustrophobic streetscape, unnoticed yet essential.

As Ramzan approaches, Matia Mahal Bazar in Old Delhi is getting dressed up for the season. Fairy lights and decorative frills are being strung across the street. But these festive ornaments are inserting themselves into the street’s permanent attire: the looping, sagging power cables that criss-cross overhead. Together, they are making the market feel denser and more claustrophobic than ever, as though the sky itself has been pulled down into the street.

The cables remain adrift, trapping the unsuspecting moon in their tangle. (Mayank Austen Soofi)

The queer thing about these perilously dangling cables is their invisibility. They are everywhere—more visible, in fact, than the monuments and landmark shops of the Walled City—yet they barely register. Instagram reels ignore them. Guidebooks remain silent. Tourists walk beneath them, immune to the most astonishing feature of Old Delhi’s streetscape. It is surreal to watch citizens go about their lives under this complicated mesh of cables, as though they were as natural a part of daily life as kebab stalls and barber shops. Perhaps this is because the cables have become part of the very fabric of the place. They have hung here for decades, providing electricity to Old Quarter dwellers. Mirroring the zigzagging geometry of the streets below, the cables are essential to understanding contemporary Purani Dilli in all its complexity.

A striking example of Old Delhi’s cable installation stands outside Chawri Bazar Metro Station, near Ashok Chaat Bhandar. The cables here appear particularly unruly, as if spun out from Chawri Bazar’s spectacular disorderliness. Or take Haveli Azam Khan Street: the gap between the facing upper-floor windows on either side is so choked with heavy cables that one could imagine gossipy neighbours visiting each other simply by stepping across them.

Other streets, other wonders. On sunny afternoons in Chitli Qabar, a dense web of intersecting cables casts a nest of shadows on the street below. In Mohalla Qabristan, thick cables drape over the decorative arch above the doorway of merchant Fareed Mirza’s stately residence, lending the entrance the look of an eccentric architectural embellishment.

In the drawing room of the Jaffrey residence on Ganj Meer Khan street, cables dangling just outside the window gather and drape across the view, framing the daylight like an embroidery.

Elsewhere, on random streets, electricians perch atop poles, repairing flaws in the cables.

Late at night, as the streets finally empty and the tired city falls asleep, the cables remain adrift, trapping the unsuspecting moon in their tangle—see photo.