Delhiwale: This way to a secret path

A hidden, nameless lane in Old Delhi links busy roads, showcasing a mix of litter and history with a surviving fragment of the city's ancient wall.

This secretive Old Delhi pedestrian lane has no shop and no house, no temple and no mosque, and currently no pedestrian. It also has no name. There is nothing else like it in the entire historic quarter.

The stone wall is a rare souvenir of Old Delhi’s origins. (HT Photo)

Linking the hectic Netaji Marg to the less hectic Ansari Road, the short, straight, almost-hidden passage might be empty of humans this cold afternoon, but is brimming with the traffic sounds of the adjacent Netaji Marg. Even so, the lane’s distinctive silence is stubbornly intact.

The track goes past a wasted heath littered with paper cups, cigarette butts, chip packets, thermocol bowls, tobacco sachets, beer bottles, a severely rusting vehicle — and amid all this litter lies a park bench. The poor bench too appears to be a part of the litter. A man is sitting on it, his head drooped downwards. Elsewhere clustered with trees, the weedy semi-wilderness is cordoned off by a thing overwhelmingly picturesque — a wall of stone ramparts.

Suddenly, a peacock lands on the pathway. The large bird furiously moves its head left and right, and flies over to the top of the stone wall. Moments later, it goes over to the other side of the wall, towards the deputy police commissioner’s office.

Minutes pass. Now, a man in black overcoat enters the lane from the direction of Ansari Road. He abruptly gets off the paved path, his black shoes stepping over the littered ground. He walks over to the Walled City’s wall, ostensibly to relieve himself on Purani Dilli’s historic stones.