Delhiwale: This way to Katra Dhobiyan

Old Delhi's Walled City faces exodus due to congestion. Katra Dhobiyan offers a surprising, spacious courtyard where children play amidst history.

Narrow noisy lanes choking the cramped crowded localities. This being the primal force behind the steady exodus of the Walled City wale from the Walled City. The first trickle started some decades ago when households with centuries-old roots in historic Old Delhi started to flee the Walled City through its vanished walls. In quest of space and daylight (and playgrounds for children), many of them merely crossed the Yamuna river, transplanting themselves in nearby places like Laxmi Nagar.

The four children who were playing football. (HT Photo)

The entrance to Old Delhi’s Katra Dhobiyan is predictably dismal—it lets in no daylight, and promises nothing but congestion ahead. This sunny afternoon, the tunnel-like corridor is submerged in darkness. But…big surprise! It ends in an open sun-filled courtyard blessed with the cooling shades of a peepal and a neem tree. A homely Hanuman temple lies snuggled under the peepal. The shrine is encircled with a blue brick border. This moment, four children are playing football.

Katra Dhobiyan truly appears to have no relation to the congested world lurking immediately outside. The spacious courtyard is flanked by a warren of double-storey houses, each speckled with short flights of pretty staircases. An elderly woman is sitting on a lower rung of one such staircase, quietly watching the football match. Or maybe she is gazing at the trees. (Or perhaps at the brown dog curled up in a corner.)

Traditionally, a katra consists of living quarters built around a courtyard with a single narrow entrance, and inhabited by people of the same caste or occupation. Katra Dhobiyan must logically have originated as a ‘hood for dhobis, the laundry washers. “All the dhobis left the katra during the maar-kaat,” says the woman on the staircase, referring to the Partition’s bloodshed over 75 years ago.

“They were replaced by new people… we are the new people’s descendants.”

Now recycler Ayub walks into the courtyard, hoarsely crying, “Kabadi walla, kabadi walla.” On spotting the woman, he bows his head, saying, “Namaste, Shakuntala mataji.” He walks deeper within, entering a lane comprising a few book-binding workshops, plus a complex of flats.

Meanwhile, the four footballers call off the game. “This courtyard gives us everything, here we play football and badminton and volleyball,” says the group’s only girl. “That dog doesn’t bite, he is very sweet,” she assures, turning to the brown dog curled up in a corner.

The players arrange themselves on a staircase for a portrait. From bottom to top — Nivansh, Jitesh, Gouri, and Vasudev.