Delhiwale: This way to Kucha Nahar Khan

As Bezos celebrates his wedding, Amazon seeks workers in Delhi’s Kucha Nahar Khan, a street bustling with diverse trades and rich history.

Even as the Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is enjoying his big fat wedding in Venice, his company is actively seeking “illiterate to graduate boys” for “packing and scanning” in Purani Dilli’s Kucha Nahar Khan street. The poster is plastered on a peeling wall, beside a flyer offering tuition classes in “computer, Punjabi, abacus, divinity course.”

The street is punctuated with a couple of old doorways. One is in fading blue—a shade so fragile that it might wash away in the first monsoon shower. (HT Photo)

This afternoon, the pre-monsoon air in Kucha Nahar Khan is unbearably hot+humid. Nevertheless, the cook at Yaseen Bawarchi is sombrely braving the heat in his street-facing kitchen crammed with pots and ladles. While the adjacent stall’s poker-faced Yusuf Chai Wale is preparing one more round of chai. Close by, electric appliance repairer Yaseen is trying to revive a battered toaster. His tiny establishment is filled with dozens of household utilities in varying states of deterioration. The busy Yaseen condescends to utter only a single short sentence, but in it he discloses everything he knows about the historical figure who gave his name to the Kucha—“Nahar Khan was accha aadmi.” (Kucha, of course, refers to a lane whose dwellers share the same occupation.)

The other doorway is crowned with a marble plaque bearing the name of the residence (Hasan Manzil), and the year of its built (1956). The black paint on the plaque’s Urdu inscription has partly faded.

The lane in fact is eclectically kaleidoscopic. Every turn of the gaze reveals an altogether new character. Look this side: that’s a workshop manufacturing juice machines. Look the opposite side: that’s the bookstore Kitab-Bu-Shifa specialising in books on the Unani school of medicine. And over there: a balcony decked with potted flowers, too close to a tangle of overhanging power cables.

The street ends beside an anonymous man’s grave, a landmark revered by the street dwellers as a sacred mazar. That’s why Kucha Nahar Khan is also called Gali Mazar Wali.