Delhiwale: Chai time with Joyce

Writers like Ghalib and Joyce connect Delhi and Dublin, with Ulysses' Bloomsday celebrated at Ansari Road's Martello Tower, echoing local chai stalls.

Mirza Ghalib, Khushwant Singh, Maheshwar Dayal, Sir Syed Ahmed Khan, Ahmad Ali, H.C. Fanshawe , Quli Khan, H.K. Kaul, Percival Spear, RV Smith, Madhur Jaffrey, William Dalrymple, Sadia Dehlvi, James Joyce, Narayani Gupta, Manju Kapoor, Malvika Singh, Rana Dasgupta, Swapna Liddle, Rakhshanda Jalil, Rana Safvi, Sam Miller, Pushpesh Pant, Akhil Kaltyal, and Pradip Krishen, and so many others. They all happen to be writers, and all of them have something of Delhi in their oeuvre.

Delhiwale: Chai time with Joyce

The nit-picking fact-checkers might pick on one of these names, objecting that this writer has got nothing to do with Delhi. They have a point. Even so, no matter wherever you might walk in Delhi-NCR—Jacobpura in Gurugram, or Turrab Nagar in Ghaziabad — one book that comes in handy to crack our city most intimately is James Joyce’s Ulysses.

The celebrated novel mostly comprises of characters walking the streets of Dublin in Ireland. The city is mapped out with extreme precision. So much so that the book’s Dublin has become universally relatable. The places and people in the novel resonate with places and people in the reader’s own city. At one point in Ulysses, the hero remarks that it would be a good puzzle to cross Dublin without passing a single pub. A good puzzle will also be to cross Delhi without passing a single chai stall. Indeed, sometimes while strolling the galis around Turkman Gate, this reporter does confuse between the two cities. For you have to understand that the chatter and curses in the Dublin pubs and Dilli chaikhanas are the same! The crowds of men, the tobacco smoke. For instance, the “applause and hisses” of Barney Kiernan’s (in Ulysses’s chapter 12) find their exact twins in Old Delhi’s hyperlocal Kale Tea Stall, Irfan’s tea stall, Babban’s tea stall, Ashok’s tea stall, and Rani’s tea stall.

What’s more, the Martello Tower in apna Ansari Road is a twin of Dublin’s Martello Tower, the iconic landmark where Joyce’s novel starts.

June 16 is falling on coming Monday. This is the date on which the entire Ulysses is set. The day is celebrated worldwide as Bloomsday, so named after its everyman hero Leopold Bloom. Indeed, the best way to mark Bloomsday in Delhi is to be at the Ansari Road Martello, and read aloud the novel’s opening lines: “Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead…”

PS: This photo was clicked two years ago at Haveli Azam Khan’s Modern Tea House, which recently shut.