Dublinwale: Door to door
Ghalib's last haveli door was dismantled for a museum, but the story is false; in contrast, Dublin's doors symbolize its rich literary heritage.
Years after poet Ghalib’s passing, the beautiful doorway of his last haveli in the Walled City was carefully dismantled from its surrounding wall of old-fashioned lakhori bricks, and installed as a primary exhibit in the museum celebrating his life and works.
But you can never see that door because… well, the story’s not true. The final residence of Delhi’s great literary figure actually fell into dereliction. At one point, it was used as a coal warehouse.
This wasn’t exactly the kismet of Dublin’s great writer James Joyce—but we’ll get there. His novel Ulysses is famously contained into a single day, 16 June, and that date is celebrated worldwide as Bloomsday, named after the novel’s hero. To celebrate the iconic city-novel, this reporter is in Dublin for Bloomsday 2025, with Delhiwale briefly becoming Dublinwale.
In Ulysses, Mr Leopold Bloom lives on 7, Eccles Street. While the character of Mr Bloom is fiction, a house actually stood on this address. It was razed in 1967. The door and the surrounding brickwork was rescued by a committed Joycean and it is now installed in the courtyard of James Joyce Centre on North Great George’s Street (see left photo with Josh Newman, a staff member of the Center). The door is a literary souvenir, possessing a Joycean sentence of its own—“He (Mr Bloom) pulled the halldoor to after him very quietly, more, till the footleaf dropped gently over the threshold, a limp lid.”
One can only make conjectures about Ghalib’s darwaza. It must have resembled the few arched doors that still stand in random parts of Old Delhi. Was it like the spiky darwaza in Pahari Bhojla? Or like the ones in Gali Arya Samaj, testimonies of Delhi’s long-ago architecture?
In Dublin, old doors appear to be greater in numbers than in Delhi. They in fact constitute the city’s signature look, as essential to its personality as Eiffel is to Paris. All these doors look the same, borne out of Georgian architecture, dating from eighteenth and nineteenth century. And yet, because of the dizzying variety of colours, they look profoundly different from each other. Rare for two adjacent doorways to be painted in the same shade. Take the doors of the aforementioned Eccles Street. Red, brown, yellow, blue, green, white. And suddenly, on Frederick Street, the door to house no. 13 is pitch black. This afternoon, round the next turn, a Dubliner is standing on the threshold of his apartment. The door is open. The citizen is boldly facing the busy street, busily trimming his moustache (See other photo).
