Delhiwale: This way to Lokraj’s colourful cascades

The Walled City dictionary.

As part of our ‘Walled City dictionary’ series that is exploring every uncommon Old Delhi element.

The unnamed shopper’s stop in Old Delhi’s Tiraha Behram Khan

Here’s a maha kumbh of blue, saffron, white, magenta, yellow, black, cyan, scarlet, pink, green, mint green, purple, gray, red, tawny red, orange, off-white and many, many more tints and hues so vibrant, so in your face, that you could almost taste them.

Some might dismiss this unnamed shopper’s stop in Old Delhi’s Tiraha Behram Khan as a forgettable bazar booth. True, the enterprise is too modest. It is improvised within a weatherbeaten building’s staircase, and merely sells unstitched fabrics for dupattas, salwars, skirts, lehengas etc. But one look at the place will make you go ooh la la! These clothes and their colours are like magnificently jumbled rainbows cascading down the building’s darkened stairs, flooding the pave, and stimulating the dull daylight.

The aesthetics of the setting is crisscrossed with its hard realities. The barely perceptible fabric merchant is obliged to be cooped up all day within the muggy-hot staircase. Perched on a lower rung of the dingy stairway, Lokjraj Pandey lets his merchandise claim the open space below and entice the passersby. “Garmi season, getting hotter,” he says, his voice a murmur, his legs buried beneath bales of colours. In his 30s, Lokjraj launched the stall for 12 years ago when he moved to Delhi after completing tenth grade in his Nepal hometown. He sources the fabrics from an Okhla “export house”.

Now two veiled women in black burqa stop by, their unveiled eyes running over the many colours. Lokraj doesn’t intrude into their window shopping.

At 9 at night, he packs up his colours, and walks home to wife and three children in nearby Lal Gali. Gesturing behind his back, towards the building’s upper bowels, he mentions that a hall upstairs is home to a few putai wale. (That explains why so many painters are spotted in the area, squatting along the street-side with paint brushes, waiting to be picked up for assignments.)

Moments later, a young man wearily climbs the stairs, the feet carefully skirting the fabrics. He must be one of the putai wale living in the building, for his pant-shirt are splattered with paint stains, their multitudinous colours almost twinning with Lokjraj’s cascades.