Mar 29, 2025 05:38 AM IST
In Old Delhi’s Gali Devidas, a century-old house stands amid change, housing families linked by history, as its last inhabitant dreams of modernization.
Once upon a time, more than a hundred years ago, a house came up in the Walled City. The house had a doorway. The doorway was unremarkable. Many such houses after all had such a doorway. And then time passed. The house witnessed death and births, even as elsewhere in the Walled City old houses gave way to the new. A few houses however continued to stand, many of them growing derelict, yet retaining traces of original grace. Gradually, more old houses disappeared. This house continues to stand to this day. You may view it in Old Delhi’s little-known Gali Devidas. Since many houses with such a doorway are gone for ever, the doorway here has started to look remarkable due to its increased rarity.
The doorway is additionally distinctive for being an abode for pigeons. They dwell in a row of metal boxes nailed atop the arched door. A passer-by refers to these metallic contraptions as “ghosla,” the bird nest. The boxes are currently vacant. The birds are loafing in the sky, per the passer-by.
The passer-by turns out to be one of the many inhabitants of the house. Furkan Ali confirms that the house is more than a hundred years old. It is partitioned into several households, he explains, with all the many families being inter-related through a common elder. Furkan Ali lives in one of the floors with his wife and children. His late father was born in the same building around the time of independence, he says. The father was a “polisher of saris and lehengas” and had his workshop within the house. Whereas Furkan Ali himelf dabbled in a series of indoor and outdoor professions. Until a spell of ongoing ill-health forced him to a self-imposed exile at home, he used to drive a “battery rickshaw.”
The mild-mannered man believes that the street must have received its name from some long-ago inhabitant. “Devidas is a Hindu name, and Gali Devidas today is inhabited by Muslim families… the Hindu households living in this gali left for newer parts of Delhi more than 20 years ago,” he says.
The street is very short. It goes past the house, via a printing press, and transmutes into a darkened dead-end alley.
Standing by his doorway, Furkan Ali graciously agrees to pose for a portrait. Later, turning towards the staircase within, he says: “I wish for the day when this old house is razed down, and we have a modern house in its place.”
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