In the heart of Delhi, an alley walk

Words decamp as one is mobbed by an army of scents and sensations walking the narrow lane joining Kasturba Gandhi Marg with Janpath. The highrises with their expensive office space and successful people stand on both sides. One can vouch the alley is not to the pleasure of everyone around. The narrow lane was born before the slim space left after the birth of the old tall buildings could be filled by one more concrete structure. No one has succeeded in evicting the alley from that site ever since. Waiting at the doorstep of success, there is a kind of greatness-in-waiting in that stretch of walk. And by dint of its location at the heart of one of the greatest post-colonial cities our unknown alley has been blessed by many important footsteps of our country. Here, thus is created a museum of marginality that combines the forgotten and the neglected of both East and West with ease.

Travel agents, cheap eateries, Internet cafes open on its sides. There are a couple of cheap lodges and kitchens ideal for youthful, cashstrapped westerners. As a walker will find, this alley has become a place in its own right; it is no more a mere alley. Today it combines the oddities of both worlds. Despite being located at the heart of Connaught Place it has quietly seceded from the city and created a nature of its own. The sweet nut seller, the vendor of second hand books, the Nepalese adolescents working in its dhabas have each carved a functional role for themselves in their little world. Above them the offices bear an air that is almost forcibly sanitised.

The alley does not value inattention and can really be nasty with nonchalant visitors. A walker most of all should be extreme alert while negotiating its spread. Else, the visitor could be left dazed, with dirty water splattered on him by an out of place, gawky, nervous sedan, bruise or, even worse, a broken bone.

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Vehicles crawl its surface in all their forms, often putting the passerby at the end of his wits. The alley rejects the vehicles unless they are tolerably small like a scooter and noiseless similarly. In the absence of a law against huge jeeps and SUVs, they too are among the regular visitors in the alley. But the luxurious and the huge Mitsubishi looks as unwelcome and unwanted like the Sojourner did on the Martian surface. These machines push into our Suez Alley and leave, leaving nothing more than the stench of their exhaust fumes which are soon overcome by the raging gastronomic conflagrations all over the place.

It is difficult to find such a small, busy , yet happy place on the skin of this urban beast we call New Delhi. The little alley goes on robustly with all its activities and creates a little village with equal claims on the national and the global as the capital itself under whose chins it has found a fold of its own.