A Spring Stroll Down the (Memory) Lanes of Kamla Nagar
Saarang Narayan
A winding search for the ghosts of Kamla Nagar, the North Delhi market where Saarang Narayan grew up. They linger in Art Deco homes hollowed into PGs, an empty mall on a public park, and around the hawkers and labourers the market lives off and pushes to its edges.
In the late Spring of 2026, I convinced my partner, Neha, and our friend, Pooja, to go out to North Campus and Kamla Nagar for lunch and some aimless walking. That is the part of the world where the three of us quite literally walked into each other’s lives. We went to college there for our undergrad; Pooja was brave enough to also do a Master’s in DU while renting a room not quite her own in Vijay Nagar. So, the general area has an intimate role in shaping our lives. However—and both Neha and Pooja would agree—Kamla Nagar and the other localities that encircle Delhi University’s North Campus have had a much bigger impact on my life out of all three. And this is simply because I happened to have been born and brought up there. I lived my entire pre-adult life in the very heart of Kamla Nagar and grew up amidst the changing landscape of the market, shops, and the people who worked and shopped in them. My paternal family were among its first residents and remain the oldest-running shop owners in the market. And so, I come from the milieu that I am writing about. You could think of me as a supernatural guide, the not-so-wise guy in every horror story who knows the supernatural realm intimately but is not fully a part of it. My maternal family (who migrated two generations ago from rural Punjab) had more of an influence on me. Yet living and growing up in Kamla Nagar from the 1990s to the 2010s, I would like to think that I witnessed firsthand (more in hindsight than consciously) a microcosm of the slow transformation of pre-neoliberal Indian market-localities into a swamp of franchise shops that change their skin every few years. The local grocer’s shop of the early noughties became a Pepe Jeans sometime in the mid-2000s, then a Numero Uno towards the end of the decade, and is nowadays a W. The ownership of such shops usually remains the same, but their identity and business often change entirely. This is the story of ghoulish shapeshifters.
Kamla Nagar and its edges, c. 2026. Red marks Satyawati Marg, yellow Bungalow Road, blue GT Road, green Roshanara Road, purple Mandelia Road, and orange the outline of Chandrawal Village. Image: Google Earth
But before I talk about the spectres that I encountered in Spring, I would like to go back into the past in a way that one can only do in a place like Kamla Nagar: by looking up rather than down. Specifically, looking up at the houses that, like a weathered, wily, and wiry Betaal, latch onto the backs of the shops that Kamla Nagar is known for. For it is in the decrepit drawing rooms and battered bedrooms of these houses that the spirits of those who owned the shops below linger.
Modern Dairy with an Art Deco abode above, c. 2026. Photo: Saarang Narayan
Named after India’s first Prime Minister’s wife, Kamla Nagar (and its mirror-half Jawahar Nagar, which is named after said PM) is one of those parts of Delhi that has fascinated architecture enthusiasts for years. I recently encountered a blog, active from around the late 2000s to the early 2010s, that photographed and documented Art Deco houses in older (middle-class) neighbourhoods of Delhi. Not to mention urban curators like Anica Mann and research projects like Deco in Delhi that archive and share photos of old Art Deco houses, regularly featuring samples from the bylanes of Kamla Nagar. Growing up, I saw these out-of-place, out-of-time flairs of interwar architecture as somewhat of an oddity. Of course, as a teen, I did not understand that these were the elements that made these houses late yet mesmerising samples of Indian Art Deco or what some call Delhi Deco. Only much later did I learn that this was a distinct style, especially considering what surrounds it. The market itself, which lies beneath the fluted balconies and latticed facades of these houses, styles itself in advertising and signboards firmly rooted in neoliberal Indian market aesthetics. The shops’ signs and facades are all gloss, glass, and vibrant, with deep shades of red and/or yellow, and big, bold, blocky fonts. The houses are semi-floral, fluted-columned, terrazzo-floored, painted in pastels, with Nagari etchings on their facades, fading quietly into Delhi’s polluted skies. The jarring mishmash of aesthetics aside, it is the very existence of these Art Deco houses that fascinates me now. Why is it that a style of architecture that originated and flourished during the 1920s and 1930s became the norm for building houses in a neighbourhood that would only be built in the 1950s and 1960s.
Perhaps the answer lies not in the storied architecture, but in the story of the people who live in them.
Fading Art Deco details above the Amazer Collection, c. 2026. Photo: Saarang Narayan
Kamla Nagar, at least the posh bits, was populated by an émigré vernacular elite. This was a group of mercantile or bureaucratic upper-caste families who had moved out of the sheher (city), known to us now as Purani Dilli, into what was, in the 1950s, a new satellite of the imperial capital. The northernmost foothills of the Aravalli, which had seen some of the bloodiest of battles in 1857–1858, had by then been cleared out, and erstwhile grazing and agricultural land had been refurbished into one of the first commercial-gentrified projects. Unlike the contemporary gentry of Gurgaon, Kamla Nagar’s colonisers were slightly different. They belonged to what some scholars have come to call the vernacular elites: upper-caste traders, businessmen, mill owners, shopkeepers, financiers, bureaucrats, lawyers, and all such bourgeois boggarts of varying sizes and vintage. They did not speak the Queen’s English like their anglicised counterparts, nor did they fully enmesh themselves in the educational institutions that offered Western education. They retained their traditional attire and preserved their caste-cultural identities even when they benefited from the economic and political changes brought about in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In other words, they made their money through mills and trade routes that were set up under colonialism without necessarily adopting the social and cultural stylings of the white colonisers.
But this description often runs the risk of downplaying a central aspect of the vernacular elite’s mind. Even though they wanted nothing to do with the social and cultural bearings of modernity and whiteness, they were nonetheless fascinated by some aspects of it, especially those that seemed easier to adopt without giving up on the comforts of their vernacular identity. Shop managers will sell you a three-piece suit in a Van Heusen franchisee store while sporting a freshly applied tilak on their foreheads. A bovine-shaped box labelled “Gau Seva Daan Peti” neighbours the credit card machine (and now the UPI QR Code) at the till. I have seen many such balding uncles run these shops by day to the tunes of bhajans on the shop’s music system, dancing at their relatives’ weddings by night to the latest dance number. It is hard to miss their fingers tightly wrapped around a glass of whiskey, a red-and-yellow kalava, or ten wrapped even tighter around the same wrist, as they attempt to twist and shake to the best of their abilities. Temporary transgressions into the sphere of the Western or the anglicised are fine, if one carries the markers of one’s tradition along with them. Nay, it is the only imaginable way for the vernacular elite to access this realm for themselves. For they are not comfortable enough to let go of their privilege acquired primarily through the accident of birth as they pine for the fruits of modernity.
The housing and architecture of their more powerful and influential counterparts (especially in Europe, America, and the UK) was perhaps one such object of desire for the vernacular elites of Kamla Nagar. The overtly caste-Hindu elements that adorn their post-dated Art Deco houses are perhaps the best markers of this phenomenon. Like charms and amulets to ward off undesired supernatural beings, Swastikas, Hamsas, and Om are embedded into the facades of many of Kamla Nagar’s Art Deco abodes, perhaps to keep the flattening effects of modernity at bay, lest the hammer blows of industrial society demolish the pre-modern caste privileges that the inhabitants enjoy.
Fading symbols on an Art Deco house, c. 2026. Photo: Saarang Narayan
But this Art Deco fascination also has a temporal element, too. The residents of Kamla Nagar seem to lag behind their anglicised counterparts. Even though they anxiously participated in modernity, they were not its primary authors. They did not initiate either the technological innovations or the socio-cultural advances of the day. They were its recipients, not its pioneers. And so, their tastes were also received rather than cultivated. Art Deco was, by the 1950s, replaced by other styles and fashions. But the vernacular elites, who had perhaps grown up marvelling at the hip n’ slick buildings of the anglicised elites in the 1920s and 1930s, knew only that style as a sign of being hip n’ slick themselves. And so, when it came time to move out of a steadily ghettoised Muslim locale, they imagined in Kamla Nagar a paradise for themselves which would look like the houses that they had desired for so long. And so, they erected mansions in a style that was already passé and adorned them with markers of their ascribed status.
What better metaphor for their own selves than this?
I must point out that on our Spring stroll around Kamla Nagar, I saw fewer and fewer of these Art Deco houses than I remember seeing while growing up there. Especially post-pandemic, many of these old structures have been pulled down and replaced with rectangular boxes housing double-occupancy PGs. What were once the abodes of wealthy traders have now become mausoleums where two young out-of-town undergrads share an 8’x10’ tomb—otherwise labelled a shared-occupancy bedroom—as invisible, absentee vampires suck the monetary blood from their fiscal veins. Once a canvas for anxious masters’ palatial desires, the houses of Kamla Nagar are now fully entangled in the market economy that they had been riding on the backs of for decades past.
An Art Deco house shares a wall with a new PG c. 2026. Photo: Saarang Narayan
* * *
Our stroll around Kamla Nagar was a stroll around the market; not a stroll in the market. Unlike most folks, we were not there to shop and hop. It has been ten years since we graduated. And ever since then, I must confess that all our visits to the area have been rather targeted. We have either gone to meet someone on campus, gone to a specific restaurant, or, in my case, visited family who still live there. It has been much longer than ten years since I aimlessly wandered the streets and lanes of Kamla Nagar. My eyes are now, unfortunately, much more familiar with the machine-y architecture of Gurgaon.
Gurgaon is an abyss of glass and steel that reflects your gaze back at you, unlike the dark houses in Kamla Nagar, which invite it into their cool, shaded hallways. But like Gurgaon, the shaded darkness of Kamla Nagar is insidious in its own way. Yes, it will protect you from the harsh summer sun. But it also hides secrets of unfulfilled, repressed desires.
Houses and buildings that announced the vernacular elite’s aspirations to stand at the top of the socio-cultural ladder continue to do so. But they have now metamorphosed into an entirely new monstrosity. Balconies once adorned with intricate patterns are now covered under glass and aluminium. Bright paint and contrasting colours on their walls are now covered in black, silver, and grey as the few remaining residents now build makeshift conservatories out of their balconies. For it is now near-impossible to sit outside and enjoy the weather when you are bombarded by hellfire blowing up and out from the exhaust fans of AC units in the shops below. No wonder then that most people who populated these houses have now left this infernal neighbourhood for other hellish ones.
Boxed-up balconies, where Chandrawal’s politics spill over, c. 2026. Photo: Saarang Narayan
But this emigration is by no means recent. I remember seeing the street I grew up in emptying itself out over the late 1990s and throughout the 2000s. At the same time, Kamla Nagar market itself was shedding its pre-liberalisation skin and slowly growing a new one. The biggest—in both area and ambition—example of this is Spark Mall. Calling it a mall is like calling a mule a unicorn. (Not that malls are a divine miracle by any means.) But its story is one worth recounting, for it maps the journey of neoliberalism in India perfectly.
Spark Mall was built in the early 2010s, when shopping malls in Gurgaon and similar places had already gone through a boom-and-bust cycle between the early and late 2000s. I remember how the malls on M.G. Road in Gurgaon spearheaded the consumer culture of neoliberal India. Buying a T-shirt from an outlet in a mall was more luxurious than buying the same T-shirt from the same brand’s shop in an old-fashioned bazaar. The allure of ACs outside the shops and an entire shop to walk through without hitting a single counter or being at the mercy of the salesman to show you what you wanted made the mall experience particularly delectable for folks who would otherwise have to slog through crowded streets on busy weekends in the narrow shops of Karol Bagh, Lajpat Nagar, Kamla Nagar, and such like. Maybe this is what shoppers felt in the 1950s and 1960s when comparing Karol Bagh, Lajpat Nagar, Kamla Nagar, and such like to their older counterparts in Chandni Chowk, Meena Bazaar, Chawri Bazaar, Kinari Bazaar, Nai Sadak, and such like. But one key difference in the contemporary move from bazaar-shop to mall-shop was the reduced human intermediaries in the retail experience. This was Nirguna bhakti philosophy taken to its logical end. The seeker was being taken closer to the divine without the need for mediators. Perhaps online shopping is the final stage of Neoliberal Bhaktism?
But by 2010, having a nearby mall to shop at was something the perpetual left-behinds of Kamla Nagar had added to their long list of unfulfilled desires. And so, Bada Gol Chakkar Park, the market’s largest green space open to all, regardless of whether they could afford to shop there, was tasked with making space for a mall at the heart of Kamla Nagar. Like many of its counterparts across the world, the Park that made up the Bada Gol Chakkar (Big Roundabout) was offered up at the altar of neoliberalism. The Humans of Kamla Nagar made a fitting sacrifice to appease the Market and Consumer gods.
Bada Gol Chakkar in 2010, the park already dug up (left), and in 2026, with Spark Mall where the park was (right). Image: Google Earth
Sometime in the mid-00s, Bada Gol Chakkar Park was dug up and buried under itself. It remained that way for a few more years as a catacomb of tin sheets was built around it. Its mutilated corpse became its own grave. And upon that grave, the foundations for Spark Mall were laid sometime around 2010. Around the same time, a prophecy ran through the market. Bada Gol Chakkar was to
become a multi-level car park with an automated parking system: just leave your car at the door of the car park and shop with gay abandon. A machinistic-messiah was coming to alleviate the suffering of the car-driving masses of Kamla Nagar, who had been wandering for 40 years in the wilderness, looking for a spot for their vehicle. Later, it became clear that the car park would be built only under a shopping mall. The whole thing wasn’t going to be a car park. And the fact that one would have to pay to park their cars in it quickly deflated the enthusiasm of all the terribly oppressed car owners.
The Kamla Nagar skyline with Spark Mall under construction, c. 2013. Photo: Saarang Narayan
The fate of the many hawkers and street peddlers who relied on the Park for a steady flow of customers was unclear. The swarm of Mehendi-men of Bada Gol Chakkar, who drew customers from across Delhi to get Mehendi applied to their hands and feet, could no longer find much space for their cane stools, which seasonally lined the boundaries of the Bada Gol Chakkar Park. I hear that some are still around, but the scale of the Mehendi operations is not even remotely the same.
I remember there were a few hiccups and delays in the construction of the Mall—as is the case with any building project in India—but the mall was delivered soon enough and opened to the public sometime in late 2013 or early 2014. By that time, we had moved out to the city of malls—Gurgaon—so returning to Kamla Nagar only to visit Spark Mall wasn’t very appealing. I think I remember despising the fact that they were building it anyway. But that may or may not be a false memory. Regardless, I never set foot in it.
Some of my friends in college narrated tales of a Starbucks in Spark Mall that had opened in 2014. Back then, Starbucks was the big new shiny object, you see. The first one, which had opened a year earlier in CP, had such a queue simply to get in that you would think they were doling out free coffee inside! So, getting to go into one in Kamla Nagar, without having to make the trek down to CP, would have been life-changing for the vernacular elite. Unfortunately, by the time it opened, Starbucks wasn’t as tempting, and the queue outside the one at CP was but the stuff of legend, a fad gone by as quickly as it came. The vernacular elite had once again only managed to arrive at the platform after the market-train had already left. Maybe that is why they are so utterly infatuated with the idea of Japanese bullet trains?
I now hear digital whispers online about the many stores that opened and closed in Spark Mall. And our very brief visit inside during our stroll in Spring revealed that it is now virtually devoid of any shops. The pandemic and lockdowns took whatever little spark the Mall may have had. I would wager the mall now operates solely on revenue from its carbon-copy food court and the multi-level parking below it. The ghost of Bada Gol Chakkar Park seems to have gotten its revenge. The Spark is long gone, and the Mall is now a retail graveyard, with signboards of permanently closed shops for gravestones. What new monstrosity it will give way to in the future, only the ghost of Bada Gol Chakkar Park can tell.
The hollow heart of Spark Mall looms over Mandelia Road, c. 2026. Photo: Saarang Narayan
The fate of Spark Mall embodies what the many shape-shifting shops have gone through in the past three or so decades in Neoliberal Kamla Nagar. So many shops that were household names have disappeared, reappeared, and then gone away entirely.
Slick signage for a time-worn business, c. 2026. Photo: Saarang Narayan
Modern Hair Dresser was the barbershop where I had my Tonsure as a crying toddler. Family legend goes that the entire market on Mandelia Road could hear me howling as the skilled naayi went about his business, quite unbothered. Courtesy of the mirrored reflection of a bulky grey Onida TV, Modern Hair Dresser doubled as a private cinema for both its customers and hairdressers. On one rare occasion when I went to a different place for a haircut, I remember a much younger hairdresser in Rohini telling me he could see the fine, intricate handiwork of the ustad who ran Modern Hair Dresser in my hair. What sorcery the Modern–wala had done upon my head in exchange for 25 Rupees eludes me. That was probably the only instance I have come across of one’s hair being seen as a sample of fine craftwork, and of a hairdresser being able to recognise another’s work.
By the late 2000s, many other men’s salons began to appear in Kamla Nagar and Bungalow Road. The white-light, air-conditioned interiors, sparkly new scissors, powerful hair dryers, sleek black uniforms, and fancy beauty products sold by the Jawed Habib franchise stores outshone the dim interiors, marble sinks, sagging leather seats, heavy copper scissors, and shuddering wired electric shavers of Modern. And soon enough, no longer modern, Modern Hair Dresser disappeared into the shadowy realm where all such shops in Kamla Nagar go.
This chain of events was a common occurrence in the market in those years. But some of the worst-hit were the food outlets, some of which were much older than I am. People would come to Kamla Nagar especially for them.
Mini Shop, a hole-in-the-wall cake and pastry shop at the intersection of Mandelia Road and Bungalow Road, is now gone. It was the first and only pastry shop in Kamla Nagar in the 1990s, and perhaps one of the few places where you could find exotic sweet treats like chocolate eclairs and cream rolls. The Paan shop near Roop Nagar that my folks (and sometimes I) would ritually visit is nowhere to be found. It comes to me in my dreams every so often. Keventers—originally a milkshake shop in CP with a storied past—had its one and only (according to boastful claims of my family members, ergo, this isn’t true) official branch in Kamla Nagar on Bungalow Road. Sometime in the late 2000s, it transmuted into a franchisee-Keventers, which was eventually called Shake Square. The white-and-gold lettering turned into a neon-orange signboard, and the original in-house milkshakes devolved into a more formulaic menu. And now, it is in a completely different location in the market! The marble walls of the original Keventers branch on Bungalow Road are lost to time. Or maybe not. Perhaps they still exist, but only as coffins in which lie the memories of those who sipped on the famous kesar-pista milkshake out of their in-house glass bottles on a hot summer afternoon.
What remains of the paan shop and the first momo stall on Bungalow Road, c. 2024. Photo: Saarang Narayan
I did manage to find a few eateries that have survived the neoliberal onslaught. Sharma Kachaudi, Baanshi Di Hatti, Vaishnav Chaat Bhandar, Bille Di Hatti, and Chache Di Hatti are all still alive and kicking. As are a few others, but none of which I truly ever cared for, nor did I seek them out during our stroll. Why is it that these places survive? What makes Chhole Bhature so robust that it has managed to survive the winds of neoliberalism? What sort of deal have these archaic, anachronous outlets struck with the devil that they remain standing while their neighbours have all been taken by the neoliberal plague?
Sharma Ji Kachori Wale, a rare survivor amid the traffic jams of Satyawati Marg, c. 2026. Photo: Saarang Narayan
* * *
As usual, our stroll halted at Chache Di Hatti. Over the years, the remarkably tiny shop, no larger than an SUV, has managed to run on a retail model that would give nightmares to any marketing-vampire with an MBA in its cloak. The Hatti is run by the children and grandchildren of its Partition-refugee founder. The white-marbled walls would remind one of the grandest Mughal mausoleums, were it not for the years of smoke and oil that have caked them to a dusty grey. This humbler marble mausoleum, hidden behind a train of people waiting their turn, has its own Emperor and Empress housed perpetually within it: the tangy Chhole and cloudy Bhature. But unlike the neoliberal logic of consumerism, the shop’s owners haven’t given up their prehistoric (by 2026 standards) business model. The shop opens at around 10 in the morning, sells its share for the day, and shuts as soon as it runs out of its daily-prepared ingredients, which is usually around 2 in the afternoon. (CW: Those of a profit-inclined disposition should probably sit down before reading the following sentence.) They also remain entirely closed on Sundays, the busiest day in the market. The short and crisper-than-a-Bhatura menu hanging on the walls has only four items: two types of bhaturas, one kulcha and one chhole. It also reminds customers that Chache Di Hatti has no other outlets or branches. The shop offers free drinking water out of a tank, which doubles as a post-meal hand wash. The recipe isn’t a closely guarded secret. You can buy the spice mix used for the Chhole at a very modest price. No NDAs, no corporate espionage, and no cease-and-desist letters to competitors, customers, or employees. Just a relentless train of hot and steamy plates, six hours a day, six days a week. Hustle and grind? What’s that?
Despite the protective hexes and spells, Chache Di Hatti hasn’t managed to entirely ward off the flood of neoliberalism. It has a companion “Lassi and Shakes” outlet right next door, which doubles up as an overflow space for customers who don’t find room to stand and eat in the four-meter-wide lane. This outgrowth is an anti-Betaal. Its interiors are harsh and bright compared to the original’s dingy, doom-y whites. But one could easily argue that perhaps it was to compete with Bille Di Hatti, rather than the pressures of neoliberal market competition, that forced Chache to expand. And the expansion has thankfully not been a means of dilution. If anything, the bifurcation of Lassi and Chhole Bhature is much stronger at Chache Di Hatti than it is in any other Chhole-Bhature shop. Lassi and other nectars are only sold next door; none of the transactions at the original Hatti has anything to do with it.
The queue at the Chache Di Hatti counter for the final batch at 2 pm, c. 2026. Photo: Saarang Narayan
After a hearty plate at Chache’s, my friends and I undertook a circumambulation of the increasingly bungalow-less Bungalow Road. The neoliberal plague seems to have made its way through what was once the rather posh boundary between the market and the university running from South-East to North-West. Now Bungalow Road is where the market meets the university. Decades-old bungalows are being condemned to memory. Newer shopping outlets and exorbitant PG Hostels are being conjured up in their place, especially in the North-Western half. But the South-East remains haunted by the undead corpses of the old Art Deco bungalows. One can still hear whispers around the area of ghosts who roam their halls, unrelenting in the face of the neoliberal storm.
The South-East of Bungalow Road, still haunted by old bungalows. Photo: Saarang Narayan
We made our way northwards, then turned west towards Satyawati Marg, which joins Kamla Nagar with Roop Nagar and ultimately merges into perhaps one of the oldest roads in the world: GT Road. The Grand Trunk Road was built so long ago that even its earliest historical records from Mauryan times (c. 300 BCE, or around 2300 years ago!) describe its reconstruction under Chandragupta Maurya and Ashoka. As is with most roads ancient and medieval, it primarily facilitated trade networks. The fact that Kamla Nagar—the residential and commercial hub of traders—sprouted in the shadow of this most ancient route seems only natural.
But this was not our route this Spring. We took a left from the intersection of Satyawati and GT Road, walking towards the most famous Art Deco specimen in the area: Ramrup Clock Tower, or as the natives prefer to call it, Ghanta Ghar. Ghanta Ghar stands at the South-Western tip of Kamla Nagar and overlooks the blisteringly busy Kolhapur Road and Sabzi Mandi, the laidback lanes of Roshanara Bagh, and the dead and decaying Birla and Jaipuria Mills.
Birla Mill, once the employer of many who lived around the area (including my grandfather’s brother, who lived with us), has been out of service for a long time. I remember it only as an abandoned site. The ever-growing cracks on its boundary walls framed my first-ever encounter with communist graffiti and the hammer-and-sickle sign. I do, however, clearly remember hearing the rumbly groan of the Mill’s siren announce the shift changes twice a day as a child.
A section of the Birla Mill walls, c. 2026. Photo: Saarang Narayan
But my life was never truly dictated by the clock-time of the mill life. I grew up rather neoliberally. Life was run more by financial quarters of the year and product release cycles. The old industrial ethic was slowly disappearing into the ether by then. For the longest time, the cracked walls of Birla Mill were all that remained. At night, when the market was closed down and businesses ceased operations, Birla Mill’s boundary walls offered a refuge for rickshaw-pullers, hawkers, labourers, and unemployed men, who would sleep under the trees or on their respective rickshaws and thelas (carts) after a drink or two. Its compound, overgrown with moss, grass, and weeds, would have made for an ideal site for Urban Exploration and Teen Takeovers, were it not set to suffer a fate similar to the Bada Gol Chakkar Park. A set of luxury high-rises has been promised as a replacement for the Mill, work for which has started in August of 2026. What will become now of the paradisaic wasteland and the djinn-like men who rested there ephemerally?
* * *
On our stroll, we encountered one such man who survives in the peripheries of the market, both literally and figuratively. His coconut-water thela (cart) was a lagoon amid the busy bazaar and the rising temperatures of that Spring afternoon. Parched on our stroll through the market’s lanes, we stopped by to share a few sips from a nariyal.
Standing behind a mountain of coconuts on his thela, the coconut seller was like a bogeyman who made all passersby answer for their neoliberal sins. He was a spirit from an undead world, one which still appears in flashes in locales like Kamla Nagar.
Over the years, we have grown accustomed to only the (frankly terrible) bottled coconut water or pre-shaved coconuts sold by quick-commerce leviathans like Blinkit and Zepto. None of us knew the nuances of picking out a good coconut, and so we were truly not ready for what was to come. I simply went up and asked for “ek nariyal paani” (one coconut water). Like a riddling Sphinx but without any airs of secrecy or pomposity, the man quickly asked back, “malaayi wala yaa saada?” (a creamy one or a plain one?) We were looking only for a drink. And so, greener than the coconuts on the thela, I said we just want to drink nariyal paani, so no cream, only water. So he picked a coconut and began shaving the top off with his sickle. With only a few targeted blows of a seasoned knight, he transformed the coconut into a pint glass holding its own water. He handed it to me and asked me to pick a straw from a plastic bag hanging from the side of the thela. To the Customer-Is-King sensibilities of Neoliberal India, such an order to fetch one’s own drinking device would register as a punishable offence.
Luckily, none of us had been brought up that posh, and so we didn’t mind doing the needful. And to be honest, after spending years living in Gurgaon and the UK, I found his irreverence towards customers mildly refreshing. One reason I despise shopping malls is that salespersons are expected to fulfil every last desire of the customer, which in turn makes them ever so eager to come across as non-confrontational and crease over every little bit of their own personality. I gladly put the straw into the coconut and passed it to Neha. She took a couple of sips and asked me to do the same with a probing look. I did the same and was struck by the strong but decidedly bland, mineral-y taste of the water inside. Little did we know that the initial question posed to us was to determine whether we wanted our coconut water sweet or not. I had no intention of filing a grievance with the customer support team of the one-man operation, but I sheepishly said to him, “bhaiya yeh to bahut kam meetha hai…” My intention was simply to make conversation by way of feedback. Maybe ask him about how long he had been selling coconut water around the market, secretly hoping that he would confirm my suspicion that he was the same man from whom I used to buy coconuts for my family in summers. But my words registered more as a complaint than a remark.
He immediately retorted, the irritation in his voice as strong as his old yet muscular arms, “poochha tha tumse pehle hi ki kaisa chahiye! Ab kyun bol rahe ho? Paise to dene padeinge” (I had asked you before. Why are you complaining now? You will still have to pay for it.) It struck me then that this must have been a regular occurrence. Wires must regularly be crossed, as younger customers, like us, knew only the neatly packaged, artificially sweetened coconut water that came in bottles, and when picking out coconuts from a random pile, one too many would have complained that their pick wasn’t as sweet as they were expecting. And expecting every shopkeeper and hawker in the market to recite the “Customer is King” incantation in their every transaction, they would refuse to pay if the wares weren’t to their tastes. And so, the experienced Coconut Knight, with his tongue sharper than his sickle after one too many such experiences, was ready for a pitched battle.
I, on the other hand, was in no such mood. I did not intend to fleece the man for a free coconut that may or may not have been to my liking. I certainly didn’t intend to argue about the taste. Even before I could say something, another hawker who shared the pavement with the Coconut Knight calmed him down and asked him to take it easy. The other hawker sold fruits, which was no less controversial a merchandise. But he was slightly younger, and his sensibilities perhaps more attuned to the neoliberal pace that the market was otherwise operating at. Interrupting the Fruit Knight and the Coconut Knight, I simply said, “Arre koi baat nahin bhaiya, main to bas bol raha tha.” (No worries, brother, I was only just saying.) To which he quickly stated something to the extent that people complain as if he were responsible for manufacturing the water inside the coconut. Of course he wasn’t. But who will explain this to a generation of consumers accustomed to buying a new smartphone worth twenty times the Coconut Knight’s entire thela every other year?
The man must have been in his sixties, but standing in the sun every day, all day, and doing the physical labour of procuring, segregating, cutting, serving, collecting, and disposing of coconuts made him look much older. Despite that, there was a strength to his voice, the source of which seemed otherworldly. Could his initial question be framed differently? Maybe. Could he have given me the benefit of the doubt and not assumed that I was trying to pick a fight to swindle our way to two coconuts for the price of one? Perhaps. But why should he? Why must he be the defensive one in the equation? Why do I expect him to be nice and polite even when I may be threatening his very little livelihood? I would need to debase myself with a degree in marketing to answer any of that.
To be sure, the source of the strength in the Coconut Knight’s voice was not entirely otherworldly. It was decidedly material, and came from the invisible hammer blows of the market that surrounded him. It came from the policemen who hounded him weekly for bribes just to let him sell his goods in a marketplace. It came from the rebukes of car-driving consumers who would invariably ask him to move his cart around every time they needed a spot to park their SUVs. It came from shop owners who periodically pushed the local authorities to remove all thelas from the market. It came from ignorant customers who refused to pay if the water inside a coconut wasn’t to their liking. It came from the missed opportunities that had forced him to do nothing else but hard physical labour for decades. It came from the severe immobility that comes from pushing a coconut cart.
Like the Coconut Knight, many other thelewale (cart-hawkers) survive on the margins of Kamla Nagar. But most are not gifted with the same strength as him. The famous Gol Gappa seller on Mandelia Road, who started out selling Gol Gappe inside the now long-gone Lakshmi Sweets, spent the better part of two decades behind one such thela that was a mini-restaurant in its own right. His otherwise unassuming thela had glass walls that doubled as shelves, filled with what always looked like a galaxy of crisp Gol Gappas, ready to be dunked in his steel canister of special paani. When and where he prepared his raw materials remains an enigma to this day, just like the secret to keeping his white dhoti and kurta shining bright all day, without a single splatter of chutney. Customers would come to him from far and wide. But his reputation could not bolster his rickety thela from the assault of the pandemic-related slowdown. The story is that he raked up too much debt and was unable to pay it back, and ultimately committed suicide. Where his clientele get their fix now is unknown to me. But I am sure that they see phantoms of his thela whenever they return to Mandelia Road.
A handpump in the market, c. 2026. Photo: Saarang Narayan
I remember one day during my undergrad, on my way to the Vishwavidyalaya Metro station, seeing a familiar face pulling a rickshaw. It was Vinayak (name changed to preserve anonymity), the grey-haired, one-handed delivery guy who worked at the Milkman’s in one of the bylanes where Mandelia Road and Chandrawal meet. I remember discussing cricket with Vinayak whenever I went to the shop. On days when a match was on, he would hang around the house and stand with me near the TV until someone either hit a boundary or the bowler took a wicket. One day the Milkman decided he wanted to sell bags instead, and so Vinayak was tied to a Rickshaw for the remainder of his life.
Men like Vinayak, who are a part of the market, yet remain ever-so-alien to its masters, have been around for decades. Growing up as labourers in the mills, warehouses, or shops around the market, they are the ones upon whose shoulders the market stands. Some worked in the mills but had nowhere else to go and nothing else to do once the mills shut. Others worked in shops that have long since closed, leaving their employees behind. Hawking or doing odd jobs is the only option left. To them, Kamla Nagar is a bog where their souls are condemned to perpetual labour.
Like agrarian fields, urban markets also have seasonal jobs. Hawking is one of them. One can find the same hawkers selling peanuts in the winter, grapes in the summer, and roasted corn in the monsoon. Other often unseen forms of labour include loading and unloading goods, sweeping the pavements, distributing newspapers to houses, putting up decorations during festivals, and much more. Many of the men carrying out these tasks live and die on the very pavement that they work on. One such man was Jai Prakash, who lived on the pavement outside our shop. I cannot narrate his story for you, for I do not know it. He died a few years ago in anonymity, like so many others who keep the machine of Kamla Nagar’s market running. Some of them also come from the urban village of Chandrawal, which is much older than the market itself.
Long before Bada Gol Chakkar and Birla Mill, the agrarian and grazing lands of Chandrawal were gentrified into the Art Deco locales of Kamla Nagar and Jawahar Nagar. For decades, Chandrawal was infamous as a village of thugs and bandits. The labour its men provided in the shops and mills, and its women in the homes of Kamla Nagar and Jawahar Nagar, went unmentioned in the many urban legends about its criminal infamy. The lanes of Chandrawal, which were otherwise taboo for us children of the shopkeepers, were the first place I encountered the statue of Babasaheb with a copy of the Constitution in one hand, and the other stretched out, pointing into the distance towards a future of toiling billions’ dreams, some of whom lived in Chandrawal. Perhaps this was why I felt a strange sense of familiarity when I first engaged with Ambedkar’s ideas, in a college that lay in the shadows of Chandrawal. His spirit had already been a companion, owing not only to the caste location of my maternal family, but because of his forever outstretched hand that I saw every time I left the house.
* * *
Our stroll ended as we circled back through the many lanes and bylanes towards Bungalow Road and Hansraj College. We shared an e-rickshaw back to the metro, which sucked us away into distant lands, new and old. As the city flashed by through the translucent windows of the metro compartment, I was haunted by more stories from my childhood, but I could not share them. I did not lack the words to share them, but the places and people they were about were no longer around.
Like any such locale, Kamla Nagar holds many untold, unheard stories. Like the scent of Chache’s Chhole Bhature, these stories linger in the air and meander across the pavements. And like these stories, the souls of those who live and die in this market-neighbourhood also linger formless, never truly descending into the shadows. Every shop façade, every bylane, every footpath, every home is haunted by them. Every time the till at the billing counter of an MNC-franchisee store receives the payment from a sale, the ghosts of its original owners and employees whirl around the shop. Every time a house is razed, and a PG comes up in its stead, the spirits of its erstwhile dwellers embed themselves in every corner of the building. Every time a family moves out to an even more gentrified part of the city, their long-dead relatives keep them bound to their old house by an invisible chain. And those like me who grew up there are cursed to see no other home in their dreams except for the one that once was and is no longer. The neoliberal is condemned to be haunted by the ghosts of all that it seeks to replace.
An Art Deco house comes down, c. 2013. Photo: Saarang Narayan
The ghosts I have spoken of throughout this essay are violently static. But are visible only to those who wish to see them. This is by no means an attempt to romanticise the lanes which I trod as a teen. If anything, the remnants of that life are parables of the violence of neoliberalism that surrounds us all. Kamla Nagar is not a singularly beautiful or unique space in that sense. Its story is the story of every such old market in our cities. It is the story of every Karol Bagh, every Ashok Vihar, every Lajpat Nagar, every Mehrauli, and indeed, every Delhi. It is a mirror for the horrors of our times. Of the violence that we desire to commit upon ourselves and those around us. Of the ghosts that haunt us today, and the spirits that will linger forever. Things that could not be anything except what they were. And of the monsters that were born and remain undead. This is the story of those who die but are never gone.
Saarang Narayan is a historian of twentieth-century India. His research focuses on various facets of Hindu Nationalism. He has also taught at the University of Leeds, UK and Ashoka University, Sonipat, and is currently a postdoctoral fellow at IISER Mohali.