Sunday, April 22, 2007

The View

and when you're done trekking down the ridge, you pop out in front of an archetypal 50's housing colony. you walk in and discover that the place you've been looking for is in a park in the middle of this nightmare. the paint's peeling off these houses, old yezdis and the odd maruti 800 dot the porches and children sit idly, looking at you like you're some uninteresting lifeless exhibit.

Peer Gayab, in the middle of this, is an old lodhi structure built in the memory of some dervish. there are hardly any stairs, but if you're keen enough you can manage. you pull yourself upto the first floor, which is a series of arches, and what seems like it used to be an empty hall. you notice a rusty sickle kept next to the remains of a few incense sticks and a flight of stairs.

when you're done following the stairs to the top, what hits you first is an unnaturally hard gust of wind. and these continue. you walk over to the edge of the roof and notice the view. and it doesn't strike you, at first, but then does.

you notice, that from this building, the gross equivalent of a two floor building, you can see all of delhi.

1 comment:

Vaibhav said...

Good Stuff Uddu!
Where is this place again? I thought you were talking about the monument in the ridge.... thats from where British forces laid siege on Red Fort during the Ist War of independence...

and you know about Khooni Darwaza right? that buidling on the divider on Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg in front of the ToI buidling... thats where ironically enough, Bahadur Shah Zafar's sons were beheaded...