On June 9th of this year a friend, Laurraine Malone, and I were featured in an article in one of India’s major English language dailies The Hindustan Times - circulation 1.2 million. Surprise – surprise. Now how did that happen? Well, it was the result of an amazing, almost unbelievable series of coincidences involving an Indian journalist, an Indian cookery writer and Instagram.
The Indian journalist is Mayank Austen Soof who contributes regularly to the Hindustan Times under the name Delhiwale - resident of Delhi. He also often blogs about Delhi’s culture, food and landscapes on Instagram where he has a mere 82,000 followers. A great lover of literature, he inserted Austen to his name simply because he’s such an admirer of Jane.
One day, at Delhi’s vast, sprawling Sunday Book Bazar in the old city, Mayank bought a first edition of a guidebook to Old Delhi that Laurraine and I had written 37 years ago. It was called Old Delhi Ten Easy Walks, although even then not all of them were that easy and even fewer are now! We both knew Old Delhi well because we’d been living in New Delhi for years and often went exploring its older heart. Our husbands were working there; Laurraine’s as a journalist and mine as a British Council Officer. We ran larger households than you would in England, as servants came with the territory, but we didn’t have outside, stimulating jobs. Writing this book filled the gap and gave us a width and depth of knowledge of Delhi that went far beyond that of a normal ex-pat’s experience. It was great!
But back to the book.
Mayank was initially intrigued by the front cover. It showed a ‘mashak walla’, a water seller, complete with goatskin bag in front of the steps of Delhi’s superb Jama Masjid, or Friday Mosque, built by Shah Jahan in the 17th century. Mayank started ferreting around in exactly the same area and found a man, Raf Muhammed, at a tea stall who was also a mashak walla. Mayank, to his delight, discovered that Raf had known the guy on the guidebook’s front cover and so took a photo of him with the book. This photo Mayank then shared on Instagram to his thousands of followers. He added a few explanatory words about mashak wallas now being almost extinct but that he’d found one who knew the name of the mashak walla on the front cover of the old guidebook. It was Bhoore and he was long dead.
Purely by coincidence one of these Instagram followers was Roopa Gulati, a friend from those long-ago Delhi days. If you watch Indian cookery programmes on TV you may recognise her name. These days she’s a renowned Indian cookbook writer and broadcaster. Roopa and I had kept in touch through Facebook and she sent the photograph to me with the Delhiwale link and words saying how happy she’d been to come across it. I quickly passed the link to Laurraine and we had a rapid exchange of emails. We decided we should tell Mayank that although vintage, like the book, we were still alive and kicking! This we did. He was a bit surprised but extremely pleased to hear from us, asked for more details and promised to write an article about us for the Hindustan Times.
A few weeks later his article appeared under the strangely sounding headline: Two England wale Dilli writers. Basically ‘Two English people write about Delhi’ only much punchier said his way!
We were thrilled by the article’s content as he wrote such nice things about the book. He maintained it had been a pioneering work, had aged beautifully, that the first 1988 edition was a true collector’s item and that it could still be read for pleasure without actually doing any of the walks. Way back in the 1980s we were well aware that the good sales figures were because a lot of people enjoyed reading it at home, in air-conditioning, without having to face the heat, the crowds or actually walk about.
You can still buy the book on Amazon, but usually later editions, otherwise try Old Delhi’s Sunday Book Bazar in Daryaganj. Even if you don’t find it, you’ll have great fun hunting!
Gaynor Barton