A quarantined bazar

A passageway that is also a self-contained market

A bunch of people in a tailor’s shop are attentively listening (see photo) to a breaking news on the mobile— a “din dahare” murder has taken place this morning at 10 outside Gurugram’s Sheetla Mata Mandir. A young man has been shot dead. The murderer has escaped.

Otherwise things are peaceful, at least in this corner of the so-called Millennium City. Cool and shaded, Girdhar Kaushik Market is a long passageway connecting two market streets in Old Gurugram. The place lies like a person in isolation, cocooned within its own private world. A self-contained bazar, it is lined with garment shops and tiny tailoring establishments. Though one of its ends opens into Sadar Bazar and the other to Naya Bazar, its personality is distinct from the chaos of both these markets. On entering the laid-back lane, you feel distanced from the chaos. There’s that sense of being quarantined.

This afternoon, the market is marooned in what feels like perpetual darkness. The sleepy corridor reminds one of the slow-moving time in the lockdown. The ambiance is so quiet that even a shopkeeper’s sudden laughter seems to create unrest in the air. Passing footsteps echo. The sound of rickshaw bells coming from outside appears as if originating from a remote world. Each shop is steeped in individuality. One establishment is decked with shirts and denim pants suspended from hangers. In another, a tailor is sitting on the floor and patiently ironing a white fabric. While Vinay Jewellers is wide open, the shop’s stately metal tijori is perched behind the counter; its owner—the sunar—is lounging outside in the “fresh air.”

Inevitably, some people are using the lane as a shortcut to cross from one bazar to another. Many of them are familiar with the shopkeepers, and ‘Ram-ram’ greetings are being tossed around generously.

The extremely polite Tilak Raj of Bombay Tailors expresses relief that the market has returned to “normalcy” after the second surge of the coronavirus. A few shops are shuttered but that has nothing to do with the pandemic, he clarifies. “Some shopkeepers have gone out of town, some others have other reason to be absent… but no place has closed for ever,” he says. However, a few businesses here are running their operations with a reduced number of workers, says Mr Raj. “Some employees who left for their villages during the second surge have yet to return.”

On stepping out of the market corridor and entering into the blinding sunlight, the calmly sensations produced by the passage instantly vaporize.