Voices Devdutt Pattanaik Sathya Saran Ravi Shankar Ganesh Saili S Vaidhyasubramaniam Mata Amritanandamayi THE new sunday express MAGAZINE Buffet People Wellness Books Food Art & Culture Entertainment august 31 2025 SUNDAY PAGES 12 Delhi Shahjahanabad was not merely a capital; it was a cosmos where politics, poetry, and piety intermingled. Despite careless development, the persistence of its people keep the old city breathing Memory Fights Back Pockets of Resistance in Historic Cities Refuse to let their Essence Die T By Ravi shankar here are cities that break your heart, like a snapped string of yearning, and then there are cities that unravel, thread by stubborn thread, until you realise the tapestry once familiar has become a pile of frayed fibres. India’s oldest neighbourhoods belong to the second kind: heartbreaks in slow motion. They fade not in silence but in a crescendo of traffic horns, construction drills, neon hoardings, and glass towers. And yet, within these collapsing spaces, there are people who refuse to let the past be swallowed whole. They gather fragments of memory like archivists of loss, insisting that heritage is not a museum piece but a tremor, beating faintly but insistently in the body of the present. Srinagar is one such tremor. Zaina Kadal still carries the imprint of Persian traders, Khanyar, the echo of shrines where saffron-robed fakirs once sang. But if you stop and look closely you will notice the cracks—literal , ones, spidering across walnut-carved balconies, and figurative ones, where generations have fled, leaving behind Kashmir Each bridge and courtyard holds centuries of syncretism; Kashmiri Pandits and Muslims who once lived wall to wall, sharing noon chai and stories. These very neighbourhoods now teeter between preservation and erasure empty shells of homes. Each bridge and courtyard holds centuries of syncretism; Kashmiri Pandits and Muslims who once lived wall to wall, sharing noon chai and stories. Yet these very neighbourhoods now teeter between preservation and erasure. When Insha Qadri was a little girl in Rajouri Kadal, her grandfather would lift her onto the carved wooden railing of their veranda and point out the rooftops stretching toward the mountains. “That’s where the waza lives,” he’d say Wazwan, the famed 36-course feast, is still . hand-crafted. Bashir Ahmad, a fourth-generation waza, explains, “When we cook gushtaba, we pound meat with wooden hammers.” Years later, after Insha’s grandfather’s passing, she returned from Delhi to find those rooftops still there; but quieter, dustier, as if waiting to be remembered. “I realised I was watching our world disappear from a distance,” she reflects softly Eighty-year-old Haleema Begum sits in . the sunlit corridor of her ancestral home. “I got married in this house,” she says tenderly . “Joint families filled every corner with laughter. On Eid and weddings, women gathered by the jharokhas to watch the streets full of children running, men carrying wazwan dishes, women balancing baskets of bread.” The jharokhas remain, as does Haleema’s pheran, passed down through generations. “Young girls now wear jeans, which is fine,” she smiles, “but they don’t know the story behind the embroidery on the sleeves. Every stitch has meaning.” Across the river in Khanyar, the caretaker of a shrine leans behind a lattice window. “People say they feel peace the moment they enter. That peace is in the wood, the khatamband ceilings, the papier-mâché panels. It calms the soul, like the old sufiana kalam once sung at dusk.” Yet today “we hear more film songs than chakri or , ladishah. The youth don’t know the words.” Still, some pockets of the city hold on. In Razdan Kocha, artisans weave pashmina and carve walnut with love. “We make for love, not just sale,” says shawl weaver Ghulam Nabi. “Tourists want quick things; they don’t see the months in each piece.” Heritage expert Saleem Beg sums it up: “Our culture is layered, it reflects in woodwork, music, pherans, and feasts. Losing them means losing memory identity and the , , rhythm that makes Kashmir, Kashmir.” From the north, if you travel eastward, another kind of fragility emerges: the fragility of migration. In Kolkata, the streets of Tiretta Bazaar wake not with the roar of modernity but with the whisper of an almost-vanished world. Before sunrise, food stalls emerge on Sun Yat Sen Street and Damzen Lane, serving steaming bowls of rice porridge, pork buns, and momos. Katherine Lim, a chef and one of the few remaining members of Kolkata’s Hakka Chinese community sees food as , “memory made edible.” But Tangra, once alive with Chinese culture, is now quiet. Lim estimates the Hakka population has shrunk from 30,000-40,000 a decade ago to just 400-500 today Born in Amritsar, Lim’s family returned . to Kolkata in 1991. Originally cooking Tangrastyle Indo-Chinese food, she now focuses on home dishes rarely seen outside families. Swati Mishra, founder of the Community Art Project, highlights Tiretta Bazaar’s deep Chinese roots—morning breakfast markets, hidden temples, old clubs, and Blackburn Lane’s Chinese architecture. Once a hub of Chinese New Year celebrations and the last Chinese-language newspaper, Tiretta’s legacy is quietly fading. “I’m Hakka—not the noodle, but the ethnic group,” Lim explains. The schools that once taught Mandarin to Indian-born children are shuttered, temples stand hidden behind peeling gates, and younger generations have left for Toronto, Sydney or Tangra’s newer , Turn to page 2