Delhiwale: This way to SN Marg (GB Road)
GB Road in Old Delhi has colonial landmarks, sex workers, and diverse shops. It’s near New Delhi railway station and Connaught Place, with historic Ajmeri Gate.
As part of our ‘Walled City dictionary’ series, that is chronicling every significant Old Delhi place.
Gastion Bastion Road has colonial-era landmarks — Siddiq Building is from 1939. It has a Hanuman temple and a sufi dargah. It has shops for bathroom fittings, and for machines with names like mechanical seals, rubber dori, and nylon sandwich belt. It has an “all women police post.” It even has a monument—Ajmeri Gate is one of the few surviving gateways of the Walled City’s mostly vanished wall.
GB Road is extremely accessible. It is next-door to New Delhi railway station, a mere 15-minute walk from Connaught Place. Indeed, the many scenes of GB Road are also the scenes of any other place in the capital--cars, bikes, bullock carts. rickshaws, snack carts, refrigerated water trolleys, along with densely leafy trees, and with walls stamped with “gumshuda” posters of disappeared people.
Certain aspects are more distinct to the place, such as the grilled windows on the floors above the shopping corridors, with women sometimes standing behind those windows. They are the sex workers. The staircases leading to their establishments tend to be steep, and dimly lit, the air strongly musty, like in a room without windows.
On stepping inside an establishment one afternoon, the doorway opened into a hall. A few women were sitting on a long bench watching a daytime soap opera. The small TV was clamped to a top corner. One of the women had a lunch thali on her lap — a bit of yellow dal over a great mound of rice. The wall behind the bench was adorned with framed icons and symbols of almost all the faiths followed in Delhi — Hinduism, Islam, Christianity and Sikhism.
During a commercial break in the TV series, the woman in green dupatta impatiently got up from the bench, walked to the balcony outside, and gazed towards the rail tracks across the road.
During the Mughal-era, the Walled City had five red-light areas. After the unsuccessful 1857 uprising, the British closed all of those, except the one in GB Road. In 1965, it was renamed after Swami Shradhanand, a social reformer whose statue stands in Chandni Chowk.
The woman in the balcony later walked upstairs to the roof, emerging into daylight and fresh air, both ends of the green dupatta sustained gently behind her on the mild monsoon breeze. She turned around and pointed to the distant dome of the historic Jama Masjid.
After a while, the woman returned to the hall, took her place on the bench, and continued watching the TV, and waiting.