Shattered glasses, cobwebbed ceiling, and a half-torn poster of hot chocolate fudge by the broken door. Fragments, of the way we were. The Nirula’s at Gole Market shut down during the pandemic — the site is now in ruins. This afternoon, the silent darkness within summons up haunting echoes of mirthful afternoons spent here with friends and family.
This is just one of the many similarly spooky spaces in Gole Market. The circular colonial-era market, close to the circular colonial-era Connaught Place, emits the melancholic grandeur of a stately graveyard. So many landmarks are lying shuttered. While the heart of the district—the historic circular building in the middle of the traffic circle—is hidden behind tin barricades. Closed about a decade back due to “structural damage,” it looks like a shrouded body waiting for burial.
Developed by the British in the 1920s, Gole Market had senior government officials as its earliest occupants. The aforementioned circular edifice was a part of Edwin Lutyens’ design for New Delhi. Indeed, the surrounding arcade’s sturdy white columns are exactly like those of Connaught Place, only smaller in scope. Today, this afternoon at least, parts of the corridor are littered with dust and tree leaves. A middle lane is completely empty, despite it being a weekday. Close by, a pillar is plastered with a notice—“need a boy to make chai, for a tea stall in Connaught Place.” Some steps away, a shuttered storefront is scrawled with green paint, informing this to be an “NDMC property.”
Amid the dreariness, something of the past is continuing to linger. It is inscribed in the old concrete, literally. The series of arches that run around the Gole Market circle are engraved with signages that perhaps indicate its early life. One arch is marked “poultry and fish.” Another is marked “wine merchants and general stores,” and two others are in Urdu—“doodh, makhan aur roti godam,” and“bakre ka gosht.” The third inscription in Urdu is not easily discernible.
Gazing at these engravings, one tries hard to visualise the wine merchants, and the poultry and fish, and the bakre ka ghosht. But the imagination is no match to the area’s contemporary spiritlessness.
Being in the city centre, Gole Market is destined to be restored and gentrified (though the attempt to bring it back to its “British-era glory” has been talked about for years). Hopefully, these old arcades will always be allowed to exist. So do the inscriptions on them, that shows us the way we were.