Delhiwale: Notes from a park

No hint of flowers or grass. The damp mossy ground is instead littered with browned leaves, empty tobacco sachets, discarded paper cups, plastic spoons and beedi stubs.
Even so, Masjid Udyan is intense.
Facing the Jama Masjid in Gurugram’s Sadar Bazar, the public park used to be bare, forever exposed to the grey sky, but now it is crisscrossed with young shade-giving trees. Of course, the massive peepal is a beautiful exception. It has been here for a long time. A foundation plaque beneath the graceful giant dates the park to September, 1975.
This warm afternoon, an elderly man is seated under the sheltering peepal, eating rookhi rotis. There is also a woman and a child; she is picking lice from the child’s head, often hitting the head with irritation.
Steps away, a brown dog is snuggled into the cooling mud of some freshly dug-up earth (he must have dug it himself). While labourers Suleman, Asad, and Noor are occupying the adjacent bench—see photo. Residents of Mansesar, they say they have come for a day’s “outing” to the Millennium City.
The fourth person on the bench is Aqdas. A pavement seller of garments, he is in the park for a “tambakoo” break. A Muzaffarnagar native, the young hawker cribs about the steep rent he gives everyday to a Sadar Bazar shopkeeper for parking the cart in front of his shop. That said, he is hopeful about the approaching winter “when people shop more freely.”
In most parks, one tends to stumble into people in a picnicky state of mind. Masjid Udyan is historically less cheery. One afternoon, a couple of years ago, a man in formals sat under the peepal, looking despondent. He had lost his “office job.” Another day, during a particularly smoggy winter, two labourers were standing under the peepal, furiously dialling friends on the mobile to get emergency cash. The unprecedented pollution at the time had resulted in a temporary ban on construction projects in Delhi-NCR, leaving the two citizens without any source of income.
Some minutes later, the aforementioned bench is emptied of the four men. It is immediately taken over by daily wage-labourer Vaseem. “I’m getting no work today,” he says.