Hine Ani Ba! (Adventures in Delhi’s tiny Israeltown)
Judaism, world religion whose central tenet implores believers to stick together because someone is currently trying to kill them. Jewish theology is rooted in the covenant between God and the children of Israel, who are commanded by the Torah never to get too comfortable, as there are already plans in motion for their murder and the murder of their families.
- The Onion Book of Known Knowledge
When I first brought up the idea to visit Delhi’s only synagogue, my parents (particularly my mother) tried their utmost to dissuade me, not merely because of her anti-Semitic leanings, but because she genuinely and sincerely feared for my life.
In a time when so many innocent young Muslim men are arrested and jailed without a proper course of justice in this country, it seems only fair to assume the worst could happen to your children when they are at that tender age of 19–24. It seems fairer still that this is the age at which many of us young Muslim men tend to radicalize into mindless, senselessly violent killers.
It was only in September of 2022 that I brought up the idea of visiting the Jewish place of worship and interacting with my Abrahamic brethren in Delhi. I had recently learned to read Hebrew for a research project on Semitic Languages (which is still ongoing), and thought a Jewish friend would help make my task easier. Needless to repeat, my mother refused to comply with my wish. I had just visited Delhi anyway, and that too with my friends so I decided to postpone my demand to a few months later.
Come December and I had a couple of reasons to visit Delhi again:
1. Jashn-e-Rekhta, a three-day festival celebrating the Urdu language in our country was set to take place at the beginning of the month.
2. Two of my closest friends (my homies, if you will) had recently moved to Delhi and I had not visited them so far.
So I decided this time I would go to Delhi on a solo trip (the first solo trip of my life, to be exact) and visit my friends and attend the Jashn-e-Rekhta festival as well. What I didn’t tell anyone was the fact that I had the hidden agenda of visiting one of the Jewish hubs in Delhi just to see what they are like.
Once again, my mother was hesitant in permitting me to go, but my father was impressed by my sudden burst of independence, and so granted me the allowance to make the travel to Delhi possible. Thank you Abbu.
On the first day I set out after sunset with the idea of visiting two places near Connaught Place: the Oxford Bookstore and the Chabad House (בית חבייד) of Delhi which closed at 9:30 PM. I set out at 5:45. With the idea of returning by 10 PM in my mind, I took the nearest metro from my friend’s place and went to Rajiv Chawk. I first went to the Oxford Bookstore and gushed over the beautiful collection they held (I ended up purchasing a beautiful paperback edition of the complete War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy). Around 8:45 I started my journey Chabadward knowing full well (as Google Maps had warned me) that it would close by the time I would reach. But I went on walking nonetheless. That’s when I started getting calls from home. My father asked where I was, and I lied and said Connaught Place. I was 500 meters away from the outermost circle. He told me to reach home soon as at night it’s difficult to get rickshaws and the metros close around 11 PM.
I gave up halfway through and went back to Rajiv Chawk.
***
The next day I decided to go to Jashn-e-Rekhta and check stuff out there.
There I met an elderly Bombay gentleman who seemed to be struggling with directions. I offered to give help which he was kind enough to accept. He spoke in that dignified, stately Urdu that sets the highly successful and educated apart from the rest of the cesspool of illiteracy that our community has in this land. That stately, idiomatic Urdu, punctuated by a stray verse of Faiz’s poetry here and there will be lost in translation if I even try to quote him, so I won’t. We had an insightful discussion on his origins, his education, Aligarh (which he, being like the 99% of Educated Muslim folk in the country was more than familiar with), and the Urdu language. I only am able to recall his first and middle name, which, almost poetically, was Syed Ahmad. The rest of his name was drowned out in the noisy Delhi traffic.
We walked around the festival compound together and then parted ways when I told him I was going to go look at some books at the stalls. I browsed thoroughly all the Urdu, Hindi, and occasionally English volumes the stalls had to offer and ended up purchasing two books on Kashmiri literature, culture, and history. I ate some Biryani there and left once again for Connaught Place.
Upon reaching, I bought myself an ice cream and, enjoying the blueberry flavor, walked Chabadward once again. When I reached the point I had walked till the previous night I decided to take a bicycle-rickshaw. I did not negotiate with the gentleman who was pulling the rickshaw, knowing full well that the poor man struggled and toiled just to get passengers who would bargain and not take the rickshaw at the end. So I told him the location and he was kind enough to take me there.
***
I think I see it fit now to describe the purpose of my visit to particularly the Jewish hub of Delhi, and that too alone. And no, it is not as simple as a curiosity that compelled me to take the journey.
Ever since I was little, I’d heard of “the Yahudi” from Muslim friends and family, as a mysterious band of mystics and freakishly smart folk who controlled the world behind a garb of innocence and religiosity. By the time I read about the Holocaust at school, I was prepared to take the nuanced opinion that they were a fundamentally misunderstood ethnic group of people. To set the record straight, and pull myself out of ignorance, I was prepared to attend online forums, learn the Modern Hebrew language, and even visit Israel to get to know the truth about this mysterious group of people I had never seen in person in this diverse melting-pot of a country.
I was curious yes, but also determined to put myself in the exact position of the Observer to make a precise judgment about this race of people who were exterminated on the one hand, and backed by large global political players on the other. And no, I was done watching American television sitcoms and feeding my stereotypes about the Jews being humus-eating bankers and whatnot. In short, I wanted to get to the root of things.
***
It was election season once again in Delhi, and different areas were closed because the largest party in the National Capital Region, the Aam Aadmi Party, were hosting political rallies and demonstrations here and there. No other political party seemed to even exist.
But not near the Chabad Street.
The gentleman pulling the rickshaw turned into a lane and brought me into an alien world that seemed to be a tiny piece of Gujarat in the National Capital. Pictures and posters of the Prime Minister were pasted around the region. Large boards and demonstrators bearing flags of the largest national party in the country were placed at every corner of the area. I was swimming in a sea of right-wingers and the bloodthirstiest of fanatics. I tried to act natural, tried to fit in, and look my angriest and most nationalistic when I was there.
I got off the rickshaw and paid the man the money. I looked around and saw a sign that had Hebrew writing on it. The arrow pointed towards a narrow cul-de-sac; a rat hole of sorts. I looked closely and saw more Hebrew signs all pointing into the same hole. Thankfully I could read some Hebrew. ‘פארןק’ or ‘Farok’ was written on one of the signs. Below it in just legible font, was written ‘Farok Leather Shop’ in English.
I went to the nearest shop outside the Hole and asked them if Farokji’s shop was nearby. My acting was so natural and my manner so businesslike, that they must’ve thought I was genuinely here for the shop. I went inside the Hole and saw a big man sitting on a chair that just held him without snapping into two. I introduced myself to him as a ‘Cultural Enthusiast’ who had heard that this marketplace was full of businesses owned by Jewish people. He looked at me suspiciously. “You’ve heard right.” He told me.
In a manner that would make me seem as less of an anti-Semite as possible, I amiably told him that I found the Hebrew language and Jewish people interesting, and if I could look around the place it would mean the world to me. In retrospect, those were exact things you would expect to hear from a Gestapo officer who has gone undercover. He considered my statements and then told me I could have a look. I asked him the direction to this Farok Leather Shop, and he told me it was right next to the shop he was in charge of. Inside two customers sat surveying pieces of leather (or some attire; I cannot be sure). On the chair opposite to them, sat a bearded man by whose nose I gauged he was a different ethnicity from mine.
“Shalom,” I said.
“Shabath Shalom.” He said. And then again he said “Shalom.”
I quickly introduced myself by my first name (which could easily belong to a Jew as much as it could to a Muslim).
“Ani Affan.” And I knew a couple of more stock phrases, which at that moment completely escaped my mind in front of the shop owner. I smiled and told him that’s all the Hebrew I know. I said this in English. He grew visibly suspicious but did a better job hiding his suspicion than the big man on the chair outside. I asked him if he minded if I took a seat. He let me have a seat.
On the table, which had a glass cover on it, were spread passport-sized images of people, majorly white people, some smiling, others serious. I tried to look away from the table. On the wall around the counter were pasted papers with Hebrew writing on them, both cursive and typeset font, and I could read not a single text in any other language.
“Are you Mr. Farok?” I asked.
“No. We are family.”
“Oh. Children?” I made the bold assumption.
“Yes.” I made a mental note to name this chapter in my travel diary “Bani Farok” or ‘Children of Farok’.
“Tell me, Sir, are you from Delhi?”
“Originally we from Kashmir, but we in Delhi long time.” He said, and that’s when I noticed his accent was unmistakably Kashmiri. I was taken aback at this. I thought he was gonna say Sepharad, or Ashkenaz or some place stereotypically Jewish.
“Interesting,” I said my catchphrase out loud. Before I could arouse any more suspicion, I told him that only today I was reading about the Kashmiri people and particularly the Jewish influence on Kashmiri literature.
“Oh.” The Kashmiri man said.
I asked him if I could show him the book. He said sure. I took the wrong book out and handed it to him. He flipped through it. And that’s when he smiled for the first time.
“Do you read this book?” He asked. I told him I had just bought it and was in the process, yes.
“May I ask you; do you think this book is factually correct?”
It was my turn to smile. Back in my home city, I had had these discussions with Kashmiri friends many times. I knew the right answer to this question.
“Well..” I began. “When you are discussing the issue of Kashmir, every single person is bound to tell you something completely different. It is therefore intelligent to not take anything about Kashmir at face value, and take it instead with a pinch of salt. It is a sensitive issue.”
He smiled the wry smile of a persecuted people, and told me it’s good that I was reading it this way. For an instance, I thought he was persecuted in Kashmir because of his Hebrew heritage. That’s when I spotted on the wall on his left side, in the sea of Hebrew scribbles, a printed verse from the Holy Qur’an. Naturally at the time, I feared the worst for God’s true and untainted word. It was an irrational fear, which held within it a spectrum of different fears, ranging from Black Magic to the blatant desecration of the Holy Book.
I couldn’t resist asking the Kashmiri man what that Verse from the Holy Qur’an was doing in the middle of the Hebrew posters.
What he said next, to borrow an idiom from Urdu, made the land slide from beneath me.
***
“We are also Muslim!” The Kashmiri Jew said with a straight face.
I asked him which of his parents was Muslim.
“Both!” He said.
I asked about when they decided to convert.
“Convert?”
Yes, to Judaism.
“We didn’t. We are Muslim!” He reiterated.
I considered this for a moment. A Kashmiri Muslim, surrounded by Hebrew papers, his table full of faces of Jewish people, who held a regular inflow of customers of Israeli descent…how much more outlandish could it get (pun intended)?
I took it in and smiled. I asked him if he could read Urdu. He showed me a paper hung way up above the Hebrew posters and asked me to read it. I read it. I don’t remember exactly what it said but here’s a rough translation I can salvage from what I do remember:
“A Shop is a place of trade, hence trade here.”
He smiled at me and said he could read Urdu very well. This is the point where the ice between us was truly broken.
“If you don’t mind, can I show you another book?”
He let me show him the book. This one was by a Muslim author. He opened it and asked how many pages I had read. I told him just one or two. He flipped through it in the same manner as he had the previous book. He told me to mark one chapter which I would find very interesting. I marked it with my pen. I thanked him for the generous conversation. As I began to leave he told me that I might want to visit the Chabad House (which I had originally planned to visit).
“They are open but they won’t talk.” He warned. I took this to mean they were not approachable people. As I wandered outside in the cul-de-sac, a guard of what seemed to be a lock shop asked me what I was looking for.
I told him I was not looking for anything I was just exploring. So he told me this is a sensitive place, it’s not meant for exploration. In a sense, he asked me to leave, and that too not all that politely. I turned around and left in the rudest manner possible.
I took the first auto-rickshaw I saw and left for the nearest metro station.
So all in all it was an unusual trip, and I got to learn how unapproachable people can get if they set their minds and souls to it. 5/10. Do not recommend.
