Before the Day Starts
I have been going to Connaught Place early in the mornings for a few months now.
Mostly on weekends. Camera in hand. Sometimes with a vague idea of what I want to photograph. Mostly not.
I have known CP for years. Like most people who have lived in Delhi long enough, I have memories attached to it. Shops. Restaurants. Movies. Aimless walks with Dee around Janpath, when we just wanted to extract as much time from the limited time we get to have with each other. Meeting friends under one of those alphabetically named blocks and then spending fifteen minutes figuring out which block the other person is actually standing under.
And photographs.
God knows how many photographs have been made here.
The white colonnades. The Georgian buildings. Central Park. Hanuman Mandir. The crowds and the traffic and the enormous Indian flag.
But come here early enough and much of that CP hasn't woken up yet.
The shutters are down. The roads are almost empty. The colonnades seem wider somehow. The buildings taller.
And other things begin to appear.
People are sleeping under the colonnades. Sometimes inside parked cars and taxis. Morning walkers have taken over roads that, a couple of hours later, they wouldn't dream of walking down the middle of. I have seen people doing yoga between the pillars. Boys playing cricket wherever they can find enough empty tarmac to call a pitch.
There are dogs everywhere.
On one of my walks, I found a young man dancing alone in a corridor, his phone propped up in front of him.
I photographed him.
A weekend later, I saw him again.
This time we spoke.
He works as a delivery rider. In the mornings, before work takes over, he comes to CP to dance and make reels. He wants to become an influencer.
I love that.
For an hour or so every morning, one of Delhi's most expensive commercial real estate becomes his dance studio.
There are other people already at work.
Someone is sweeping yesterday away. Someone else is washing a pavement. Restaurant windows are being wiped clean from the outside. Crates of food arrive through entrances most customers probably never notice. Newspapers are dropped outside shops that are still locked. Taxi drivers wait.
A city preparing itself for people who are still at home.
I think somewhere during these walks I realised that this was what I had actually been photographing.
Not an empty Connaught Place.
A Connaught Place being made ready.
The CP most of us know doesn't simply open at ten or eleven in the morning. By then, a whole shift has already happened.
And before that shift ends, there is this small window of time when the place seems to belong to nobody in particular.
Or perhaps to everybody.
A corridor is a bedroom.
Another is a dance studio.
A parking lot is a cricket ground.
A shopfront is somewhere to sit with the morning newspaper.
The roads belong to runners. The pavements to dogs. The colonnades to sleepers, cleaners, walkers, workers and whoever else happens to need them.
Then CP starts becoming CP again.
A shutter goes up.
Then another.
Cars appear. The Metro begins emptying people into the circles. Restaurants open. Traffic takes back the roads.
And many of the things I have been photographing simply disappear into it.
I don't know yet what this project will eventually become.
I don't particularly want to.
These aren't photographs of some secret or "real" Connaught Place that disappears when the rest of us arrive. That would be giving them, and me, too much importance.
They are just things I have noticed by repeatedly turning up at a familiar place at an unfamiliar hour.
Some things repeat.
Some people I see again.
Some mornings give me almost nothing.
And every time I think I now know what CP looks like before the day starts, I notice something I hadn't seen before.
So I'll keep going back.
Early enough, hopefully, to catch it before it becomes itself.