The afternoon sun splits the last of a tired monsoon cloud, slanting in through the large windows. Author-editor Mala Dayal draws the curtains, as has been her habit of decades. A few blocks away, columnist Bhaichand Patel sits at his writing desk, sifting memories of the Valentine’s Day parties in his lawn, a large oil painting of a young Nargis keeping him company. On the other side of the road, behind the arches and trees leaning over them, and inside the staff quarters, 81-year-old Surendra Mohan Sharma sits under the canopy of a banyan tree he had planted as a child with his father and grandfather.But the quiet of Sujan Singh Park cloaks a turbulent time for the upscale neighbourhood in the heart of New Delhi. The Centre had initiated eviction proceedings, arguing that the original lease on the 7.85-acre property expired in 1960. Temporary relief to the residents came this August when the Delhi High Court stayed proceedings. One of the Capital’s longest-standing disputes that has pitted the Centre against Sir Sobha Singh & Sons Pvt Ltd, the real estate company that runs Sujan Singh Park, has unsettled a community that has lived here for generations.This is where celebrated author Khushwant Singh lived, wrote and met people from all walks of life. Where winter get-togethers on the lawns and house parties meant filmmakers brushed shoulders with bureaucrats and architects met politicians. Sited opposite Khan Market, one of the world’s most expensive retail spaces, with its exposed brick façade and elegant arches, it was where ancestral heft sat side-by-side with the quotidian. And people didn’t feel the difference. But that was more than eight decades ago.Today, hidden by canopies of kadam, amaltas and mulberry trees, the guards at the gate will stop you and ask for the house number. Over the decades, Sujan Singh Park has moved, in mood, from Van Gogh’s Café Terrace at Night to Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks — from a place of creative richness to one where the loneliness of a large city is palpable. From being at the centre of Delhi’s cultural and intellectual life, to being at the centre of a long court battle, staring at an uncertain future.From the Raj to Post PartitionBuilt in 1945 to house military officers of the Raj during World War II, Sujan Singh Park was designed by Walter Sykes George, an architect who was in his 30s when he arrived in India as an assistant to Herbert Baker who, alongside Edwin Lutyens, was then shaping the architecture of New Delhi. Working on some of these ambitious government projects was a young Indian contractor, Sobha Singh, Khushwant’s father. He built the multi-storeyed housing estate on land permanently leased by the British, then surrounded by scrub jungle and the wild calls of jackals. Named after Sobha Singh’s father, Sujan Singh, the estate is spread over seven blocks, each of which hosts 12 townhouses. There is a staff quarters block, a primary school, the Ambassador Hotel and numerous small enterprises, including the motor market within the precinct. With its long foyers shielded by jaalis, deep verandas and high ceilings, the houses were cool even in Delhi’s harshest summer.“Sujan Singh Park is a seminal pre-Independence mass housing project. It was an early effort to resolve housing problems in India and address modernisation of cities,” says heritage conservation expert Gaurav Raj Sharma, founder of the multidisciplinary architecture practice, Under Mango Tree. Sharma says the exposed brickwork here “would be further explored in later projects such as the housing projects in Chandigarh and IIM, Ahmedabad.” In a first, the apartments had air vents and garbage chutes.Following Partition, Sobha Singh opened the complex to families fleeing Pakistan, including his own, while honouring the lease agreement of allocating 50 per cent of the flats to British government officials at concessional rents, a practice that continued once India became independent.Story continues below this adThe Early Residents Sujan Singh Park today (Photo: Ram Rahman)“This began as a regular, middle-class neighbourhood. People who came with nothing rebuilt their lives brick by brick. There were Dasaprakash and Chona’s as the family eating place in Khan Market. The twin bookshops, Bahrisons and Faqir Chand, became our window to the world. There were grocery and convenience stores, garages and tent walas,” says Naina Dayal, a Delhi University history professor and Khushwant’s granddaughter. Patel recalls that among the early residents there were “hardly any businessmen or millionaires. We had a rhythm of life and became invisibly bonded as a community. Not that we meet every day but for major life events, we always show up. People just walk in and resume conversations from where they had left off. It’s a beautiful bond,” he says. Perhaps that’s because nobody is an owner, everybody is a tenant. Apart from government accommodation, a pie which has shrunk over the years, the rest of the apartments are shared by private tenants and Sobha Singh’s kin.Preminder Singh or Pami, Sobha Singh’s grandson, Khushwant’s nephew and trustee of The Sir Sobha Singh Public Charitable Trust, recalls his early years here during the violence after the Partition riots. “My father (Bhagwant Singh) and fellow residents of Sujan Singh Park formed a committee to protect Muslim residents. He would move around with a gun. I was six years old then,” he says. Shiva Parmar, a corporate and descendant of former Himachal Chief Minister YS Parmar, plays down any connection to privilege. “My father chose a life far away from the one he could have had. He became a receptionist at the Ambassador Hotel and then he got this two-bedroom apartment. He later changed companies and retired as director of Mafatlal Industries. My mother was a flight attendant with BOAC (the British Overseas Airways Corporation, a prominent British state-owned airline that operated from 1940 until 1974). This place nurtured self-starters over pedigree,” he says.ALSO READ | From Ralph Lauren to Fendi: Why Indian crafts are easy to borrow but hard to protectAccording to Parmar, residents, despite their proximity to the corridors of power, never believed in the “by invitation only” culture. A motor garage owner from the service quarters became a rentee of the apartment below Parmar’s. “No class divide but a class mix. I was exposed to different ways of looking at things. A well-known cardiologist would work as a GP, once he came home after work. When the first black-and-white TVs were launched (in 1975), neighbours invited each other to watch Chitrahaar and classics. I remember how Aunty Dean, who headed the nursing division at Gangaram Hospital, held Christmas parties with underprivileged and special children. My mother made sure that I attended them. In our minds, we were all kids wanting the same things,” says Shiva. His friend Rohit Dean recalls how every neighbour kept their homes open for children. “I had more friends in the service block; we would run over to India Gate lawns and then slurp ice cream from Carry Home, the only one in the area, on the way back,” he says. “Khan Market worked on trust, everybody ordered everything and the shopkeepers complied, knowing that nobody was leaving the place and that the money would come,” adds Dean.From the ’70s onwards, the Ambassador Hotel became the home of Russian engineers, who were launching several industrial plants in India. As expats rented apartments down the years, residents became more blended than anywhere else. Of course, coming of age was exciting with the disco revolution in the ’80s. “The Wheel’s disco at Ambassador was a social hotspot for young people and competed with Tabla at The Oberoi,” says Parmar.Story continues below this adKhushwant’s Cultural Durbar Khushwant Singh at home (Photo: Express Archive)As Sujan Singh Park became the beating heart of a culture capital, Khushwant pivoted a community that was open and inclusive. His home was an informal salon where writers, scholars, diplomats and friends gathered in a spirit of conversation and intellectual exchange. Mala recalls how scholar-poet AK Ramanujan’s wife, Molly Daniels, lived here while teaching English literature at Delhi University. The complex became a crossroads for some of the most influential literary and intellectual figures of the 20th century. Author Ruth Prawer Jhabvala and her architect-husband Cyrus Jhabvala dropped by, while authors VS Naipaul and Vikram Seth visited whenever they were in Delhi. Khushwant also kept his doors open to friends from Pakistan, healing lifelong relationships severed by the Partition.Photographer-archivist Ram Rahman, whose parents Habib Rahman and Indrani lived here, recalls architects, artists, dancers coming home to meet them. Habib was then chief architect at the Central Public Works Department (CPWD). Indrani, a well-known classical dancer, had her bevy of artistes and gurus visiting and often staying over.“Historians Upinder Singh and Vijaya Ramaswamy, scholar Vijay Tankha, spiritual teacher Madhav Ashish, publisher Urvashi Butalia, who briefly ran Kali for Women from the colony, and diplomat Badruddin Tyabji were all part of this milieu,” says Naina, who would wake up with her grandfather by 5 am and had tea made by him. Patel, once a diehard Mumbaikar, chose to stay close to his “writing” mentor. “Guests were allowed to visit Khushwant’s flat from 7 to 8 pm and he had no qualms nudging then PM Manmohan Singh out as he would sleep by 9 pm.” Another resident, Dilshad Begum, bonded with Khushwant over Ghalib. “I would make kebabs for him. He was always interested in women’s opinions,” she says.Surendra Mohan’s father ran a garage servicing mainly Army vehicles, while his grandfather worked with the NDMC. “I was born here as my family moved from the Partition camp at Purana Qila. I went to school, started my garage repair business, had two daughters — my whole life happened here. Everywhere else is unfamiliar. If the windows on the other side overlooked the park, ours framed the backs of the buildings, the service paths. My mornings were about a running tap, quick showers, the clink of pots and pans, a scooter starting below the window as drivers, housekeepers, cooks got ready for their jobs at the park. From nothing, we had a livelihood and grew roots. Like the banyan tree here,” he says.Story continues below this adAlso Read | Exclusive: ‘He never came out of it’ ~ Manipal Doctor recalls Nana Patekar’s CPR and the missed ‘Golden Hour’A Blended Community (L-R) Former PM Inder Gujral, dancer Indrani Rahman with Ram (Photo: Ram Rahman)For Malvika Singh, aka Mala, author and editor of Seminar, it nurtured a “sense of community. Sujan Singh Park was never a gated colony.” Married to Tejbir, Sobha Singh’s grandson, she says, “There were vendors who came by, who came for old clothes, the phal wala, the papad wala, the phool wala; they were the eyes and ears of the complex. Neighbours were from all professions.”Ram talks about a winter get-together of December 1992, when Babri Masjid had just been demolished. “Malvika’s party was planned way ahead. The cards said ‘Celebrate’ but when we heard the news of the demolition, she decided to cancel it. I told her just blot out the word and send out the invites. We got artists to respond to the demolition and their works were displayed along the sides as a protest. Sujan Singh Park was like Camelot,” he says. In fact, it was at Habib’s house that legendary artists MF Husain and Satish Gujral met for the first time. Later in life they would fall out, but at that time, this was a place of chance encounters.Architect Romi Khosla, who lived as a tenant, calls the complex a template of an ideal urban environment that was ahead of its time. He contends that the relentless commodification of urban land is eroding the very idea of the city. “The problem is compounded by the centralisation of power. Without giving citizens a genuine voice in shaping their neighbourhoods, they lose a sense of belonging,” says Khosla. Jan Gehl, Danish architect and urban planner, who has studied cities, says, “A good neighbourhood should feel like one big hug, where nobody feels left out”.“At the centre of this value system, is a layered capital city, with seven older capitals, from Indraprastha to Tughlakbad. People come to India, to Delhi, to see those legacies. Sujan Singh Park is only a blip of how life can be lived as a community. Why don’t we carry that idea forward? To me, it symbolised openness and equality, the unpredictable and the spontaneous,” says Malvika. Much like a gift that keeps on giving.(With inputs from Shiny Varghese)