India, June 9 -- Two England wale Dilli writers

Intro: On a pioneering city guidebook

Once upon a time two foreigners arrived in the capital with their respective families. Residing in our smoggy Dilli for a few years, Gaynor Barton and Laurraine Malone were taken in by the Walled City's "crowded pavements, fragile rickshaws and noisy buzz of people and traffic." They ended up co-writing a book on Purani Dilli.

37 years later, this reporter excavated the first edition of that book- 'Old Delhi: 10 Easy Walks'-from under a pile of used paperbacks in Delhi's Sunday Book Bazar. The cover shows a mashak walla, the street hawker who sells water in goat-skin bags called mashak. The photo stood out because Delhi's mashak wale have gone almost ...