India, April 26 -- Tucked behind GB Road's red light district, this street is privileged with a parallel existence. Mohalla Niyaryan is in Old Delhi, but it also lives outside time and space, inside a classic novel, enjoying the distinction of being the only Walled City gali to have been exhaustively chronicled in a work of fiction.

First published by Virginia Woolf's Hogarth Press in 1940, Ahmad Ali's Twilight in Delhi commands its status as the most evocative English language novel devoted to the historic quarter. Indeed, the book's Mohalla Niyaryan is conspicuously relatable to the actual Mohalla Niyaryan as it is today. The pages percolate through Purani Dilli bowels as effortlessly as rainwater through parched earth. The trusting re...