No hint of flowers or grass. The wet mossy ground is instead littered with brown leaves, empty tobacco bags, discarded paper cups, plastic spoons and iron stubs.
Despite this, the mosque religion is intense.
Opposite the Jama Masjid in Gurugram's Sadar Bazar, the public park was once bare, forever exposed to gray skies, but is now bedecked with young shade trees. Of course, Mass People is a beautiful exception. It has been here for a long time. A foundation plaque under the beautiful giant bears the park's date of September 1975.
On this hot afternoon, an old man is sitting under a peepal eating rokhi rotis. There is also a woman and a child. She is picking lice from the child's head, often hitting the head with irritation.
A few steps away, a brown dog is buried in the cool mud of some freshly dug earth (he must have dug it himself). While workers Sulaiman, Asad and Noor occupy the adjoining bench. See the picture. Mansesar residents say they have come for a day's “outing” in the Millennium City.
The fourth person on the bench is Aqdas. A sidewalk clothing seller, he's in the park for a “tobacco” break. A resident of Muzaffarnagar, the young hawker tells a Saddar Bazar shopkeeper about the hefty daily fare for parking his cart in front of his shop. She said, she's optimistic about the approaching winter “when people shop more freely.”
In most parks, one stumbles upon people in a picnic state of mind. Masjid Udayan is historically less auspicious. One afternoon, two years ago, a formal man sat under the papal, looking disappointed. He had lost his “office job”. Another day, during a particularly blustery winter, two laborers stood under a pile, frantically dialing their friends on their mobiles to get emergency cash. The then-unprecedented pollution resulted in a temporary ban on construction projects in Delhi-NCR, leaving both citizens with no source of income.
A few minutes later, the aforementioned bench has been emptied of four men. He was immediately taken over by Waseem, a daily wage labourer. “I can't find any work today,” he says.