The taste of sweets (like music) lingers till last of all, said John of Gaunt as he lay dying in Shakespeare’s play, Richard II. The taste of Ghantewala’s sweets similarly lingers on. The story is an old one. Lala Sukh Ram came to Delhi from Amber, after it had been replaced by Jaipur as the capital of Rajputana because there were few takers for his sweets. Qalaqand was what he mostly sold on his “thel” or rehri. And with that sweet also hangs a tale. In Amber there are places, like in Jaipur, where those belated used to put bits of qalaqand at wayside shrines or under peepul trees to propitiate spirits, or so was the belief. Naturally qalaqand was the most preferred sweet. In Delhi too qalaqand was liked both by its people and (sic) djinns.
Sukh Ram’s qalaqand found a good number of customers in 1790, which marked two years of the blinding of Shah Alam II by Ghulam Qadir Rohilla. But it was Mahdji Scindia and his Marathas who ruled the roost, with their own cantonment in Chawari Bazar, which was quite close to Chandni Chowk, where Sukh Ram made his rounds, ringing a bell to attract buyers. That was seven years before the birth of Mirza Ghalib and it was left to Nazir Akbarabadi to wax eloquent on the khomchawala’s sweets, not in Delhi but Agra, where the main shops were at the Mithai-ka-Pul and are said to have attracted djinns. The same belief prevailed in Delhi where one old man asked another long ago as to how the sweets at Ghantewala halwai’s shop got sold when people found it difficult to exist even on dal-roti? The other man replied that it was because of the djinns who frequented sweet shops at night and bought basketsful for the human sweethearts they had lured. That’s why unmarried girls were told not to go to the terrace in the evening with their hair open. The superstition included newly-married women. Sharifan Bua swore her daughter-in-law wasted away as she lived only on qalaqand, empty daunas (leaf-cups) of which were mysteriously found in her room in the morning. The conjecture was that a djinn must have brought them.
But to come back to Ghantewala’s, when Lala Sukh Ram discarded the rehri after he set up a shop, the ghanta he rang was also put up there. Believe it or not, it was rung by Shah Alam’s pet elephant too on which a Red Fort attendant came to buy qalaqand for the harem. May be a fable but it still holds good. If memory is not playing tricks the shop was closed for some time during the Emergency of 1975-76 and a retail outlet of Bombay Dyeing came up there. The shop was also sealed briefly in 2000. It was reopened soon after and those returning after a meal at Paranthewali Gali would stop at it to indulge their sweet-tooth. That was when the two brothers running the shop decided to part ways and one of them opened his own opposite the Fawarra (Fountain). That also is now closed. But there was a time when examinees short of cash for after-prayers offering went to Ghantewala’s saying, “Dadaji ki dukan pe fateha charainge”.
Did Ghalib buy sweets from Ghantewala? Probably he did, as the poet was fond of good eats, including sweets, but not in the evening when it was kababs from Maseeta that went well with Old Tom whisky. For that matter, even Josh Malihabadi, on a visit to Delhi from Pakistan in the 1960s and staying at Azad Hind Hotel, used to send for qalaqand from Gantewala as his wife liked the preparation in preference to the stuff sold in Lahore. One witnessed this while staying in the next room at the hotel. When Hassan Habib, a 1947 migrant who had become Secretary to Khairpur’s Mir in Sindh after a stint as a civil servant in India, took his son to Ghantewala on a rare visit in the late 1970s, the boy bought some halwa sone (a variation of Hapshi Halwa) for his mother, Mariam Habib, editor of Pakistan Times. So Ghantewala attracted customers in other countries too.
One more thing worth retelling is that when the British celebrated Christmas in Delhi in the Mughal days with quite a few of them staying in Chandni Chowk and cakes hard to get from Calcutta, they chose Ghantewala sweets instead. Imagine Sir Thomas Metcalfe doing so! Such memories will never fade, though there’s a lingering hope that Sushant Jain, the shop proprietor, might follow up this hint and revive family business (by selling the franchise) with branches in New Delhi to spread the flavour of desi ghee mithai in the posh areas too!
