“At the age of 12, I was the youngest of a senior citizen coin club,” Shah Umair tells me as I marvel at his Instagram page, akin to a history book come alive, only more interesting.

He recounts how this passion for coins transformed into a desire to uncover the legend behind them. While around him, people were hustling and rushing through life, Umair decided he wanted to take a step back, and head down the ricketty slopes of time and into bygone eras.

“The world speaks of the Qutub Minar and the Taj Mahal,” he says, “but I want to tell the story of the unheard monuments, the ones that no one writes poems about.” And so Umair, a Calcutta boy, would make frequent trips to Delhi where he would pursue this passion.

In 2018, when he moved to the capital to start his own venture — a creative agency catering to lifestyle and fashion — it held a special kind of joy. He decided that if he was going to explore and unearth the stories of these monuments, he wanted to do it right.

“I began reading books, gazettes, and papers that could offer some insight into how the city was built, as well as the stories that lurked behind the stone facades,” he says.

Today at 27, Umair is retelling these stories.

10 steps through history

1. Bridge by Firoz Shah Tughlaq

Some legends you come across purely by chance, while others are by intent. The bridge belonged to the first category.

Umair and his group of friends were exploring the heritage of North Delhi, when one of them remembered reading a story about a bridge that was built 700 years ago in North Delhi.

On further exploration, they discovered that while they had been walking for miles trying to find it, they had been on it the whole time. “This structure was built by Tughlaq, who did a lot of conservation work in the Mughal era,” says Umair. “He repaired the Qutub Minar, re-excavated the lake of Khilji, and brought two Ashokan Pillars from Meerut and Haryana to the capital because he thought that they are an important piece of history.”

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