“Can I sign up for a heritage walk? I want to get to know my city better.”

“We only take foreigners.”

The reply stumped Abu Sufiyan Khan.

After this failed first try, Abu (32) knocked on another door. This time, the tour guide obliged. But the “Wikipedia-esque walk” disappointed him.

As Abu navigated the veins of his century-old home city, his attention snapped to the crumbling havelis (manor houses), arched doorways, and the pandemonium in the baazars (markets).

But the tour guide’s walk shied away from these elements, his hackneyed monologue instead focusing only on the popular overdone spots, leaving Abu feeling a sense of loss.

The magic of his home city was fading away with every new-age rhetoric spun around it.

“To add to this, these walks kept emphasising pickpockets and unsafe roads,” Abu points out. They were vilifying the city’s reputation. So keen to tap into Delhi’s breathless routine, the walks were forgetting to pause and let the city get a word in the conversation.

But Abu wanted that to happen.

That day, he took his favourite detour before returning home. At the Hazrat Shah Waliullah Public Library — originally established as a one-room refuge during the 1987 riots, it now overflows with thousands of books in Urdu, Arabic, Persian, Hindi, and English — Abu addressed the room of readers and scholars, regulars at this reading sanctuary, one of the major Urdu libraries in Delhi.

“I want to do heritage walks,” he coaxed the gathering.

They were on board.

This was the speciality of the Hazrat Shah Waliullah Public Library.

Every idea was welcomed. Every thought was given a dais.

Ever since the first time Abu had stumbled upon the library, he’d been mesmerised by its repository of Urdu manuscripts, a priceless collection of over 30,000 books, a 100-year-old Quran embossed in gold; Ghalib’s poetic rendition Diwan-e-Ghalib, complete with his seal and signature; an illustrated Ramayana in Persian; and Diwan-i Zafar, a volume of Bahadur Shah Zafar’s poetry, printed and sealed by the royal press in the Red Fort in 1885.

Within the four walls, he’d held conversations with shayars (Urdu for ‘poet’), bantered with culture aficionados who always had a bout of trivia to share (“Did you know William Dalrymple would also visit the library, its material serving as research for his books?”).

While we couldn’t confirm that the Delhi-based Scottish historian did indeed pay visits to this reading room, Abu was quite fascinated by the likelihood of the fact.

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