Seelampur

A quarter across the river

Cross the Yamuna going east out of old Delhi and you reach Seelampur, a tight, working quarter of the North East Delhi district in the Shahdara belt. It is one of the oldest and most crowded parts of the trans-Yamuna city, grown not from a drawing board but from decades of arrivals settling lane by lane. Where a planned colony spreads out, Seelampur stacks up: narrow streets, close houses, and a density among the highest anywhere in the capital.

It is a place that works with its hands. The population is largely working class and, by long history, largely Muslim, and the neighbourhood carries a reputation across Delhi for one trade in particular, the one that arrives here by the truckload every morning as the rest of the city's dead electronics.