India, June 30 -- The story of this one-bedroom Sujan Singh Park apartment in the south block started in Lahore, pre-Partition, when some called it the hotbed of political activity - still remembered as the Paris of the East. Men and women alike joined the political movement. Chanda's great-grandmother, Ladorani Zutshi, was married to Ladli Prasad Zutshi, Motilal Nehru's nephew. She went on to become President of the Students' Congress Union, recognised as a beauty full of fire. She had four daughters, remembered in Delhi as the Zutshi Sisters, about whom a headline once read: "The Zutshi Sisters are in Jail, Lahore can rest in Peace." Joining the Indian Freedom struggle, the ladies started as revolutionaries in Bhagat Singh's camp but soon became active pacifists in Gandhi's company, spending seven years in jail for their active pacifism. The government has some flats allotted in Sujan Singh Park. Chanda Narang's first link to the complex came when her grandmother spent her last days in a government-allocated apartment. Her mother's side of the family ran the Rehabilitation Ministry on special request from the first president of India, working on the setup of Lajpat Nagar until their last days. Chanda remembers Sujan Singh Park as the final place where she saw these fiery women of India, her bloodline. Chanda Narang is a filmmaker known for Ayodhya: A City Under Siege, broadcast on Channel 4 London in 1990, and Kash-m-kash, broadcast on Doordarshan's DD Metro channel in 1995. She came to live in her flat much later, and when she rented the current apartment, she found, by sheer coincidence, the one right above her grandmother's former flat. This coincidence felt divine - much like the coincidence of Sujan Singh Park's architect Walter Sykes George having lived right next door to her family home in Civil Lines. Stories like these make Delhi feel like a small town full of modernist culture. Chanda's background is richly layered, with strong freedom-fighting women on her maternal side and an entrepreneurial lineage on her father's side. Her great-grandfather was knighted, a title he once threatened to abandon in conflict with the British. Her grandfather built sugar mills, transforming swampy tarai areas into cities. The legacy was expansive. Homes were estates. Yet Chanda desired to live in Sujan Singh Park, in a one-bedroom apartment. When you look out her window, you see a driveway with humble cars - Cretas, Swift Dzires -nothing flashy. Chanda recalled she was always pulled to this complex. Not for the amenities, but for the community: people interested in history, art, and culture. Her home is in the southern part of Sujan Singh Park, with the red facade, across from Khan Market. The entrance has iron gates and a driveway that reminds one of wartime London - large archways announcing stature. Built in 1945 for the British military in Delhi, the complex has three types of apartments: one, two, and three bedrooms. Separate service entrances, quarters for help, double doors, and rooftop water storage. They don't build buildings like this in India anymore. One resident claims the structure has a layer of matkas sandwiched between floors. A marble drop echoes in a particular way on the floor below. If there were a cultural address in Delhi, it would be Sujan Singh Park. The building was built by Sir Sobha Singh on an urgent basis during World War II to house British military and civilian officers. A target of 100 flats, four-storied high blocks with air conditioning and servant quarters, was given, which was later expanded to include godowns and a laundry block, as recorded in Deco in Delhi. Walter Sykes George was commissioned to design the apartments, infusing Lutyens' archway entrances with curving Deco balconies. Post-completion in 1945, flats not for governmental use could be leased to people of "good position and social status in life." During Partition, Sobha Singh invited families fleeing Pakistan to stay until they found appropriate accommodation. It is worth pondering: would a person of "good position and social status" choose to live in a one-bedroom flat? As farmhouse estates sprawl on the outskirts and penthouses sell for over Rs.200 crores, who exactly are the elites of the Khan Market gang? Just as Lahore was remembered as the Paris of the East, Sujan Singh Park acquired a reputation for people of culture to convene in tiny flats, discussing politics in a modest, almost dorm-like setting. A walk through the boulevard reveals that modesty is not deprivation here. It is a choice, and perhaps a philosophy. Sujan Singh Park is rare in what it permits: the elites live without performance, influence persists without exhibition. One of the last addresses in Delhi where the size of your flat has no bearing on the size of your world. What holds this place together is not British colonial style preserved through grand arches, but something more evolved: Delhi Deco, where a tanga or rickshaw replaced the British rapidly. A sensibility as much as an architecture. The filmmakers, historians, artists, and publishers who have chosen to live here form an irreplaceable thread in the cultural fabric of contemporary Delhi. Which is why the recent eviction notice served to Sujan Singh Park North carries a particular sting, arriving as it does in the wake of the city already having lost its Gymkhana. A slow erasure seems to be setting in - a public shaking of the cultural islands built by the people of early modernist Delhi. The notice carries a history of its own, rooted in a long clash between the government and the caretakers of Sujan Singh Park. The complexity of that battle may straighten itself out in the courts, but the public battle leaves cultural islands like these vulnerable, threatening their identity as hubs of discourse and universalism that the city still remembers. The history is intangible and resistant to documentation, impossible to restore once broken. It is precisely because it cannot be filed as evidence or appraised in rupees that it remains so dangerously easy to dismiss. Only the residents can truly enunciate what is at stake....