Adaa Bazaar
Shop No. 152-154, Ground Floor, Gurbaksh Plaza, Amritpuram, Block E, Jagat Farm, Gamma 1, Greater Noida, Uttar Pradesh 201308, India
http://www.adaabazaar.com/
Adaa Bazaar is not your average record shop. Walk south on the lane that twists behind the 14th-century Sufi shrine in Nizamuddin until the air smells of kebabs and roses, then watch for a slab of indigo door set into a brick wall. No sign — only the smell of oud-soaked agarbatti drifting out and, on some evenings, the soft rattle of a tabla that seems to be tuning itself. Push the door and you descend three stone steps into a low vault whose ceiling arches like the inside of an old oud’s body. The walls are dressed in midnight silk; tiny pin-lights mimic constellations, giving each visitor the hush of entering a private observatory.
Inside, music exists as both memory and invitation. Crates line the left wall: dust-sleeved 78s of Gauhar Jan, first-press LPs of the Sabri Brothers, bootleg cassette tapes from the Afghan cassette revolution, even a Nokia memory card said to hold early Casio experiments recorded in a Srinagar attic. Tags are handwritten in Urdu, Devanagari, Kufic, and, occasionally, a private shorthand understood only by the caretaker, Ustad Anwar Rizvi. Anwar, seventy-two, silver-haired, often wears a taupe shawl embroidered with tiny paisleys that reappear as motifs on the price stickers. He will gesture you toward whichever object is “calling you,” though he may refuse to sell if he deems the match premature. Over two decades, musicians, DJs, and folklorists have learned that acquiring a prize here sometimes requires a month of tea, story, and silence; the transaction is never about the rupees but about the sincerity of the question you bring into the room.
At the back of the vault is a copper-lined listening niche floored with Persian carpets. A restored 1928 His Master’s Voice gramophone, a Marantz tape deck, and an Akai reel-to-reel share space with a Raspberry Pi streaming lossless archives from Anwar’s private servers in Berlin and Lahore. You may sit on a velvet bolster and listen for as long as you like, provided you observe two customs: remove your shoes, and do not ask what “Adaa” means — the name is a riddle for you to divine through sound.
Every Thursday, after the dargah qawwali concludes, Adaa Bazaar hosts the Baithak-e-Gumnaam: an anonymous open-mic where singers, poets, and field recordists appear under candlelight and perform for no applause, only the hush of the air between breaths. These sessions are unadvertised, the only clue a date chalked faintly on the step at dawn.
Leave before midnight and you step back onto the spice-lit lane wondering whether the place itself has dissipated into the notes you now carry in your ribs.
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- Published: August 1, 2025
