The Ahmedabad Diaries - Day 2 contd (Sidi Sayyid's Mosque)

 I booked an auto and we headed off to Sidi Saiyyed mosque which was in the vicinity of the hotel where Martin was staying. Since he had a flight to Jaipur at 7, we decided to stop sight seeing after the mosque. It suddenly came up in the middle of town, in a huge park.

The mosque is right opposite the House of MG or House of Maganlal which is a heritage hotel and an upmarket one at that. Its a simple enough structure and one could be misled into thinking that there's not much to see.  

Built in 1572-73 by Sidi Sayyad, a Habshi nobleman who came to India as a slave of Rumi Khan, a Turkish general, and later on was gifted a jagir, the mosque has 10 intricately carved latticework windows carved out of stone. Sidi Sayyad did much good for society then, was an avid reader, distributed free food and so on.

The latticework that one can see in the above pic of an intertwining tree is so intricate that one wonders how anyone could carve it out of stone. The other design is a geometrical design.

The Sidi Sayyad jali is the unofficial symbol of Ahmedabad and the intertwining trees design is the inspiration for the design of the logo for IIM, Ahmedabad.

We decided to have chai and asked the man who seemed in charge of the mosque where we could get tea and he pointed us across the road to Lucky Cafe. Now Lucky Cafe reminded me of the many Irani cafes we had in Hyderabad and Jyo and I were pleasantly surprised to find the ambience similar as well. We ordered bun maska and chai and Martin was quite happy with it. 

That's an MF Hussain on the wall

I spotted a painting with Hussain signed on it and asked a waiter and he said that MF Hussain would come to the cafe and was friends with the cafe manager and gifted him that.

Martin Zheng - happy with his maska bun and chai

Lucky Restaurant

It was time to part ways and we took some pics outside Lucky Cafe with Martin and booked our auto. Martin found me on Linkedin and sent me an invitation. In November I met Duncan in Jaipur and we connected on Linkedin too. We exchanged numbers and we promised to stay in touch.

With a cheery Bye we bid good bye to Martin Zheng and headed back to the hotel. Quite an eventful day.