Dilshad
Garden

A heart made glad

Dilshad is a Persian word carried into Urdu and Hindustani, dil, the heart, and shad, glad or joyful. Put together it means a heart made happy, a contented soul. It is an old given name across North India and Central Asia, and it is the word the planners chose for a stretch of open ground on the far side of the Yamuna when they set about turning fields into a colony.

So the literal reading is almost too neat: a garden of the joyful heart. Whether the ground ever held a garden by that name is lost to record, but the promise stuck to the place, and the name is now worn by a metro station, a hospital catchment, a cluster of parks, and tens of thousands of front doors.