A couple of years ago, the Indian blogger Mayank Austen Soofi took me, in an auto-rickshaw, to his favorite brothel. It was in Delhi’s illegal and infamous red-light district, on Garstin Bastion Road, or G.B. Road, a crumbling commercial thoroughfare that I had encountered only in the lewd imaginings of school friends years before. Soofi had a firmer grasp of the place. He had spent two years regularly visiting the brothel, first as an English teacher for the proprietor’s sons and, later, as a journalist. He published a sensitive, book-length account of the brothel’s workers, in 2012, titled “Nobody Can Love You More,” and he had stayed in touch with the people who live there.

After being accosted on the twilit G.B. Road by pimps in T-shirts who asked “Jana hai?” (“Want to go?”), we climbed a flight of steep, uneven, betel-stained stairs and entered a large pistachio-green waiting room with a low ceiling. A single light bulb cast a bleary gleam on framed pictures of the Hindu god Krishna, the Sikh saint Guru Nanak, and a Muslim Sufi shrine—a menu of sin absolvers to choose from. A tall woman in a sari shook our hands and led us into the next room, where we were greeted by a domestic scene: two men sprawled on the ground drinking tea in front of an industrial fan; a five-year-old boy in a skullcap, praying on a mat; two young men loafing before a PC; and two sacrificial goats, straining into the room from their tether on the balcony. This was the one-room living space of the proprietor’s family. At night, the adults slept on the floor of the pistachio-green waiting room; when customers arrived, later in the evening, they would step over and around the adults’ supine bodies.

“So, Soofi, when are you going to get married?” the woman in the sari asked, playfully.

Soofi laughed. “Could we get some tea?”

Soon, we were sitting barefoot on the floor, listening to one of the men—the fiftysomething owner, who wore gold-rimmed glasses, a lungi, and a white vest—as he offered a practiced lament about the dying brothel business. The boy and the two young men—the three sons—had gathered round, too; Soofi introduced them fondly. “This one almost became a fundamentalist but now writes a blog called Red Light Insider,” he told me, gesturing to a bespectacled man in his twenties. The next oldest son was a bodybuilder. “You like Eminem, right?” Soofi asked him. The young man shook his head, muttering his new enthusiasm for an artist whose name I’d never heard. The youngest child, the one who had been praying, attended an élite private school—although, Soofi said, the boy never told his classmates where he lived or what his father did for a living.

“How did he get admission?” I asked the owner, knowing the scarcity of seats in such schools.

“This man who’s laid down on the ground,” the owner said, pointing to Soofi and smiling. “He’s the one who got him into private.”

Soofi is a waifish man with glittering eyes and a tumultuous mop of prematurely graying hair. His head was resting on a pillow by this point, and the top buttons of his slim-fitting blue shirt were undone, revealing two pendants. “Why am I not coming here more often?” he said. “It’s like home.”

For the past thirteen years, Soofi, now thirty-nine, has made it his business to get to know the most neglected corners of India’s capital and to develop an intimacy with them that he transmits through various print and online franchises: a feverishly updated blog, called the Delhi Walla; a swollen Instagram feed; a daily column for a leading newspaper; and four guidebooks, in addition to his book about the brothel. His pieces range from quick sketches of the down-and-out in Delhi to bitchy reports of literary parties and on-the-go shots of trees, monuments, doorways, and the gorgeously polluted sky. His blog and his Instagram feed have a dreamy, in-medias-res feel to them. “They are like migratory birds who make permanent, if makeshift, nests in a faraway land,” one post, about a group of forty Kashmiri men whom Soofi saw living in Old Delhi’s Turkman Gate Bazaar, begins. In another, he explains that the traditional “goatskin waterbags,” once used to sell cold water, are called “mashaks.” Occasionally, his voice rises to complaint: “Outrageous. No other word to describe it. A new garish pink building, still splotched with cement stains, now stands right beside what is probably the last important Mughal monument in India—Zafar Mahal.”

A waste picker and her daughter, on a street in Gurgaon, near Delhi. Photograph by Mayank Austen Soofi

These are details about the city where I grew up that I would not have known were it not for Soofi. There are other Delhi enthusiasts online, but no one can match Soofi for volume: he has published nearly three thousand blog posts and about thirty thousand Instagrams; he uploads fifty photos a day and is trying to profile one per cent of Delhi’s population. He’s up to only two hundred and twenty-three so far. Still, it’s impossible to doubt the sincerity of his crazy goal. He is so devoted to the idea of the city that he has refused to establish a permanent residence in any neighborhood, preferring instead to sleep at the houses of various friends or at his parents’ place—or in the homes of readers, whom he promises to profile in exchange for a bed. All of his work together may add up to one of the most eccentric and encyclopedic ground-level portraits of a megacity in the Internet age.

When Soofi came to Delhi, in 2003, at the age of twenty-three, from the corruption-riddled state of Uttar Pradesh, he was intimidated by the city’s cosmopolitanism. “For the first few years in Delhi, I couldn’t stop inside McDonald’s,” he told me. “I would think, Could I coherently place my order in English?” He was poor and depressed, performing odd jobs at a major hotel. Living in a slum, he began venturing out to Delhi’s book bazaars, where he discovered Jane Austen, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, Maya Angelou, Marcel Proust, Arundhati Roy. After enrolling in a Web-design course at the behest of his parents, he started a blog called Ruined by Reading.

Then, one fateful night, as Soofi tells it—he loves to indulge in the large, breathless gestures of an art promoter—he found himself in Nizamuddin, the shantytown that surrounds the eponymous Sufi tomb where individuals of different faiths congregate to make wishes and receive blessings. The site’s domed mausoleum, built in the fourteenth century, is an oasis of marble, and devotees recline quietly on its ample platforms. One reaches the tomb via narrow alleys that are contrapuntally chaotic. When I visited Nizamuddin with Soofi, after tea at the brothel, the alleys were dense with diners thronging food stalls; parked scooters, with live goats tied to them, in preparation for Ramadan; bent beggars, asking for alms; and a group of skullcapped men, from the evangelical group Tablighi Jamaat, solemnly sitting at a long table. “It sounds crude,” Soofi told me, of his first visit to Nizamuddin, “but, at that point, I saw the meat shops and crowds, and I felt I was in West Asia”—“Arabian Nights” territory. He also glimpsed the secular and pluralistic India that he had previously only read about in books and seen in movies.