By Mohul Bhowmick
Hyderabad was not meant to be consumed only on Sundays. Especially when the Bibi-ka-Alam proceeded towards Masjid-e-Ilahi in Chaderghat, with mourners of all hues lamenting their inability to wage war alongside the pious. The elephant on which the howdah was placed murmured its assent before being offered cups of frothy Irani chai. The sidelong glances at the youth besmirched with the blood of a sacrifice heretofore unknown in their lives — and therefore easily bypassed — could not be missed.
She could not grasp, at first, why the chai had to be sweetened with such copious quantities of sugar. Nor could she understand why the students of the fine arts college in Masab Tank had to wrestle with their lives — and a passerby’s conscience — when getting off bus number 49M. She was told much later that they were forced to read The Fountainhead before they could even dream of touching their coursework. Their professor of drawing was no fan of Francisco D’Anconia, lesser still of Dagny Taggart — for reasons he credited to his deficient childhood in the treeless expanses of Rayalaseema — and, quite understandably, Atlas Shrugged was passed over.
She had bumped into an architect of renown, whose primary skill consisted of knowing someone who knew someone who had erected a brutalist coffee shop in west Hyderabad, and who had not heard either of Howard Roark or Ayn Rand. He called himself a modernist and displayed an unnatural interest in Balinese architecture. Spring had come late that year, and she had often found herself wondering what the brutalist coffee shop architect was called, and if she would be able to tell upon seeing it without being told. She seldom questioned her inability to see past charades those days.
But she had questioned her inability to separate facts from fiction, and one warm afternoon, upon finding herself in an auto-rickshaw on the national highway connecting Bowenpally to Suchitra, she had wondered at her own resilience. A fictional flyover, proposed to ease the misery of motorists, seemed comfortable in adding on more to it, and she had struggled to be a mere spectator in such a carnage of dust. Coughing seemed to be an act of participation, and she had denied herself the pleasure. Seamus Heaney often came to her those days — not least because of the parallels she could draw between the ‘troubles’ in Northern Ireland and those in her life — and she was reminded of the anguish of being an innocent bystander.
*
Turning south, her attention was taken up largely by the passion with which the Bibi-ka-Alam journeyed past Purani Haveli, and with a stab of recollection, she was reminded of why the city was home. Such brushes with epiphanies confined her to the immediate past, and whatever largesse Mir Mahbub Ali Khan or Mir Osman Ali Khan had bestowed upon the land, she could not look past the perverse stains of neglect on the walls of the Chowmahalla. The Khilwat Mubarak often wept these days, for want of heirs who truly knew the Deccan, and she had shied away from taking photographs of its compromised state.
She hardly ever turned east except to see Hyderabad play in the Ranji Trophy at the new stadium constructed at enormous expense to the taxpayer. She could not forget the Fateh Maidan as quickly as the newfound bourgeoisie that lived in Sainikpuri had, and it was also why, for sentiments she would not voice out of a fear she could not understand, the IPL[1] had passed her by. Her forebears spoke of ML Jaisimha and Abbas Ali Baig in the same breath (and deemed MAK Pataudi a mere passenger), and she had come to the Gymkhana expecting to see suave men in white. Cricket not played in its true colours had not appealed to her.
But one rainy evening, not long after the murderous summer had drifted away, a friend had spoken wistfully of the bric-a-brac one could conjure on the jumbling avenues of Dilsukh Nagar, and she had not known how to refuse. Soon afterwards, having been caressed by a sickly downpour, they found themselves in Kanchan Bagh (where a vision, as if from a previous life, had roused her to action) and a meal at Hotel Sohail in Malakpet — with the feasible attraction of Barkas and the debonair Chandrayan Gutta, warts and all, lurking close by — had seemed too cheery an enticement to pass up.
*
She had not truly known the city before journeying past the necropolis that was Golkonda. Her grandfather had often sung her lullabies about the ancient riverbed of the ferocious Musi. In moments of unguarded alacrity, she had found herself wishing to see it. Having lost everything but herself in the mêlée that the city had become, she had found enough strength in her lungs to bargain and hail an autorickshaw off the ranks at Basheer Bagh. Thankfully, it had not rained, but she could carefully envision the fresh petrichor wafting north from the exhibition grounds in Nampally.
The driver had turned and twisted, driven on the wrong side of the road and gone past Moazzam Jahi market without paying obeisance, and she could feel the clock tower warning her to steer clear of exigencies to come. The courteous guide, with salt and pepper in his hair and dressed immaculately in a brown kurta at the Salar Jung Museum — where she had detoured after glimpsing the sickly Musi at Naya Pul — had spoken highly of his regard for women, and addressed her throughout as aapa. Of course, she had not gone close enough to smell the liquor under his breath, nor fathom his inexplicable urge to indulge in his favourite pastimes of beating his wife every night and collecting lithographs from the Asaf Jahi era.
Whatever was left of Hyderabad in her veins promised to wash away in the floods that had in the past reminded the Musi of its penurious state in 1908, or the spate it had reached in 1578, when Muhammad Quli Qutb Shah had worried endlessly about the well-being of Bhagmati. Such a Hyderabad did not exist for her anymore, and in her dreams, she recounted only the rapine and the arson and the pillage that Julius Caesar had expressly forbidden, and of which Raja Singh and Akbaruddin Owaisi were proud inheritors. Just like Rome, Hyderabad had been an idea, an idea worth fighting for, but she found herself disabused of any such notions on her midnight rambles to Gachibowli.
The thought of the Cyber Towers existing in a city where the Arts College proliferated disgusted her; where men such as those who had erected the Deloitte Towers (and Trump Avenue) existed, she could not. Her views on perfection were not mixed — she wanted the best or nothing at all — and to breathe in the same air where the dead architects of the Paigah Tombs and the Falaknuma shared space with real estate barons from Kokapet seemed sinful.
The government was involved too, hoping to pocket large parcels of Raidurg, and by then, she did not find it difficult to contemplate suicide on her way home. Only a hot cup of frothy Irani chai from Café Green Corner — going to Café Niloufer may have been the final straw — could calm her down before she mustered the courage to knock on her door, and open it to come face-to-face with herself. Did she need to protect Hyderabad from men, or did men need to be protected from Hyderabad? No. The answer was simple. She had to forget Hyderabad.
*
When she could afford the luxury of thinking about Hyderabad at all these days, she imagined herself turning west and staring at the last Hyderabadi across the Pacific, daring him to blink.
[1] Indian Premier league – cricket
Mohul Bhowmick is a national-level cricketer, sports journalist, poet, essayist and travel writer from Hyderabad, India. He has published five collections of poems and one travelogue so far. His latest book, The Past Is Another Country, came out in 2025. More of his work can be discovered on his website: www.mohulbhowmick.com.
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