By Mohul Bhowmick
When the last Hyderabadi man walked into the last Hyderabadi Cafe in the last Hyderabadi part of the city, he winced in disapproval at what lay in front of his eyes.
The metro rail — almost always championed as a resort of the poor but as heavy on the pocket as a plate of haleem[1] from Pista House — seemed to have overtaken the remnants of what was once the Garden Cafe. The construction workers were often seen munching on luqmi[2] before starting work in the bright sunshine of the day.
***
Had Garden survived, the last Hyderabadi would have survived too. He would have dipped his roti into the banal bowl of keema that had largely seen the innards of whatever chopping machine they used in the kitchen and digressed considerably to criticise the commercial fervour that Paradise Cafe (the World’s Finest Biryani — as it advertised itself these days), less than a mile away to the southeast, had embraced.
Yet, the way that Paradise had fallen on its face would not have seemed agreeable to him — the pride of the city intact in this wounded yet uninjured man — and he would have argued with the horde of loafers roaming in anticipation of a few pennies near the bottom of the Clock Tower, or booed with derision at the well-dressed middle-class diners approaching Baseraa for a meal they had envisioned a month ago.
Deccan Chronicle, about a hundred metres to the east from Baseraa, would have stood in silent vigil for what it had noticed, and in muted rebuke for what it had let flow from its murky torrents. Long having divested himself of the habit of reading a newspaper, the last Hyderabadi would have turned north in search of something a bit more appetising than the statistics of bribes taken and favours disbursed.
Wasn’t it George Bernard Shaw who said that politics was the last resort of the scoundrel? The last Hyderabadi remembered having read something of the sort during his time at the Nizam College; surrounded by biryani by the bucketful at the Grand and mutton seekh by the skewer at Cafe Bahar, his wakeful remembrances were engulfed by a sordid affair at the Public Gardens which he would much rather not recall.
***
Much given to lewdness in his youth, which included moments of sheer discomfort riding pillion behind a pillion on a two-wheeler — effectively three on the Honda that grunted in distress. Time — often seen as slipping past him like the silky outflow of the Irani chai at Blue Sea — was the great deterrent that forced him to fight for the movement that once engulfed, and now corrupted those who had vowed to not get enamoured by the corridors of power.
The last Hyderabadi now watched the last cricket match on the last pitch at the Parade Ground and grunted in discontent while crossing the road to the Gymkhana and witnessing one of the finest cover drives ever seen on its now-remodelled track; for all his impartiality, in his eyes, the Gymkhana remained the home of cricket — the home of Indian cricket at the very least.
***
When peppered with bouts of time — of which he had plentiful — he often dreamt of the ideal that had consumed his passions and ignited the fires that have long been dormant now. Inexcusably, he had juggled three jobs at a time when his friends were struggling to make ends meet.
The opaque waters of the Hussain Sagar at the bend around Sanjeevaiah Park had seemed inviting enough on nights when he had not had time to read the freckled Dostoyevsky acquired that Sunday from Koti. It was the timely remembrance of an embrace from a friend who ran his father’s steel bearings business in Ranigunj that finally restored the last Hyderabadi to sanity and greater aspirations than what The Idiot had suggested. Strangely enough, he had dreamt of Alexander Pushkin that night; the duel upon the Black River seemed to be disapproving of what he had evaded in life.
The last Hyderabadi was often given to understand that those of his kind were an extinct race now, those who still studied the scores on Monday morning and despaired when their Bajaj ran out of fuel in the right lane in the thoroughfare he had called ‘Kingsway’ all his life.
Rather pitifully, the memories of his childhood visited upon him infrequently, withering that which he had left behind and flowering that which he did not want to remember. Oftentimes, these recollections included little apart from the moments tiptoed from the dispensation that ruled with an iron fist and earmarked itself to the cause — perhaps too vehemently for its liking — that he believed in.
The dilkhush[3] scarred him on more than a few occasions when he hung around the Armaan Bakery in Ferozguda. His friends had called upon him to administer the immaterial wealth he had gathered over the years and embark on the search that had bruised his ego and slighted his soul for long; it seemed to be of a lifetime ago now. The sun had set that evening beyond the railway tracks as it did today, and yet his memories conveniently lied when put on the spot.
***
Those friends to whom he had clung for stability through those years of intransigence, with whom he had set back innumerable cups of tea and luqmi at the Rio, with whom he had shared remembrances by the plentiful at the Bawarchi — they had all disappeared without a trace in a world where public memory lives long enough for the good to be remembered and the bad to be dismembered. Bawarchi had been overtaken by Shah Ghouse, and Abids by Gachibowli, the empty streets of Jubilee Hills notwithstanding.
The last Hyderabadi had known this long before they started constructing the statue of the prominent lawyer who had been responsible for drafting that which held the people of this nation liable for their values and the politicians who ruled over them accountable for the promises they made. These now loomed larger than that of the ascetic whose refuge he had sought towards the end of his life.
Neither the ascetic nor the lawyer mattered much in the minds of the newly-minted, power-hungry class who turned their noses away from him; the ideals the former propagated had been flung into the much-insulted Osman Sagar with grandeur, with the latter swallowing them without a hint of disgust.
The last Hyderabadi meditated upon this as he turned back from where Bade Miyan used to exist. The patthar ka gosht[4] lingered long on the tip of his tongue, but with his pockets empty and resources nullified, ice cream from one of the myriad Bihari push-cart vendors on Tank Bund would have to make do for dinner, washed down by a bottle of lemon soda made from water rarefied by the Hussain Sagar[5]‘s numerous cousins.
***
Had he taken the bus from Patny southwest to Mehdipatnam on a lazy Saturday afternoon, the last Hyderabadi would have noticed the hawker who still believed in the incorruptibility of man, who sold ball-point pens at the traffic signal without haranguing his clientele too much, or the stout hijra[6] in Rasoolpoora whose self-respect had given way to hunger, or the blind beggar in Masab Tank, who died with Hyderabad in his eyes.
Had he been flogged that day by the marching crowd demanding employment for the destitute who neither knew nor chose to care about the latest matinee flick at the Tivoli, the last Hyderabadi would have known the extent to which his boundaries lay.
The aggrieved mob screamed in righteous indignation and discontent as he sat beside the conductor, who counted the day’s earnings with just about enough interest to murmur,
“Haibat me ye logaan kahan-kahan toh bhi fir lete rehte, kya-kya toh bhi kar lete rehte – apan khaali ye puron ku dekh lena fir gumm bol leke palat lena. Shukraan apne ku koi dam nai karte!
(With great resentment these people move about in protest, but nothing comes of it. All we have to do is look the other way when they come here. Thankfully, nobody bothers us!)”
The last Hyderabadi had cried that night.
***
Spring seemed to be around the corner, but the last Hyderabadi had little by way of hope, further less by way of reflection. For what he remembered seemed to hark back to the days when he could still think of himself as a man in a city that bore him, that gleefully harboured him.
Those of his ilk had disappeared long ago, men among whose shadows he had multiplied himself and sat in the peace of knowing that there were at least some who were like him, who understood him and who, perhaps, even loved him.
.
[1] Stew originating in the Middle East and South Asia
[2] A Hyderabadi variation of the samosa with mince meat
[3] A sweet stuffed bread of coconut and tutti-fruiti
[4] A hyderabadi lamb dish
[5] A lake in Hyderabad https://tourism.telangana.gov.in/nature-discovery/HussainSagarLake
[6] A transgender from birth
Mohul Bhowmick is a national-level cricketer, poet, sports journalist, essayist and travel writer from Hyderabad, India. He has published four collections of poems and one travelogue so far. More of his work can be discovered on his website: www.mohulbhowmick.com.
PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL.
Click here to access the Borderless anthology, Monalisa No Longer Smiles
Click here to access Monalisa No Longer Smiles on Kindle Amazon International
Borderless 