Soliloquy

To walk on Bolton Road was to be free. Free from the clutches of the glitz and the glamour that the lights of Tivoli threw on your face, and free from the aromas of the samosas that you remembered from your early evening forays in childhood. The Lambas who ran the theatre were simple folk who doled out generosity with snippets of dust specked into your clothes; the 219 that slid past the gardens, which took inspiration from the same entrapment in Copenhagen to arrive at Parade Ground amid no fanfare, lacked imagination.

The old airport was within sniffing distance from where you walked, and the Gymkhana within hearing distance of any blasphemies that you may have uttered. Having arrived an hour earlier for assignations that have made a 15-year-old blush and hold the high horse of morality, you trudged past the blinking policemen sharing cups of unsweetened, and therefore un-Hyderabadi, tea with the myriad autorickshaw drivers, purely bored with the comings and goings of the Falaknuma Express from the station bypassing General Chowdhury Road.

The president of India was expected to be in town, and the delegation of work seemed unmanly, and almost chaotic; for those who had eked out a fortune selling hot meals in the vicinity of the Jubilee Bus Station, life was about to turn a full circle. Club Road was jammed with men who felt they deserved the dignity of arriving before someone important did. They were soon followed by hordes of women who thought it to be their right to shower abuses on anyone who had the affrontery to jump the multi-metered, rheumatic traffic signal in broad daylight.

Back on Bolton Road, and after the drying sun had set this early winter evening, you sang with your heart filled to the brim in anticipation of joys that had once evaded you, and in the grief of a light this city had once shared. Such light was visible only in the afternoons, with the sweepers taking their siestas, in the criss-crossing of Bolton, Chowdhury and Club roads. You could almost smell the fragrance of the traffic piling up from Balamrai to Tadbund. Cafe Golden Point awaited your arrival with bated breath.

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