Soliloquy

Now that Kaifi Azmi Road had been dug up and was in disarray, she felt a sense of betrayal merely at the thought of speaking in Urdu. Dakhni came as naturally to her as breathing, but chaste Urdu took time to learn, and the road works had come at the worst possible time. The rains would soon be here – amid a nationwide crisis – and she wondered whether she would have enough time to adapt to the nouveau régime, which blatantly claimed Telugu to be the sole official language of Telangana, and left Urdu to fend for itself.

Such a life had been deemed impossible by her forebears even a decade ago, but now that this reality became explicit, she feared the loss of her essence. The only Irani cafés left in the wide circumference that Kaifi Azmi Road encompassed were peopled by those who had nowhere else to be. Mazuri and Kasa were new additions – one could not possibly count La Makaan – and her thoughts were filled with dread at the idea of the entire city being filled with knockoff Niloufers that sold cups of tea at INR 150. The idea of a protest at such a just cause, teeming with an indignation only seen among the adulterous, drove her with a ferocious desire to right historical wrongs.

For the right to speak in Dakhni and sip cup after cup of sweetened, frothy, diabetic-inducing Irani chai came added onto one’s passport after being born – or made – in Hyderabad. And she did not know what to make of the fact that Azmi himself, having married a Hyderabadi and fathered the greatest actress in the country, did not speak Dakhni. The monsoon rarely brought the best out of her, and she knew that her being would be akin to the roadworks on KBR Junction on Kaifi Azmi Road, which bore everything that came its way with a steely resolve to not let its scars show.

And yet, the scars that were bound to expose themselves after the chief of the nobles was done with his agenda of building flyovers and underpasses everywhere but the south would be unavoidable, and she doubted if she would be able to see them. To imagine a Hyderabad in which Kaifi Azmi Road was injured, and inured to criticism with an impunity hitherto unknown woke her in a sweat in the middle of the night these days. No nightmare was complete without the destruction of a Hyderabad she had once grown to love, and at long last, come to abide.

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