Soliloquy

To breathe in the fetid air south of the Musi was rebellion enough, but to go boating on the Mir Alam, wafting in the memories of Naidu and Makhdoom seemed positively preposterous. Sagar Sarhadi had shot Bazaar not far from here, with Bahadurpura merely peeping to make its presence felt from behind the curtains of the zoo, named furtively after the first prime minister of independent India.

The man who had moved heaven and hell to bring the last Nizam, Asaf Jah VII, to his knees, and made him wait outside Race Course Road dressed as a mere supplicant with his staff in hand, was thus rewarded in the new Hyderabad, a city he had illegitimately birthed. Mir Osman Ali Khan, Nawab Bahadur, had understood what it felt like to be a common citizen, if only for a day in his storied life.

***

Few migrants from Andhra, who had moved in throngs after independence and almost immediately put the laidback natives of the city ill at ease due to their industry and enterprise, liked living near the Mir Alam. The air did not suit them as much as the rumour-filled atmosphere of Kukatpally did, which their godfather NT Rama Rao had willed them.

It suited the denizens of Bahadurpura just as well that they did not have to learn another language; they had already been hard put to understand the Marathi and Kanarese prevalent during the Nizam’s reign. In Shamsheer Gunj, you would have been taken for a foreigner if you said ‘haan‘ instead of ‘hau‘. In Kukatpally, neither word would be in use.

***

For Jummerat Bazaar to reclaim its lost glory, and Mangalhat its gory, life would have had to change immensely. The obstruction to the addition of the metro rail seemed childlike at first, before one understood that the imposition of modernity would be an insult to the joys of chabutarbazi. Why compete when one could laze, and why bother when patience seemed infinitely more pleasurable and rewarding?

Everyone was welcome to live and settle here, but the Hyderabadi wanted nothing more than his nahari after fajr. But occasionally, when the Begum harangued him enough, and the children pestered him to be taken to the Maut Ka Kuaan at Numaish, it used to cross his mind that boating on the Mir Alam was not reserved solely for women with sequinned burqãs and their lovers on winter afternoons.

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