Had it not been for the unpolished brick roads in the heritage arc, the 17-year-old non-residential Indian would have taken a better picture. A picture where the clock tower, or more like the ‘ghanta ghan’ as she called it when she was younger would have come out clearer. A picture where the azure Lucknowi skies weren't blurry. A picture where she could really pat herself on the back for capturing the dreaminess of the view in front of her.
After a moment's hesitation, she straightened herself in the tumbling rickshaw, threw her hair up in a carelessly tied bun, and requested the old paddle rickshaw driver to stop for a second. Her mother patiently waited on the rickshaw's blue, torn mattress-seat as she saw her younger self morphed into another human capturing Lucknowi sunsets on her year-old iPhone.
The street-food vendors, that had been pushed away from the scene the previous day had come again; proudly laying their food in a not-so-hygienic manner to lure customers. But the people of the city had come to discover a fact; the dirtier the place, the better the food. Say, for example; Idrees, the famous biryani spot owner, wouldn't serve thousands of customers every day if they sat down and pinpointed the unhygienic way of preparing the biryani next to the colonial monument turned into an age-old dumpster. The pani-puri and aloo ki tikki sellers around nearly every corner of the city were also the reason so many people seemed to believe in a statement like this. Hence, the first thing that popped into her mind as she passed by increasing crowds around the wooden thelas was, ‘dirtier the place, better the food.’
As the three of them headed towards Mehtab Bagh on the tumbling rickshaw, she remembered the simpler times; when Lucknow was simply the City of Nawabs, when most women and children were dependent on old paddle rickshaw drivers (who were internally dying of lung diseases) for their daily commutes. But times had changed, and this was the new world order for the citizens. Lucknow was now oozing with impatience and restlessness; the peace in the air had been replaced by soot. New electronic rickshaws had replaced paddle rickshaws and people who were even remotely influential - celebrities, politicians, and gang leaders alike - placed sirens atop their cars.
A frown appeared on her face as she realized how the rich heritage and culture of the city she loved was slowly eroding because of the processes of modernization and westernization. But this is what life had come to since colonization; traditions and encounters declared uncivilized, people categorized, marginalized, and then enslaved, regions conquered and demolished in the name of colonial progress. That may have been nearly three hundred years ago but colonial-era rules continued to linger in the contaminated air of Lucknow.
A city that once worshipped the practice of consuming nihari ‘nahar-mooh’ - first thing in the morning - now turned to pancakes and bacon strips. A city whose tourism industry once depended upon the Imambaras now turned to the fancy and fast-developing areas of Gomtinagar. A city that once witnessed young women and men clad in chikankari was now filled with foreign commodities.
She had a special connection to the city and contrary to her family’s belief, it emerged not from her obsession with historical places and half-broken monuments but because of the memories she associated with these places. To her belief, the air in Lucknow itself had a certain intoxication which constantly lured its people to the different aspects of the city. Whether it was boating in the Gomti river, strolling through the markets of Hazratganj, performing Eid prayers at the Bara Imambara, or simply discovering the old city’s culture and heritage through her grandparents and their siblings. Everything about Lucknow was an addictive variable that once gained experience with could never be taken out of the equation.
In fact, one of her favorite things about the capital of Uttar Pradesh was Chowk - the central region of the ancient city. Earlier, it used to be a brothel where knights and nobility of the Nawabs used to spend their drunken evenings enjoying mujras and placing bets in efforts to prove their superiority. It was the marketplace of all traditional goods including spices, cloth, and a wide variety of commodities ranging from dry fruits to paan daans (containers storing betel leaves and their assortments) to slaves.
Now, however, Chowk was home to narrow streets lined with clothing stores, jewelry shops, and small rooms in which stout men would sit on planks of wood and confirm large orders for flowers (and hard drugs) that were used in weddings and lavish parties thrown by politicians. Times had changed; the victorian era architecture was falling apart, the streets and lanes within the area choked with garbage, and men, women, animals, plants, and all beings that could possibly fit within the ecosystem lived in a primordial state. Still, however, Chowk’s prosperity never faltered.
Outside the Gol Darwaza sat a lineage of doctors who, despite their popularity, had accidentally prescribed the wrong medicine to several patients - resulting in their deaths. However, they continued their practice with the utmost confidence. Adjacent to the clinic sat an old man in his tiny shop and sold betel leaf after betel leaf to customers entering the Gol Darwaza who would spit out the remains of the paan merely four shops later on a wall that was inherently stained.
She reminisced about having kulfi with her family from the dirty thela in Chowk on a winter night. How at least twelve of them fell out of the car like pearls breaking off of an old necklace, how they shuddered in the chilly air but continued to devour the malai kulfi-falooda that would soon give them a brain freeze.
This is what the city meant to her. Besides the marketplaces and their oddly comical elements; every nook and corner of this magical capital had a special story behind it. Crumbling buildings, tobacco-stained walls, faulty electric wires hidden behind billboards, leaking water pipes, loyal street dogs, friendly shopkeepers, gawky rickshaw pullers, were all part the large cosmic realm that was Lucknow. Every place had a story, every story had a teller, every teller had a history and every history found a way to be accommodated within this realm.
Remembering this history, the girl recalled how a few years ago she had entered a shop in Aminabad for the sole purpose of buying Chikan kurtas. The shop was old and dimly lit with a dusty ceiling fan and torn, tea-stained white sheets atop wooden boards used by the salesmen to showcase the old pieces of clothing that no longer held anyone’s interest. As the shop’s ceiling wind-chime rang, an old woman sitting in the corner of the shop turned to face her. She observed her from top to bottom… from her toothy smile to the tightly held hand that seemed like her mother's to the mud-covered sandals on her feet. A few moments later, the old woman in the corner shot back a smile from her world to that of the young girl's.
Later, as her mother and the old shop owner sipped their teas in the shop, she told them about the world she had come from. How the life of marrying a man of age 45, having to raise children, and finally eloping with them was shoved down her throat by her helpless parents who were merely pawns within their backward society. But that was a life she had left behind and didn't want to look back at.
The woman smiled sweetly at the young girl, and patted her shoulder saying, “Do good things,” in Hindi, knowing that the concept of child marriage was slowly being washed down the drains of time and that the young girl would soon be able to lead a life of her own.
In a split second, the NRI was pulled out of her abyss of thoughts while the old woman’s words spun in her mind. She insisted that her mother pay the old paddle rickshaw driver a little more than what the ride had cost. And so she did.
While she stood on the land she had left when she was three, her mother walked towards the general store to buy some groceries. Freshly washed veggies lay beneath the light of bulbs hanging from the damp cloth between the grocery store on one side and a newspaper stand on the other. The headline of one newspaper read:
“END OF AN ERA:
THE DEATH OF NAIYER MASUD”
She had read the famous Lucknowi writer's book back at her school in the Middle East and remembered her family members sitting in a circle around the crackling fire, talking about the beauty, “Taus Chaman Ki Naina.” The book in one's hand, coffee slipping down a few throats and pashmina shawls tightly wrapped around most bodies.
His books held a mirror in front of his readers’ eyes that reflected the solace he and many others found in the Urdu language. He talked about things that often slid past an average human's sight. He was a man who had ink raging through his veins. A man with words etched onto his skin. A man who destroyed empty pages. While he was lucky enough to be recognized for his talent in the cataclysm that was Lucknow, the girl thought about the millions of other people who weren’t as fortunate; who tread the same path in the same city every single day in the hopes of some change - any change.
So this is what the 17-year-old wanted to do; to be more than just another person existing in just another city. To be someone who made a change - for those who could not and because of those who would not. To bring people together for the greater good, whatever that may be. While Lucknow breathed chaos every day, it was also the city where every story had its place; whether it was something that people held close to their hearts for the entirety of their lives or something that people expressed through their work as doctors, poets, writers, dancers, rickshaw-pullers, salesmen, entrepreneurs, flower-men, kulfi-wale, electricians, or anything else that their mind could create.
The City of Nawabs taught her how insanely humane all of us truly are. How none of us are permanent. How we are all skin and bones and beating hearts. How we will rust and burn and fade away, with the faith and hope that our souls could be what we could not; infinite. But most importantly, it taught her that while the rest of the world seethed in the turmoils of hatred, the city of Lucknow would always be about nazakat and pehle aap.
BY; FARVA NADIM
Comments