People move; in search of survival, progress, ambition and change. People
arrive in a place, own the place with their routine: like visiting a grocery
store every other day or frequenting a meat shop every weekend – they let their
routine smear a place with their footsteps.
In search of progress, my father arrived in Hyderabad on a
fateful day in May 2001. Clinging to our belief in dad’s superpower and mom’s
reaffirmations in positivity, I and my brother arrived too – wide-eyed, gaping
at this city and its constituents with a never-before wonder in our minds and
fear in our eyes. Wonder for having never seen such a bustling city and fear for
the possibility of drowning in its hustle and bustle.
Days wore by and we settled into a routine – intercepted by
events that now we reminisce with a touch of nostalgia and a rusty taste on our
tongues. In Hyderabad, it so happened my dad chose this characteristic neighborhood
called Malakpet.
Being quite at an insulated distance from the city’s gentrifying
neighborhoods at the turn of the millennium, Malakpet, like how it has a lazy
ring to its name, has stood up as an emblem of the city’s much-romanticized
charm - with people taking their own
sweet time to start their business hours into late afternoons and mildly sweaty
evenings with underaged boys selling flasked chai, wandering from street to
street.
It’s only in retrospect these things are occurring to me – because
back in the day, I and my brother were busy leading our respective pubescent
and prepubescent lives that revolved around our mom’s daunting and dosas, totally ignorant to the
neighborhood’s charm and character.
Slowly time passed, and we moved across a couple of blocks,
still part of Malakpet and a new chapter began with that relocation. I gained
new friends, they showed me new alleys, abandoned playgrounds, and charming cafés.
It so became a part of us to stop at a café to enjoy a
hurried cup of chai before bringing back my mom’s saree from a drycleaner store
and to climb up the abandoned Raymond’s Tomb’s highwalls to reach the former
French General’s memorial ground and bring out the hidden pints from our
pockets and drink to the city’s lights at dusk.
Handful of friends scattered in and around Malakpet gave
place to stashed memories in different backlanes at different times of the day –
I only remember (and retained) a few friends now, but I vividly remember how carefree
I felt while riding on Malakpet’s lanes to meet those friends and back.
I joined college and the perimeter of my friends’ houses
extended beyond Malakpet to other neighborhoods in town. With new friends,
outings increased and that’s when I discovered what a beautiful city I have
belonged to and how unique is it in itself.
And then career surfaced into picture. I got busy in making
a place for myself in the race. I grew to financially support my indulgences
and that opened whole new directions to explore. New directions had new people in
them and I waved my way through – stopping at each waving and spending a portion
of life. All this while, Malakpet lurked in the backstage, silently being there
as a neighborhood that still felt home at the end of the day by offering a
homelike familiarity of its cafés and laziness – whenever (means, almost every day)
I felt I was drifting away from where I belonged to.
Career progressed well for quite some time and then I found
my wife. She still tells me how I went on and on about Malakpet when I first
took her to the neighborhood, with a glint of ownership in my eye and a sense
of ‘at-home’ in my droop and gaunt.
And so, recently, I moved to elsewhere to find a new footing
in life. I weighed in practical factors like distance and the associated
distress because of commuting from Malakpet to work and back and so, I have
moved to a new neighborhood. Quite distant from Malakpet and has quite a
character to itself – for its own reasons and follies.
I have been visiting my parents on most weekends ever since
I moved here. Weekends in Malakpet – that still gives me a chance to sit in cafés
and slurp tepid cups of chai on stained saucers. I look left and right while ambling
down the road to fetch my mother a sheet of tablets and I see one old clock
store being replaced by a funky, modern furniture store, one more café giving
way to an outlet of global chain of bakeries.
I sigh, and I remember – it’s the Malakpet I have been familiar
with and will be increasingly unfamiliar, one new store at a time.
