“It would take a man from outside years to fit in here. It would take a decade of hanging around helpless among the plazas, navigating the stinking dark lanes in an attempt to make sense of his surroundings. And if he stuck around too long, his grave would be marked among the many who had come, and lost themselves here, the English, the Normans, the Persians, the Turks, and more recently, the Bengalis, the Punjabis and the Marwadis. Or if it were to his liking, be burnt in the Hindu manner and let his remains be washed away in the same river the leather mills emptied their filth into, and depressed high school students would jump into, and fishermen would find buffalo calves and deformed monkey babies in their nets.
The sellers of kebabs and meatloaf, greasy potato “tikkis”, roast corn cobs spiced with lime, and the sellers of beetle leaf, and cigarettes, and alcohol, and mints, came together in the square, and drank cheap sugary black tea together, all taking shelter in the colonnade while the rain dripped down the eaves and trickled into the runnels by the street, and the urchins ran across the street, newspaper wrapped around their shriveled bodies.
Of loving the birds, the trees, the people, the language. Which he reminded himself, were all in a state of flux. The Siberian white crane used to fly above the city every winter, according to the old newspapers columns.
Of the electric cables that clouded the entrance of a lane like an evil bird’s nest, the memsaabs and the government babus who couldn’t bear the heat in these quarters (and yet could not do without the street food and the cheap ethnic wear sold here), and yelled at the traffic, blessing the world with a cool perfumed air-conditioned gust that made the beggar boy smile and wipe their window screen with greater joy.
Of the old ladies, who bore titles only their grandmothers could have made sense of, on the top floors of decaying havelis, who would stretch out on their little balconies, and fan themselves, taking in all they could of the occasional passerby.
Of practising his English with the Americans who studied Urdu at the university, who admired the stitching on his tattered kurta cuffs, and hung on to his every word in search of obscure words he had heard in his childhood, and laughed at his Bush impersonations .
Of then going to see the girl at the bookstore, in her elegant blue chiffon salwar. And looking up at her from the pages of the illustrated Persian epics illuminated ages back here in the city, and asking her to read out unpronounceable names from the catalog, and reveling in the music of her voice.
Of then retreating to his room to read from the epics and the fantasies and the romances of old, the poets who set his blood on fire, the battles that were fought on the river side, and the very streets he walked, sometimes hungry, sometimes contemplating contemporaneous accounts from Afsany Nikalovich Petrov, the biologist from Kursk, who had observed, like a candid creature from Mars, the city, before and after its destruction, and who had joined the rebels out of pure curiosity, to document their side of the story.
On his attempts at writing the novel that speaks of the splendors of another age, the djinns and the fakirs, the princesses and the song-birds and the court eunuchs and the court poets, and the last of a species of beasts, lowing miserably at the onslaught of cannon on the city walls.
Of then being driven out by his screeching aunt out onto the street again, laughed at by the neighborhood for his wretched wastrel ways, and smoking with the wretched rickshaw-pullers of the quarter, and then, running drunk around decaying buildings with the depressed literature student he’d met at the lawyers’ protest rally(what a droll spectacle that was), and collapsing in a wine-induced euphoria, that the poets of the Ming era would envy.
Of the early morning clamor of kids around the block, who passed the quarter on their way to work, or school, or cyber cafes, and spoke no longer of films and books and cigarettes and girls, but of prime time American TV series, and computer games, and their Internet lives.
Of feeling old and out of place, in the most outmoded quarter of the old city.
