Chapter 1
The city of Hyderabad displays uniquely blended culture that bosoms the traditional cultural habits at the heart of it, and is constantly adorning the modernistic rituals. Hyderabad is a treasure hunt; every single lane in the city smells differently, the families living in those lanes epitomize the lane to the extent that the lane and the families become indistinguishable to a visitor. It is hard to tell if the lane acquired its air, authority and ownership of uniqueness from the families or if the families from the lane. As one attempts to dig deeper, one uncovers a chronological progression of uniqueness, the niche quality that the lane acquires over a period of time. It is not so much as the communion (of lane and families) progresses as time passes, but more of refining the uniqueness and displaying it outside. For any potential visitor, the communion bethinks it their responsibility to grant acquaintance to the visitor. And, this has to happen before the communion begins to confer the visitor with something inanimate and articulative, a representation of the unique communion.
The city’s main roads display cloaks of modernity, but one only has to make the slightest of an attempt to descend into the backstage and one falls prey to the beautiful archives. Here one finds the actors dipping their puffs into some viscous liquid before dabbing them against their cheeks; someone applies rouge over the layer of dried up viscous liquid. And all the actors step onto the stage every morning punctually, to enact their roles. But as soon as the day ends and all the play has ended, the actors cleanse their faces of the rouge and the city comes alive.
The streets and lanes rid off the foreigners (and the locals that have become foreigners in their own homeland), as the sun’s rays undergo a red shift, become organic. The housewives come out of their homes to chat with the neighbours, their husbands return from work, kids return from schools, and the streets are lit up by the lonely warriors-the street lamps.
Chapter 2
It was raining heavily outside. Water gushed out of the pot holes on the road, the sewage canals were incapacitated by the virtue of their inept construction and the murky water flew outside the canals on to the road. Johnny pulled out his disheveled hanky out of his blue denim trousers, held it by its diagonals, rolled it and covered his head with it, neatly tucking the diagonals of the hanky underneath his protruding ears. His shoes were rather heavy and the rain poured incessantly into the shoes as he stood on one end of the road eyeing both sides awaiting a momentary lapse in the tireless traffic of Hyderabad roads.
Johnny long hair, he sported a pony, presently the pony was becoming wet and heavy. His shirt hugged him in an embrace that would put two lovers on any planet to shame. It was as if his body was creating vacuum, and the shirt collapsed into the vacuum that was his body. Vehicles shot past him with screeching noise, honking horns violently as everybody hurriedly throttled their bikes to reach home, to sit in the comfort of their homes. Johnny stepped into the pool of water before him; he waved vigorously at the vehicles coming from either side to indicate that he was crossing the road. The incessant rain grudgingly perhaps, was beating him up, battering him with pounding energy as he crossed the road. Once he was on the other end of the road, Johnny galloped onto the raised platform that was home to good hundred or more bikers who had parked their two wheelers in the rain by the road side and were waiting under the green plastic roof that leaked here and there profusely. Johnny peeked into the café, it was teeming with men drenched wet with heavy boots and water dripping from their wet clothes. There was no place to sit, or even stand, for a lot of them were already standing and sipping the hot irani chai from the white china clay tea cups.
With his fingers numb and body shivering, his body jerked for a fleeting second with a spasm as he approached the pan shop. The radio or was it the tape recorder, was playing out songs from an old hindi movie of the eighties, and the man behind the counter was humming with mad soothing energy. The owner was a short man with capacious paunch, he was wearing a sleeveless green jockey t-shirt. The man’s beard was thick as a dense forest, he was rolling a pan with his nimble fingers for a customer who apparently was a friend of the owner, for he was cracking jokes on the man’s balding head.
Johnny bought a cigarattte and took a couple of deep drags out of it. He walked closer to the road and began smoking. The man in red uniform came out of the café to instruct the mirchi fellow to begin preparing. Johnny took the opportunity to order a cup of tea fro himself. He waited for the man to show up while he saved his cigarette for the tea to arrive. the smell of mirchi must have had an infleucne on all the men soaked wet from the thunderous rain, for they all save for one ordered for mirchi. Johnny did not order, for he was waiting for his cup of tea.
An old man coughing vigorously, so much so that he was out of breath, was heaving with pain as he inhaled satisfyingly as the cough paused, and he leant his head in the direction of Johnny enquiringly. Johnny was confused, while Johnny froze in his thoughts; another avalanche of cough took over the old man, and he, in a mad bout of panting was offered a chair to sit on. The onlookers gasped in dismay as he went on coughing as if for an infinite time. Johnny’s tea arrived and he sipped out of his tea, while he regrettably eyed the cigarette in his hand. Only the vestiges of a once long white cylinder remained, there was nothing left save for the filter. Johnny disposed off the cigarette and sipped coffee with his wet hands still shivering from the wetness. As the hot irani chai entered his stomach, he felt a sudden suffusion of energy, and as if in jubilation, he approached the pan wala and smoked his last cigarette for the day.
And, it stopped raining; all the two wheelers took to the road instantaneously. Curiously enough, within five minutes, the once teeming café now looked desolate. Only the old man and Johnny were left outside the café. Johnny troubled by the intensity of the vacuum the he felt, went and sat inside the café. There were signs everywhere inside that displayed the revised prices for tea and coffee from so and so date. Johnny read out the menu that was painted on the dark brown wall to his side. Water seeped from the roof and was dripping all the four sides of the café wet. And the already illegible menu was spoilt to the core by the water that cleansed off the paint and the layer of paint soaked wet was now bulging out as if it were wood. Patches of layer fell off the walls here and there,
The hundred watt bulbs suspended from the roof barely lit the whole café. The corner of the café where all the men in red uniform were presently gathering to have irani chai themselves was in utter darkness. One of the waiters shared a bit of acquaintance with Johnny. The waiter approached Johnny as if he was about to blurt out a secret that he could not contain. Johnny greeted him with a smile. They talked about the rain and how it makes the waiter nervous, for his home was in one of the low lying areas, down stream the city’s infamous musi canal. He was worried that the rain might cause musi to overflow, cut across the banks and inundate his home. His wife was pregnant and that it was almost inconceivable to think that he could move into a makeshift home across the city.
Chapter 3
The old man dropped with a thud and the pan wala yelled at the waiter inside. Johnny noticed this and rushed out. While all the waiters gathered around them, Johnny, his waiter friend and the pan wala lifted the old man up, one of the waiters checked the old man’s pulse and assured of his life. Johnny waved at a three wheeler automobile and all the waiters lifted him up with their bare hands and lodged him beside Johnny in the back seat. The waiter friend accompanied Johnny and the old man to the hospital. The three wheeler automobile whirred through the rain soaked muddy lanes.
While the auto driver, with all his might and energy, steered the vehicle away from pools of water on the muddy road, Johnny looked through the wide gaping hole in the curtain to his right side. the houses were all crowded up, there were too many of them
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