From Pujagutta Circle to the Mecca Masjid

Impressions from a Sunday Stroll
Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh
May 4, 2008

I was told that I couldn’t stay, and the panic that rose in my throat at the thought of going home was enough to raise my chest from the bed, enough to make me aware of each fold in the cool sheets behind my back when I let go, enough to realize where I had landed and how soon I was leaving. So I decide I would start walking. There aren’t many traffic lights here, let alone street corners (the words ‘city block’ usually draw a blank stare), so I couldn’t play the follow-the-green-light-game, but I bought myself an overly-intellectual adventure novel and shoved it in my bag and called a Cascadian friend and asked the clerk to point me and stepped into the shade and started strolling in the right direction, down the wrong side of the street. When I stopped to ask for assistance, for reassurance spaced a few kilometers apart, most people pointed to bus stands or asked the whereabouts of my motorbike – but I’ve found that if you smile broadly enough and walk away with the proper head bobbing and step springing and follow the fingers with the toes they point you in the right direction despite the incredulous tone behind the answer. The songs bubbled up – as they do when I’m happy (not laughing out load but overflowing internally with the giddy thought of my own existence) – and although they started under my breath they were soon swinging in the breeze –

The city’s changing, ‘cause we are changing,

And we’re all in this together…

[changed to, with a shift in the wind]

I open my mouth to the Lord, and I won’t turn back,

I will go! I shall go! To see what the end is going to be!

And as the white skullcaps multiplied the streets grew narrower and I passed a camel and an impossibly small horse pulling a wooden platform bearing darkly wrinkled men in purple plaid lungis (in addition to the normal traffic of autos to minivans and everything manufactured by Tata in between) and at one point the sometime-flagstone sidewalk was dyed red from the minerals seeping out of the green flaking doors of a street-side storage room and two men asked if I wanted a room and three khaki traffic cops waved me forward but only one 12-year-old voice called out as I passed: ‘madam, which country?’ I paused at the center but I didn’t stop because I love to concept ‘to meander’ but I was entranced by my destination, so the first thing that stopped me (after seven or eight or ten kilometers and only two blisters from my precious cracking Chacos) was the clearly palatial dome of the hospital. I turned right and leaned against a waist-high wall and hid behind a bush and covered my hair (or shaded my head) with a white scarf that I purchased in Jew Town in Cochin but baptized in dance class in Secunderabad. This was the beginning of the curlicues.

I wandered past the waiting patients (waiting in the shade, not waiting for a doctor) past the reserved parking spots (for doorways that looked permanently closed but a garden that might have been recently trimmed) past a man reclined along the steps of a podium leading nowhere, a heavy worn book in his hands. I stood on the edge of the nowhere raised platform and looked across a small deserted street and a wide abandoned canal to the smooth succession of domes that I imagined held an ancient house of worship, but which (after going over the ‘river’ and through the stench wearing the mask of an idyllic late afternoon sunlit view) I soon realized topped the home of the high court of Andhra Pradesh. The gates were open on one side but locked on the other for Sunday so a surly young guard had to open the padlock from inside the compound to let me out past a Hanuman statue bearing unusually garish kissable lips.

I retraced to follow the crowd and it snuck up on me: the endless piles of bangles and pastel cotton baby shirts and sequined chiffon saris draped down garage doors, black burqas with bright beading, kitchen utensils pre-aged from the grime of transport and too many touches, pickpockets with wide eyes and autos inching and children running. I walked past the gateway to the city, past piles of books in a long curling letter with pink and gold covers whose proprietors I trusted not to harass me so I followed their directions and found myself in front of a pigeon paradise, followed my bare feet past small raised marble tombs (one decorated and attended), followed the Hindu tourists to the outer edge of the prayer hall where blasts were heard last May because the dissidents from Far Away think that a city born of mixed religions is the perfect canvass on which to have their grievances painted. I curled my fingers through the metal caging that descends down the open façade of the Mosque and leaned my face against the diamond openings, watching the patterns in the bowing, the rows of heels pointed back and away, foreheads forward and above great (glass?) chandeliers wrapped in dirty white cotton quilted dust covers.

So I sent a piece of a prayer in or up or out and as the men filed past the lean security guard with the peaceful pretty face I disengaged my fingers and followed the pricking matt across the piercingly hot smooth flagstones to the water where the setting sun was bathing with the forearms of an elderly worshipper released form his tasks. When the light left, I followed it, and when the fluorescents flickered on to reflect in the tiny mirrored shards next to my head I finished my tea and the tea finished its biscuit and together we squeezed past the glitter and the oncoming army vehicle’s flapping front flags and boarded our own set of wheels home through the back allies past the infinite miniature groceries and the singular Big Bazaar, past the Hussain Sagar and its towering cornstalk Buddha to a bookshelf we’ll be stacking and a wardrobe I’ll be packing in one month’s time. And I thought of the morning’s panic, but I couldn’t find it in my throat (or my stomach, where it might have lodged on another day, or if I had remembered to eat lunch that afternoon), so I closed some curtains and watched the reflection of my face in the black glass behind the water filter, sliced softly by iron curling bars and patterned with beige plastic mosquito screens and realized that the wandering day – as wandering days would – had led me back to the place I should have started from.

The photos that accompany (tell) this story are available on my Picasa account (click on the photo icon on the right) in an album titled ‘Hyderabad: The Old City (vs. new clothes).’ Another recent photo album, ‘The British Residency’ is worth checking out if you are curious about Hyderabad’s history, ancient doll houses, or The White Moghuls.