Chapter 1 – Decay

I am standing outside Lucknow Airport, trying to spot a smoker. Those ban-chos at Delhi took away my lighter, even the second one that I usually hide within the folds of my wallet just before I walk through the electronic threshold; in case they discover the one that’s placed behind the belt buckle.

The cigarette is already out, tucked, waiting to be lit – a ritual I have found to be of some comfort in the interim while the restless eyes hunt for a savior. Two young men – I’d call them a couple anywhere else other than India so tightly are their hands clasped and swinging merrily – brush rudely past me at first, then turn around and ask in a suspicious whisper if I want a taxi. I ask them if they have a matchbox. Irritated, they move on.

This is Naipaul territory, all of it. I see his ‘stunted’ men, his ‘insect’ people; I see them everywhere, in groups or on their own, some down on their haunches with a broom in hand, chatting, staring, soliciting, scolding, scratching their balls, perched on tin trunks – “Tin trunks! At an airport!” thinks the scandalised Dilliwaala – looking into the distance. I realize later, thinking back of the bazaar -like scene, that only very few cities in India have airports that appear radically different from their railway stations. It takes decades of planning and years of political interference to achieve this distinction. An airport is a status symbol for a city, a railway station just a blot, an unsightly hideous scar that must be kept hidden deep within the inaccessible centre of the city, while the airport gets to breathe the sparse and relatively healthy air of the outskirts.

A man is coming directly towards me with his huge VIP – he’s going to run me over. But he doesn’t. At the last second he raises his hand to his mouth, and through the Churchill salute ejects a neat parabola of dull red, that lands perfectly – without disintegrating – into the plastic drum just by my side. I had missed the plastic drum as it was of the same colour as the wall, dull red. Everything here is coloured dull red, an ideal camouflage for what here is a favourite pastime.

Finally I spot a taxi driver lighting up a beedi. I drag my suitcase towards him, having decided that I would, as his reward, take his taxi. He is sitting on the high footpath beside his Esteem – all four doors are wide open – as though his car needs some sun and air – and reading a quarter-folded Hindi newspaper. He sees me coming and looks up, notices the dangling cigarette, and rummages his Nehru jacket pocket for the matchbox.

“CDRI,” I say lighting up.

“Ji?”

“CDRI…Chattar Manzil.”

“Baithiye,” he says and gets up, dusting his behind with the newspaper. I am so thankful, with the first few drags in, that I decide not to haggle for the fare.

The man can drive! We are zipping through the outskirts, with Switti Switti Switti keeping us energised. Soon, we pass by the shrouded elephants, hundreds of them. They look cute. The park, that park, endlessly debated and derided by the media, is, to my surprise, not a sore sight at all. Alright, it isn’t the Mughal Gardens, but then who nowadays is allowed to stroll in the Mughal Gardens for crying out loud, unless it’s the President or the aam admi stripped to the underwear with all his life’s possessions taken away from him and deposited in the cloak room? Here, I can see people wandering about the great open space. No one seems to notice the elephants. The open space really is immense, it goes on and on for miles. The wandering men and maalis are like tiny ants on a desert pilgrimage. Yes, that’s it! The endless sandstone playground, the near complete absence of trees and foliage, brings to mind that scene in Bugsy, where Warren Beatty is standing in the middle of the Nevada desert shouting at the wind: “One day I’ll build a great city here, you watch!” Casinos or Dalit pride -your choice.

I ask the driver about the elections. “Sabne loota…” he says, then seems lost. I decide not to carry on with the conversation and look out the window. Everywhere there are hoardings, some of BSP, some of SP, but mostly – a surprise – of the Election commission, asking people to come out and vote. There are posters at every chowk, but the colour somehow is missing. The city seems exhausted. It has passed through so many ‘phases’ – and two more to come – that it seems its hormones are all spent. People look tired. They don’t want to indulge a visitor in some political conversation, some masala gossip. I catch a glimpse of the famous Hazratganj, the shopping mall built by the British and a hunting ground of the rich and famous of Lucknow for generations. The media has been complimentary of the Mayawati government for the way in which this Lucknow heritage has been spruced up; new signages, parking slots, Victorian lampposts, cobbled footpaths…the local press thinks this largesse, after all the negative publicity from the Ambedkar parks, will win her a lot of voters. Voters after all are easily swayed – all it takes is planting Victorian lampposts where none previously existed.

I pay the fare, say goodbye to the taxi driver, climb three flights of stairs of the Guest House and enter my room. One look at the toilet and I am out again on the street, pinching and unpinching my phone touch-screen for a better view of the google map. Having found my bearings, I decide to walk to Hazratganj.

Lucknow! So much in the news lately, so much a backdrop for all the political shenanigans, all the schemes, everything that has made it appear as a seat of power (“Lakhnou ki kursi say Dilli ki gaddi”), a worthy prize for whoever comes through the UP mud bath splattered but unscathed. Lucknow, that city of culture, of forgotten manners and mannerisms – the Lakhnavi andaz, of kings and nawabs and tunde kebabs. And here I am, walking slowly towards its heart, Hazratganj, its pride and joy, a pride once lost but now supposedly regained.

It’s a wreck. All of it. The Victorian lampposts have shades missing, the spittoons are overflowing, the bricked pavements don’t follow the pattern to the full and are uneven and dangerous, the shop signs are not uniform (they were meant to be, it’s obvious, but there’s always someone who wants a larger, brighter sign, a different font – the pioneer – and then it starts), the traffic is calamitous, the air stale, there are half-eaten kachauris and chaat papri pattals everywhere, wires and cables festoon the walkways, beggars and lepers lie sprawled by the shop entrances. The buildings are freshly coated with yellow lime no doubt, but barely able to hide the sad, jugaru architecture, those cruel additions and subtractions to the heritage buildings we see everywhere. But here especially it hits you, for the original buildings are beautiful and well planned out, with intricate archways of the first floor veranda veiled by burlap or chic and louvres flanking window casements.

I enter a bookshop, one of only two I could spot in the whole of Hazratganj. The air inside is at once cool and inviting, and also familiar; a musty lazy ambience one encounters at places long past their glory days. Books are everywhere, on the floor, on side tables, on the counter; but I get the impression they’ve been dumped not arranged. The bookshelves are not groaning, they are collapsing. I am looking for Beyond the Beautiful Forevers, just to find out what the fuss is all about. The owner, who bears a striking resemblance to Kaifi Azmi, hasn’t heard of the book or the author. I tell him she has spent four years in a slum. He says, bringing down the fly swatter with practiced ease, “I have spent fifty, so what.” He might have summed up in one sentence what many Indians feel about such books and films, no matter how well written or praiseworthy they may be.

“Yay parri hai?” he says, lifting Lucknow Boy from the top of its book-column. I say yes, fearful of what might happen if I don’t acknowledge having read and liked the daring adventures of the perennial panelist.

“Bahut chal ruhee hai…kyaa likhtay hain. Lucknow ka karz adaa kar diya hai unhonain.”  Such high praise, and so beautifully rendered! It is an obvious attempt to start a conversation on Vinod Mehta. But I desist; I have to try Shukla Ki Chaat and then somehow get to CDRI. I come out of the bookshop, prepare to walk on, but something in me, I don’t know what, makes me stop and turn around. Perhaps my brain is looking for that one word that would describe the bookshop  – brains do that, in their free time, hunt for single words that sum up our experiences. And so, standing outside the bookshop, soaking it in, I get that word. Decay.

Decay. It’s a beautiful word, layered and much more complex than you might think at first glance. Its usage is meant to nudge your memories, invoke nostalgia, recollect a bit of history. Like a striking photograph that forces you to think of the precise moments just before and just after it was clicked – a perfect and true slice – and in this singular attribute so different from a running film – the word ‘decay’ carries with it the history and the tragedy of the place. A decaying building; it was so beautiful once. A decaying culture; it was the envy of the world at one time. For something to decay it has to have been great once. The streets don’t decay, trains and buses don’t decay; they are simply ‘filthy’ or ‘crummy’ or ‘disgusting.’ A kingdom, a culture, a building, a way of life, a bookshop, a city decays. And for this reason, this reason alone, I find Hazratganj suddenly palatable, endearing. That bookshop and the imagining of its once great and busy life, of readers and enthusiasts coming in and out, chatting up the proud owner, of book-readings, its young and welcoming bookshelves – all these imaginings have made its present sorry state hazy and pardonable. The bookshop has decayed, but so what, decay is a beautiful thing!

And now, with a completely fresh nazaria of the filthy state around me, I cheerfully negotiate kachauris and dog poo and chaat pattals and gobar, side-stepping gobs of phlegm and irregular pavement stones, and march fearlessly towards the waiting cavalry of cycle rickshaws.  “Chattar Manzil?”

At once there is forceful patting of taut rexene seats, in preparation of a customer’s bottom, like a fruit vendor who continuously lobs a spinning papita so it can be admired by the undecided buyer. Out of a primeval concept of caring, or just plain empathy, I choose the old man and his rickety rickshaw. A big mistake. Halfway through our journey, he starts to cough so severely and mightily that I think his death is imminent, perhaps even before the journey’s end. Selfishly – terrible, awful – I begin to think of tuberculosis, first of MDR (multiple drug resistant), shortly followed by XDR (extremely drug resistant), and topped off with TDR (totally drug resistant). Aman Sethi’s A Free Man has opened my eyes. Researching this bug while wearing astronaut suits, is not the same thing as breathing the air exhaled by someone whose innards are being slowly ravaged by this bastard.

Thankfully the coughing subsides and the magnificent chattar of Chattar Manzil comes into view. Feeling terrible at having taken a rickshaw at the first place (“Exploiter of starving men!” “Slave driver!” “Zola’s villain!” “Thoughtless oaf!” “Capitalist!”), I offer the old man double the quantity of crumpled and paan-stained ten rupee notes he’d asked for earlier. He takes the money and rubs the notes between the thumb and forefinger in a way that suggests he is admonishing me. It is admonishment alright, for he says, “Aap log nahin baithaingain to hum khaaingain kya? Khansi to hoti rehti hai.” Fuck.

Chapter 2 – Ruin

Soon after independence, when buildings were being hunted by men who were sincere but bureaucrats nonetheless, to accommodate benches and tables and equipment for carrying out scientific studies, some cruel man suggested Chattar Manzil. Sixty years of doing science in the service of the nation has taken its toll. The two buildings have become sorry caricatures of their glorious past, too painful to stand in front of and gaze at. Cables of all lengths and girths snake around the walls and drain pipes and, as usual, disappear to where no one can find them again. The front of the palace lies unseen, ‘decaying,’ while the entry to the building is from the back a la Taj, Mumbai. The approach to what is now the main access is lined with ‘Gents and ‘Ladies’, but because these facilities don’t have exhaust fans to take the stench away, their entrances have swinging saloon doors, the kind you see in old westerns. Better out than in.

The main portico, a beautiful structure in itself, where Ambassadors and government vehicles used to come screeching under and doors were opened with flourish and closed with force, is not there anymore. It collapsed a few months ago, completely, crushing an Ambassador and a government vehicle in the process. It is not decay, it is not ruin, it is simply gone!

Claude Martin’s home, which still has its original eighteenth century Italian tiles to admire, is now the VIP Guest House. The swimming pool, that still has a diving platform or at least steps leading up to it, is now the canteen. The damage and cruelty to the buildings is much more in witness when one dares to venture inside. My painful tour, given me by a friend, is at an end. These, then, are not ruins, these are cruelties and acts of vandals. The only areas of the complex that haven’t succumbed to the madmen, that haven’t been violated, are the areas that are for the most part inaccessible, like the main chattar and the smaller octagonal pillared canopies of Martin’s house. You can look at them and cry, they don’t mind. They’ve seen it all.

To see a real ruin, and not just decay, I skip a few lectures and visit the nearby Lucknow Residency, the building complex where the Brits used to stay and scheme. Now there’s a ruin! And astonishingly, the place is well kept: manicured lawns, nice clean walkways, friendly staff, even a museum.

A walk across the whole compound gives you goose bumps, and by the end you realize that it’s the state of ruin that does it, just like the state of decay. A complete building, howsoever beautiful or spectacular, doesn’t manage to recreate the history of its period the way a ruin can. Walking in and out of the houses and rooms and banquet halls of the complex instantly brings to life a vision of how they might have been ruined. What led to all this devastation, this mayhem? Did a sepoy barge into a roomful of petrified Brits and began to poke them with his bayonet one by one? And here, right here, under this great bargad tree, did those victorious Englishmen, their eyes bloodshot with revenge, did they hang our forefathers en masse, or did they pace the hangings to get maximum enjoyment out of them? The drama of destruction, of a siege, of a terrible battle where so many died or were butchered, is so vividly being thrown up by the restless mind that I have to stop for a few minutes under the shade and contemplate whether it’s a good idea to carry on.

While on the way out I ask the man at the entry gate of the whereabouts of the graveyard – the English graveyard. Out of interest I want to read the tombstones of the men and women who had had their fate sealed, literally, during those terrible months of 1857, for, truth be told, I had detected some acid in the inscriptions on the memorials that were scattered all around the building complex. They only talked of ‘heroic battles’, and ‘valor’ and ‘honour and victory’, with little thought for the hundreds of Indians who had either helped them fight their own brothers or were ‘the enemy’ but had fought bravely to their deaths. For example, a memorial stone, in typical dryness, simply mentions ‘Lucknow 1857’ under a couple of other victories the English had achieved though sly and craft.

“Aaj to bund hai…murammat chal rahi hai.”

“Oh,” I say, a little disappointed.

“Phir kabhi dekhiyega – bahut maara tha saalon ko, phir yahin dafna diya.” There is a kind of jollity in the guard’s voice when he says this, as if an English graveyard, in the heart of India, was mission accomplished. We might have ultimately lost the battle and paid a monumental price over the ensuing hundred years for having started it, but, behen chodon, we chopped a thousand of you that day alright, didn’t we, hain, the guard seems to suggest. History, I realize then, howsoever badly taught, howsoever twisted or mangled or rearranged by the victors, squeezes through in the end, and right or wrong, is vital for a man’s sense of placement, his sense of belonging. We pass through history as we pass through phases, waiting for the bad phase to pass and the good phase to come. We never seem to learn from history, we only seem to remember it. These thoughts, and the gurgling WC, keep me awake all through my first night in Lucknow.

Nowadays, the real acid test, the true agnipariksha if you will, for the wellness of any city is the state of your nose-pick and the contents of page 3 the following morning. The page 3, or Lucknow Times, however, is all of four pages. And therein, within the paltry fold, lies a pleasant surprise. There are no bare midriffs or thunder thighs or eight packs to titillate you; in fact, the damn thing seems to have been written and managed by an auntie, for an auntie. It is almost as though some kind soul has done his duty and flicked the channel to DD Bharti while you were enjoying Nine and a half weeks. The talk is only of weddings and wedding receptions. A sample, names withheld: “…guests kept coming in and groom’s father Mr. ____ along with wife Mrs. ____ greeted everyone while the bride’s father Mr. ____ along with his wife Mrs. ____ ensured everyone was looked after.” Apart from the fact that a war has been declared on the comma, the proceedings seem to have been faithfully described. Hurray for narrative journalism!

One can safely assume that Lucknow parents readily let their kids fetch the paper every morning, happy that no serious harm can come to their loved ones from these supplements. I wish, as the father of an impressionable boy, that I was living in Lucknow. The minute-by-minute reportage of a wedding is any day less fretful than a lively description of Paris Hilton’s wardrobe malfunction.

On the flight back to Delhi, as I look down on the throbbing and twinkling Lucknow lights, a disturbing thought strikes me. Why do I worry so much about ruins and decay and preservation and crowds and filth and traffic and fumes and ways of life different from mine, hain? – when science tells us we are nothing but children of a chance event and everything is transitory? Here I am, a thousand feet above the earth, a speck flying in a speck over a speck that is part of a system of specks which itself is just one of trillions of specks that dot our universe that, if the boffins are right, could well be a speck in a multiverse. What self-importance, what self-aggrandizement, what conditioning, what monumental folly!

Nothing is meant to last, for everything was created through chance. Why worry about the state of a two hundred year old palace, about a hundred year old shopping mall, when their intended purpose was to give momentary peace and calm to their owners and make their lives – not ours – more comfortable? They did their job and have retreated, like a good butler. Why fret about a ‘way of life’ when there are a million ways of life? There is nothing more antithetical to the concept of the universe than to give order to it, so why worry when you can’t possibly violate the second law of thermodynamics?!

But no! I want a good ruin, a decent decay. I am forever hunting for ‘a purpose and order to life’ when all I was meant to do was to procreate and live my life in relative comfort, just like E. coli. I forget that I am perfectly capable of procreating and living comfortably in total chaos too.

The eighteenth century European concepts of intelligence and superiority of a mechanized society have ingrained in us this dirty habit of forever comparing intelligences, among people, among societies, among cultures, even among animals. Anyone who didn’t know how to cock a rifle or sip tea from a porcelain cup was a ‘bloody savage!’ Little has changed since, except that the rifle and the cup have been replaced by a fighter jet and an iphone. We still condemn societies and sit in judgement over ‘ways of life.’ Well, let those who call others savages try and survive in a dense forest for a day, where what will save you is not an iphone but a poison-tipped arrow.

I realize, finally, that a city, its beauty, its culture and heritage, comes only from the people who live in that city and not from its public transport system or airports and railway stations. These are mere beauty spots that come and go like passing phases. A city can’t survive if its people don’t. And human nature is such that people will always survive, they will always flourish and blossom come what may. They never decay. So fuck the buildings and the roads and the ruins; Lucknow, for your people and for your way of life, I love you.

This article first appeared in newslaundry on Mar. 02, 2012.