a trip to the city

The thing about a B-school campus is that it's so bloody ordered and snug, it can make you forget your actual location on the geographical face of the earth. So I decided to step out of the campus yesterday, and explore the city of Hyderabad, alone. I don't think I've ever travelled a city absolutely alone (except a little 10-minute auto ride in Pune), and I live in the perversely exciting morbid fear of being lost in a city I do not recognise. Seriously. My most frequent nightmares are about forgetting where I parked my car, as I trudge through an alien city full of frighteningly identical malls and kilmetres of dusty parking lots, with only groin-scratching mole-sporting shady parking attendants for help.

Interesting that, cuz yesterday was spent hopping from one cramped Hyderabad mall to another cuz it was too friggin hot to venture in non-Ac spots, however scenic they might be. I spent the entire morning researching all the city guides available online, and got mighty excited about lakes and nizami museums and Andhra sari exhibitions, and then decided they'd be wasted on a hot hot day and my consequent foul foul mood. ISB has one of those cool little shuttle buses that do the 15-odd km trip to Panjagutta, clearly important for being pretty close to the posh and not-so-posh areas of the city. After spending what seemed like a decade on deciding what to wear (happens, esp after a week of lounging around the house in your chaddis), I finally hopped onto one of those forenoon shuttles, which runs frightfully on time, even when empty - which it was, ferrying me, its sole passenger, across dutifully and with only a few disgruntled rear view mirror glares from the driver who could've spent a snoozy afternoon if not for this. And me.

Nevertheless, I spent the half hour ride pretending to read, but actually taking in whatever I could, of the city, in tennis-match style left to right swing of the head. Only to be hit by the fact that Hyderabad is one giant mine. It's a city sculpted out of rock and cliff. Everywhere you look, there are huge concrete and steel structures coming up, building fervently on what they could mine and clear out of the rocky landscape. And where their technology fails them, they leave the landscape as it is. So you have these mammoth boulders, arranged in peculiarly and particularly precarious balance, tottering threateningly cheek-by-jowl next to shiny glass and steel structures designed by men who clearly think Hi-Tech is a synonym for Space Age. In some places these boulders are numerous and so impossibly stacked that it all looks like nature's mad little quirk. A game of pitthu set up for a bunch of giants or something. I kept marvelling at these little islands of natural landscape, which looked so much like many many JNU Parthasarthy Rocks replicas, and wondered why Delhi's rocky ridge gave in to razing so pliantly while Hyderabad's ridge remains so grudgingly resilient. This is a city, the topography of which does not align itself to the typical city skyline. Even the posh areas like Banjara Hills have a parochial flavour, disrupted briefly by some monstrosity mall of steel and glass, or worse still, an NTR palace. And umm, I mean, a city with prime areas called Begumpet and Shaikhpet? In the only two languages I know, they would mean Nobleman/Queen's tummy or pooch. No wonder they had to invent a name like Hi-Tech city to compensate for that. And then build the entire shiny spaceship-y-ness of it.

For me, this is partly the charm of Hyderabad; it intrigued me the last time I visited a few years ago , even though I was here on a drink-all-u-can-dont-step-out-of-friend's-house trip: this stubborn refusal to lose all character in the face of metamorphosing from city to metro. I love a city in this transition phase - from the chaotic open-faced town-y shabby-ness to slick city facades that sport wide sweeping stretches, that billboard-beaming megacity of expressways, flyovers and rows and rows of megawatt streetlights that bathe the city in a glam night spotlight. Maybe this is lifelong fascination/ disease of revelling in the landscape of such adolescent cities was bequeathed to my generation, we who faced the twin rush of adolescence and post-liberalised India at one go. It comes from the trauma of that hormone-charged uncertainty of figuring out who the fuck you are, made doubly mad because suddenly, in that narrow swoosh between Chitrahaar and MTv, nobody could tell the difference anymore, between the world we lived and the one dreamed in. In a blink, almost, Delhi was not the sleepy city of empty streets during the Sunday Doordarshan matinee, of the rattling ambassadors and buses that trundled about on flyover-less roads once in a blue moon, or those Corbusier-hungover boxy buildings with honeycomb facades and glass windows inconceivable without thick iron jaali cladding. On the surface level this massive makeover happened before you could say 'globalisation', but if you actually get down to tracing how exactly it all happened, the only way to do it is let the painful detail spill, more often than not entwined with the tumultuous experience of growing up. In fact, now it's almost as if these dull, boring moments of our childhood are a hook to bond with fellow traumatised people of the generation, as we brag about whose nieghbourhood was the emptiest during Ramayana sunday mornings or screech nerdily, 'wasnt the Bombay chitrahaar on wednesdays always better than the Delhi one on Fridays?' We live to tell the tale, but I don't think we'll ever quite snap out of it and move on.

Moving from Hi-Tech City to Panjagutta, the Delhi-equivalent of which would be, I guess, Gurgaon to Karol Bagh, I wondered about my city. Would Delhi look less of a city-town than Hyderabad if its landmarks didn't have an umbilical relationship to events in my life? I don't mean the tourist spots, but its most mundane landmarks: bus stops, flyovers, markets, office buildings. Literally landmarks we use to map our way through; god knows how in a surreal world they often hold up little placards saying things as accurate and as petty as 'waited at the bus stop for that jerk for over an hour on a June afternoon 12 years ago'. Just a week away from this city, and I'm already getting autobiographical. Looks like for all its violent memories, I will return to Delhi again and again and again, no matter what city I move to - hell, even if I move to the moon. I guess then I'll finally truly stop cursing those lit critics who wrote essays the size of pillow covers on the loaded-ness of words like home, nostalgia, exile.

To shake off my Delhi hangover and get back to Hyderabad, oh well, Panjagutta is full of malls that look big on the outside and are teeny-tiny on the inside. Apart from this hideous gift, the architects of these malls are also adept at putting one-way escalators on random floors (like the second and fourth), so that you have to wait for the lift for a major part of your day if you don't chalk out an aggressively detailed plan for movement before hitting the mall; I recommend flow charts. Also showrooms here often advertise about thrice as much product range as they actually do offer; I went looking for kitchenware in a showroom that claimed a whole floor dedicated to it, only to find that this floor is fictional and exists only in well-designed, laminated wall hoardings.

But still, there's Food Bazaar. I bought three dinosaur-sized bag-fulls of groceries and utensils, and suffered their clang and clatter in a marathon auto ride that sliced through the longest underbelly-type suburb of Hyderabad and the hottest dullest 4 pm afternoon it has ever experienced, for about one and a half light years, until I had finally reached our student village, and paid what seemed like a six-inch wad of currency to the auto guy and thanked him for fleecing me. It took one whole day of comatose tivo-watching and muttering 'this is crap. why am i watching this' as finger stayed paralysed against the commonsensical action of pressing the red 'Off' button on the remote, to recuperate from that.

Now I have all the ingredients of all the cuisines I like, and the choices that present themselves for something a innocuous as cooking lunch are baffling the hell out of me. Suddenly I don't want to do anything but stare at the ceiling as I lie on the crisp white house-kept sheets. And so I pour out the workings of my addled brain onto this blog so that I can finally shake off the inertia, don my new bubblegum-pink kitchen gloves, and scrub away at the dishes I must dirty again when I cook, and then scrub again and then cook and thenscrubandcookandscrub. Sigh.