The Colour of Blur

Lucknow, the city of Nawabs, sits right in the heart of the Awadh, eastern part of today’s Uttar Pradesh. A living example of the famous Ganga Jamani Tahzeeb, or composite culture, the place is a riot of colours, a melange of mouth-watering delicacies, and melting pot of cultures.

In ‘My Indian Mutiny Diary’ (1957 pp57–58), William Russel’s describes the city as:

“A vision of palaces, minars, domes azure and golden, cupolas, colonnade, long faced of fair perspective in pillar and column, terraced roofs – all rising up amid a calm and still ocean of the brightest verdure. Look for moles and miles away, and still the ocean spreads, and the towers of the fair-city gleam in its midst. Spires of gold glitter in the sun. Turrets and gilded spheres shine like constellation. There is nothing mean or squalid to be seen. There is a city more vast than Paris, as it seem, and more brilliant lying before us. Is this the city of Oudh?”

Of course the British, after the surrender of last Nawab Wajid Ali Shah surrendered in 1856 added colonial architecture, mostly in Gothic style to the city.

Wanting to visit the city? Here is a local’s guide to the town in a 2 day itinerary!

Minimum 2 days are required for Lucknow. Here’s how you can make the most of the time:

1. Bada Imambara- that’s a religious place so cover yourself well. Do watch the Baoli and Bhul Bhulaiya inside.

2. Next to that is Chhota Imambara, a 5 minute walk. Do both in the day. You will pass by Rumi Darwaja so that too is taken care of!

Beautiful Fact: Nawab Asifuddaula built Bada Imambara in 1780 to help people of Awadh fight famine! He employed everyone who needed employment and thus emerged the saying: Jisko na de maula, usko de Asifuddaula! (Those whom even God does not provide for, Nawab Asifuddaula provides for them!)

3. Then go to the La Martiniere College founded in 1845 and a really beautiful architectural marvel.

4. Residency: Residency was the abode of the British Resident. It witnessed very heavy fighting and a slaughter of the British residents during 1857 uprising and got almost completely demolished. Go there in the afternoon and stay for light and sound show- that explains Lucknow’s history rather beautifully!

5. Then go to Hazaratganj in the night and walk around! There’s a proper word for that- Ganzing! Watch beautifully lit Vidhansabha and so on! Have your dinner at Royal Cafe, Idrees Biryani or Falaknuma restaurant or Tunday Kababi. End your day with Prakash Kulfi.

Day 2: Start your day with Sharma ji ki chai (also in Hazratganj). Do try their Gol Samosa only place in the world having round Samosas!

From there it becomes a little tricky depending upon what you like more: you can go to Ambedkar Park and have your lunch at SHEROES- a restaurant run by acid attack victims. Then you can head to Chowk, the heart of real Lucknow! Do your shopping in Aminsbad- Dont forget to buy Chicken clothes and Jutis.

Food: Avoid 1090 chauraha, it is basically worthless in sense of a Lucknow visit for an outsider. It is a street food point serving a variety of cuisines from Awadhi to Chinese, I would go there if I want to have Chowmein not anything Lucknowi!

For real Lucknow food you need to go to Chowk and Hazratgunj: just noticed that you are pure veg so you can explore these- Royal Cafe for best Basket Chat in town, Nimish for Daulat ki Chat, Ratti Lal’s Khasta Kachori in Maqbool Ganj, Prakash ki Mashoor Kulfi in Aminabad, Sheermal in any famous shop in Chowk, Sardar ji Ke Mashhoor Cholle Bhature in Lalbagh (right opposite Sharma ji ki Chai, Raja Thandai, Imarati Rabri in Moti Mahal, Bajpai Kachodi Bhandar for Kachodi and Khasta. Also, you can go to Bati Chokha restaurant for one of the meals- they serve real nice bati chokha and other traditional UP dishes and the place is super cool, instagram worthy!

In case you are adding Ayodhya to Lucknow visit:

It is just 2.5 hours away and roads are really nice. Just know that they are “reinvigorating” Ayodhya as of now so there’s lot of demolition! Also, it is better to leave early in the morning unless you are planning to stay over- if staying over, do visit Ram Janbhumi, Hanuman Gadhi, Kanak Mandir and Sita ki Rasoi. Go to Saryu Aarti in the evening if staying over. Staying over will be really good as then you can add Bahu Begum ka Makbra, Moti Mahal and Gulab Bari in Faizabad- around 10 kms away.

When in the city, everyone goes to the Zhongshan Lu Pedestrian Street. They say that over a billion people pass by this street every single year. Over a billion, to just one street. The Boy from Babhnan had to go. 

He was in Xiamen, formerly Amoy, one of the coolest cities in South China. A city which got its name changed and restored so many times as few others in the world would have. A Ming rebel Zheng Chenggong had set a military base here and changed its name into Siming- meaning remembering the Ming in 1650. Later, when the Qings took the city back, it was back to be Xiamen. After the Xinhai Revolution that established the republic in 1912, it was back to Siming. Come 1933, it was back to, again, what it is now. Interesting, no? 

This is a city that sits just across Taiwan and one can in fact see the rebel island across the strait from its beautiful Gulang Island. Gulang island was a beautiful vehicle free escape from the urban rush, alas, the island is now getting crushed under tourists’ weight. 

Back to the Pedestrian Street. Dating back to 1925, Zhongshan Lu is the oldest commercial street in Xiamen. The over a kilometer long walking street is filled with pretty shops, big department stores, chic cafes, restaurants specialising in the cuisine from world over, and so on. 

Most interesting part though, is that smoking in not allowed in the street! The boy was surprised to the core! He had seen smoking to be the normal even in these times across the South East Asia including China. There still remain restaurants one could enter with a lit cigarette even now. He had always associated this with seafaring being one of the very basis of economy here. So ban on smoking in a public street was surprising for sure! 

The street is one of the ultimate examples of the East Meets West cliche- with McDonalds sitting next to traditional Chinese eateries and shops selling tea- a hundred kinds of teas. One could buy them in whichever form they want- as loose tea leaves to prepacked ones. Ditto for the food items- be they dried crab, squid, fish, pork floss, or otherwise, nuts, durian, pineapple and mango candies, mooncakes of different flavours, roast duck and more.

Tired, the boy went to grab a quick bite of the street food. Fujian province has its own cuisine markedly different from the rest of the Chinese variants. The boy had noted that the focus on seafood in Fujian sits along lots of vegetarian options- a wonder in China. Rarely had he been happier while travelling in the South East Asia. 

The signature experience in the street, though, is many of the jewellery stores making necklaces made of pearls harvested from live oysters right in front of you. He decided not to have this one. 

Another thing that strikes about Zhongshan Lu is beautiful amalgamation of architecture styles- Victorian, Venetian and traditional Chinese. Many of them were in fact shop houses, or Tong Laus, as they are called in Cantonese. In these, the ground floor used to be for shops, while the merchants and the family lived above. The boy remembered Babhnan- his Kasba with similar houses. Of course very basic, not grand. Babhnan is no treaty port after all, it is a blurry kasba even within the district! He then remembered the Tong Lau(s) of his new home- Hong Kong, fast disappearing. 

Home, he thought of. 

The boy from Babhnan had skipped a beat, or two, aboard that 10-seater Cessna Caravan. It was such a surreal experience. No safety demonstrations, none asking to switch off mobiles. The pilots sat right ahead of him, setting up GPS, as radar system doesn’t work in the Himalayan mountains! 

Don’t worry; this is just a truck that flies, said Ashok Singh, a friend who was with me on this trip. The plains of fertile Terai were soon behind us, and the snow capped mountains ahead. Karnali, the river that becomes Ghaghra in India, the river in my district, flowed below majestically. It was a scene to die for, just that he was too scared to appreciate the abundant beauty. No one aboard a small aircraft flying dangerously close to the mountains would with sudden gushes of wind throwing the plane away by meters. 

And then came the descent, a steep descent seemingly into nowhere. The plane was losing height, dangerously, and he could see no runway. He looked back, the 9 others seemed calm so he reassured himself. The plane, suddenly, took an almost impossible 90 degree turn and there it was, Talcha Airport. The runway strewn with small pebbles. The first things the pilots did after getting off was checking the tyres! 

His eyes settled on the wreckage of two similar aircrafts, neatly packed on each side of the ‘runway’. Aaah, no one died in that crash, Ashok, sensing his unease, volunteered. They both did not mention the other one. The trip of a lifetime had begun. It is just that he was to take the same flight back a week later. Climbing up, he also realized that the runway had no electricity.

They left their luggage to be taken to Gamgadhi, the district headquarters of Mugu that was a 6 hours trek away, and started for Rara lake, the biggest in Nepal and second highest sweet water lake in the world. Lying at an altitude of 2900 meters and surrounded by snowy mountains, it was the most beautiful one too as he was to learn later. The 6 hours (three for locals) hike had begun. 

A kilometer into the trek and there came a river of snow, the first of his life. A war broke out shortly, with snow missiles being thrown at one-another. They, in the human rights movement, did not often get to make merry. For them, whose days began with stories of extra-judicial killings and ended at starvation with everything else thrown in between, the snow was a welcome break, a very welcome one.

Back on the trek and they just encountered the first human beings. A few Nepali workers looking at them, intently. They boy asked for a photograph, and got a stubborn no as the answer from a woman. She must be a Maoist, Yubraj later speculated. They are the only ones who have the guts to say no to such requests coming from apparently affluent Nepalis, he argued. That fact that the boy was in the heart of the region that gave birth to Maoist insurgency was slowly dawning upon him. Soon they crossed an army post as well.

Rara was there, in its unabashed glory, right there. Speechless is not the word that can define the sheer beauty of it all. They stayed in Dafe Guest House proudly displaying a ‘clean Rara Green Rara’ signboard. Not that they had any choice, this was the only place to rest. The food was simple and bland, boiled potatoes with salt and chilli with rice, some strange daal and a local spinach. Hardly did he know that this was going to be the menu three times a day for next week. There was no dearth of alcohol, though.

We sat the night, okay a part of it, out chatting with western backpackers and local guards listening to the stories of daring raids that the Maoists conducted, of the sellout thereafter and the ‘transition’ the country was going through. It was a long night. And a very chilly one too as the temperature goes sub zero in the night. I had never woken up to such melodic chirping of the birds as I did the next day.

We, then, had to leave for another trek to Gamgadhi. It was supposed to be a 4 hour one though I could cover it only in 8. The scenic beauty was the same with rivers of snow crisscrossing the trek. Tall pine trees stood their guard, lovingly watching over everything that passed under them.  There were mules too, no ordinary mules though. They were in the service of the World Food Project transporting rice to this chronically food short region. And then they found the trail washed out by a recent landslide! The way out was climbing on a tree and trying to negotiate the washed out section. They did it.

Many such small tragedies and breaks later, they were finally in Gamgadhi, a place more politically charged than any the boy have ever seen. A week of encountering the truths- from beautiful to horrible was ahead. 

And then getting back to Rara taal. For another day, or two, of escape from all the horrors of life! 

The boy from Babhnan looked at the monster in awe. It indeed was one, occupying a whole city block in a Quarry Bay where King’s Road meets the base of Mount Parker. That is a beautiful location to be, as the equally famous tree walk starts from there taking one away from the bustling city to the serene and beautiful woods! The 19 story E shaped goliath comprising 5 building blocks indeed looks like a monster and has proudly featured in films like Transformers: Age of Extinction and and Ghost in the Shell. 

Monster Building, the new Instagram sensation had not started with any aspirations of becoming one. It is one of the last of its kinds commonly known as Composite Buildings. These oversized tenement blocks cast a permanent shadow on everything beneath and were outlawed by the Hong Kong building code soon after its construction. 

Quite on the contrary, it was born out of a very different idea in the 1960s. The builders wanted to give affordable housing to the Hong Kongers hard pressed for space. They delivered on the dream as well- offering flats starting at mere HKD 15,000 with world’s cheapest mortgages. The name it had then was far more unassuming- Parker Estate. The project finally got completed in 1972 with the first buyers moving in. It consisted of five separate blocks linked together by a ground-floor shopping arcade – the Yick Fat Building, Yick Cheong Building, Fok Cheong Building, Montane Mansion and Oceanic Building.

In all, the building contains 2,443 flats and many illegal huts on the rooftop housing at least 6,840 people by the most conservative estimates based on Hong Kong’s average household size of 2.8 people. Bring in its total area just 11,000 square metres- and it has to be the densest spot on the earth! Quite an accomplishment! A mammoth never ending front divided in 5 courtyards. 2443 families living together using them- elderlies playing mahjong, toddlers in their prams, kids playing, housewives working and chatting- all with the shops around doing brisk business. 

Till the building hit the Instagram jackpot, that is! The unending queue of photographers- from professional to amateur and pretenders played havoc with the lives of the community. In February 2018, they finally banned photography inside the courtyards without prior permission! Do not worry though, go there, behave well and ask one of them, they would allow. Provided you do not act as a jerk! 

The story of the Monster Building is eerily similar to the neighbourhood. Hakka people, many of them stonemasons, settled in the rocky terrain in then Bay on the foothills of Mount Parker for mining the rocks- that’s why the name. Then the area began developing, like the rest of the Hong Kong. The SWIRE group, one of the richest corporate conglomerates in Hong Kong bought a lot of properties here and developed Tai Koo dockyard and Taikoo Sugar Refinery. It even built a cable car for its employees. 

Their own building blocks followed. Their interests in the areas ended up getting a part of the neighbourhood called Tai Koo, the Cantonese word for the SWIRE. Now it has even a metro station by the same name.

The area also had many buildings with “ventilators”. The metropolis known for its humidity and sweltering heat needed them before the advent of the air conditioning. The buildings are all gone, redeveloped into newer ones. Some of the “Ventilators” remain, though.

The neighbourhood defines Hong Kong in many ways. A place where jungles coexist: of concrete and glass and woods. Take a right turn once out of the Exit A of the Quarry Bay MTR, and you are in the middle of woods. Don’t and you are in the urban jungle! Don’t take a right, keep walking straight and the sea greets you with all it has. You are in the promenade that begins, depending on which side you come from, with the pets section. Aaaw, those furry beauties and also the exotic ones! I once saw a pet chameleon there! 

Move ahead and you have a lookout point with Kwun Tong on the other side of the sea. And the Alexander Grantham, no not a man. It is the famed Fireboat with the same name, now berthed in its permanent home and converted into a museum. Go and it has a lot of tales of brave firefights on the sea. Yeah, fire on the sea- sounds so paradoxical, no? It does. Just like life. 

Come, the sea is calling. So is the monster!

 

It is an aarti like none other, not at least the boy from Babhnan knew about. An aarti that gets followed by a gun salute to the deity, Ram Lalla, or baby form of Lord Ram in this case. This was in Orchha, a small kasbah now fallen 15 kilometers off the major railway route connecting India’s north to the south. It was once the mighty capital of the Bundela kings though, giving the region its name- Bundelkhand. A word mere mention of which evokes strong memories: of ballads and betrayals. Of alliances and intrigues. Of Abul Fazal and Jahangeer. 

And of Ayodhya, a very important part of the history of the once capital of the princely state accorded a 15 gun salute by the British Raj. The boy was in Ram Raja Temple, the centre of life in the small town more than 500 years after Bundela chief Rudra Pratap Singh had established it in 1501 AD, albeit at a different place nearby called Garh Kundar. He then shifted his capital to a more strategically located place, Orchha, on the banks of the river Betwa in 1931. 

The story behind the gun salute is contested and, intriguing. Most accepted version though is that of a clash of faith. Then king believed in Lord Krishna while the queen was a Ram devotee. The conflicted escalated to such an extent that the King permitted the queen to go to Ayodhya only on a condition. The condition was that she would return with Ram Lalla (Baby Ram). 

She went and worshipped. Yet, after getting no response from the lord for several months, she jumped in the river Sarayu. Lord Ram immediately manifested himself and granted her wish on three conditions. They were that he would travel only under a particular star, would take his seat wherever she first kept in the capital. She returned and kept him in his palace for taking him to the temple built for him the next day. By then he had become an idol. The king and queen tried their best to shift the idol next morning to the newly built temple but it did not budge. Legend has it that Lord Ram came in the queen’s dream in the night reminding her that as the new king, the palace was his rightful abode. 

The king and queen kept the promise. They vacated the palace and turned it into Ram Raja temple. The king also abdicated in favour of Ram Lalla, making him official king of the state and started working as his regent. 

From there started the tradition of the gun salute to Raja Ram. Interestingly, Nehru, the secular blamed for everything today, kept the tradition alive even after accession of the state in the Union of India. This also reminds me that the queen had returned from Ayodhya in 1528, two years after the claims of Babar having demolished Ram Janbhoomi or the Birth Place of Ram Lalla. But then, these are other tales for some other time. 

The fact remains that the city stands as a witness to the history of India from much before the idea of India itself was to be born. It stays witness to all the attacks and intrigues too. Of first Islam Shah Suri trying to capture the state and then Akbar himself, forcing Madhukar Shah becoming vassal of Mughal empire. Interestingly, another contemporary historian records him as a rebel much, though much later in 1583. 

What is certain though that Akbar did send his favourite son Saleem along with Abu’l-Fazl ibn Mubarak to capture the city and its then Vir Singh Deo surrendered. He vowed to never ever betray Akbar and became friends with would be Jahangeer, the Mughal emperor. As fate would have it, Deo later assisted Jahangeer during the war of succession and kill Abul Fazal at his behest. They would stay friends all their life and Deo would build many monuments, making the capital a city to cherish. Jahangeer would even visit the city again, the city which Ram Lala ruled. Deo would build a palace for just that visit of his, the most beautiful in town. 

The Aarti was over, cops in attention, gun salute ensued! It was time to retire- the day ahead was a long one with various palaces, most importantly the Jahangeer Mahal, Chhatris (cenotaphs), river Betwa and much more. Bolo Ram Raja Durbar ki Jai, the crowd ecstatically chanted. The boy from Babhnan, a stone throw away from Ayodhya, was home.