You sit down to write a requiem for a friend. It turns into a lament for a city, a time lost: a time of beauty, elegance, erudition, spaciousness. Lost, forever...
My friend Sadia Dehlvi passed into the ether on August 5. Buried much with her: thirty-two years of my youth, memories of many sun-drenched afternoons on the expansive lawns of her sprawling, glittering Shama Kothi, which locals had dubbed ‘Dilli ka Tajmahal’; reading Faiz together with the polymath Suharwardy; listening spellbound in the moonlight as the flirtatious Pakistani poet Ahmed Faraz recited ‘Suna hai log use aankh bhar ke dekhte hain/Jo uske sheher mein kuchh din theher ke dekhte hain’ to my beauteous friend; laughing as the vivacious Tehmina Durrani regaled us with stories of assorted feudal lords across the border; stuffing our faces with melt-in-the-mouth kakori kababs from Sadia’s legendary Al Kauser kiosk across the road; wondrous annual haleem and come-eat-the-choicest-mango lunches starring hamaam ke aam, ratauls, langdas...
I thought nothing of turning my bike after a late-night shift at the Express and dropping by well past midnight to be part of Sadia’s soirees that extended well into the small hours of the morning; demanding food and drink that was generously, magically, produced, lovingly served. Did it ever strike anyone as odd that Sadia was an incredibly attractive young woman; that I, her bum chum, was a single thirty-year-old? That she was Muslim? And I, Hindu? That her salon featured me, and innumerable other questing souls of varying ages, faiths, persuasions? All we knew was that we shared a passion for food, for books, for poetry, for Urdu, for beauty. And Delhi.
It was 1990. Babri Masjid, the violence before and after, was yet a looming nightmare. But it was already a fractured dawn. Camelot was over. Cataclysm crept over us incrementally: the 1987 unlocking, rath yatra, assassination, demolition, riots, blasts that tore apart everything. It forever changed the Delhi Sadia and I had known and loved. Saffron became the code and colour of the New Establishment. Hundred-headed hydras roamed the ravaged land, colleagues mutated overnight into aggressive apologists. Civic discourse coarsened, dialogue faltered, then ceased.
The lights dimmed somewhat at Shama Kothi. So did Sadia’s family. They sold the fabled house. She moved to Nizamuddin—it comforted her; for here, in this cocoon next to her beloved patron saint’s mazaar, the old alcove of syncretic devotion, she felt safe. Evenings acquired another dimension, a Brechtian edge. Singing, you ask? Yes, there was singing…about the dark times. Sufi strains rang out of that flat. Her son Armaan, a dhrupadia, invoked Shiva.
Outside, the brief reprieve of UPA-I was giving way to the sorry drift of UPA-II, ringing in The New Era. Delhi, India…as we knew it…ceased to exist. On a train from Saharanpur, Sadia’s panic-stricken brother rushed to prevent her from having a mutton kathi kabab snack. Akhlaq and the attendant horror freshly, indelibly, imprinted on his psyche. A ‘friend’ told her, “But you Muslims are quite fundoo, no?” An erudite, professionally eminent relative taunted me asking why I was “so ashamed of being Hindu” and declared rhetorically he didn’t mind “if we became a Hindu rashtra” while I stood stunned, speechless. Things one took for granted in Delhi—the lack of narrow provincialism with its marked divisions of religion/caste, an easy cosmopolitanism, relaxed urbanity, a reflexive belief in beliefs being a private not a public matter—were a thing of the past.
Sadia threw herself into a study of the past to make better sense of the present. A book and a documentary on Sufism followed. The seething, helpless anger at our unfolding dystopian horror gave way to a genuine quest to understand; the combative tone changed to a calm, searching, conciliatory one on TV, assorted public fora. Often we despaired. The Delhi riots broke her, us both. But there still was music, her compelling joi de vivre, her incredible ability to laugh. Like her Beloved City that had reimagined itself nine times over, reason too would prevail. One day. Soon.
She couldn’t live to see that day. The cancer that ravaged the body politic raged in her body now. Twenty-one long months she fought, bravely, before her tired body capitulated. They carried her out, as she wished, to the sound of Dhruv singing Khusrau: Mohe apne hi rang mein rang de/ Nijaam tu toh Saheb mera, Mehboob e Ilahi. May the Saint she adored be the salve to her soul. And the salvation of her wounded city.