The Indian Express: City and I: Why didn’t you teach me about that world, Udaipur?

How could I possibly explain that Udaipur taught me to soar, catching the updrafts from the Aravallis? That my family didn’t choose to go to Pakistan, even if they risked losing everything

Udaipur has been my Shakespearean stage of life’s drama. The stage where I was a squabbling infant, a schoolgirl, a lover, a ghost, a ruler and a chronicler. Where my best friend for years was a falsa tree and I found true love in the dark night garden of Sukhadia circle. Where I ruled the city like a kite and suffered the greatest losses of my life. To describe your relationship with such a city, you need lightyears. Or a poem. A glass of dry martini always helps.

This city, big on the tourist map, was never about palaces and forts for me. It was about the forests and trees and the birds of the oldest mountain range of the world — the Aravallis. When we had guests, which was often, we would take them for long drives around the hills. We would sit by Phoota Talab, long before its shores were choked with plastic or have ganthia and mirch at Iswal before it vanished from the map with the new highway.

The unlimited supply of goodwill that Udaipur kept in store for me was not remotely my own doing. My grandfather, close to Maharana Bhupal Singh ji, was the monopoly holder of arms and ammunition business in pre-Independence Mewar. Later, as the vice mayor of Udaipur, he did much work for tribal upliftment. Dadijaan was one of the initiators of the women’s education movement, and vice president of All Indian Women’s Conference, Rajasthan chapter, of which Maharani Gayatri Devi was the president. Driven by this legacy, my father, uncles and aunts became socialist leaders, initiators of wildlife conservation movements and headed some of the finest educational and folk arts institutions in honorary capacities. They gave their lives to help Udaipur evolve and conserve.

It also brought along the dunia to our doorstep through a meteor shower of visitors the whole year around. I travelled the world sitting in our wild and green family lane in Panchwati, one anecdote, one nazm, one sher at a time. From Kaifi Azmi sahib to a Bhil tribal from the forest, from Swami Agnivesh to George Fernandes, from Alyque Padamsee to a rescued leopard cub, our guests in Udaipur came in all colours and shapes. Our residence was a vibrant, chaotic ecosystem of ideas and visiting or resident personalities: A poet, a socialist, a fighter, a dreamer, a politician, an activist, a hunter, a journalist.

The monsoons in Udaipur didn’t begin with dark clouds looming in the sky but with a reporter at our door. It had become a tradition that my father, the original wild man of this region, would predict the rains depending on where the lapwings had laid their eggs. When my husband asked for my hand, my father was more interested in showing him the turtles in Fatehsagar than worrying about my future.

Udaipur prepared me not just for the monsoons but for sweltering summers and freezing winters. Except, it didn’t prepare me for a life in bigger cities, where you are not sharing your breath with a sitaphal tree or a hoopoe but with a yellow-and-black cab or a roach swept under a dustbin. I ruled Udaipur like a kite but waddled on the streets of other cities like a duck out of water. Udaipur had not prepared me for a world where no one knew my name. Where many disdained my Muslim identity. How could I possibly explain that Udaipur taught me to soar, catching the updrafts from the Aravallis? That my family didn’t choose to go to Pakistan, even if they risked losing everything. That they contributed much more to the homeland than those looking down on me for my name. That I was not taught how to other but to sit still in a forest to await a leopard.

Why didn’t you teach me about that world, Udaipur?

The Udaipur I knew was not a provincial town, but an eclectic hub; wild yet remarkably urbane. A galaxy in a teacup. What are these blinds drawn on its twinkling universe? Thoughtless constructions, piles of garbage, lawless traffic. Whenever I visit again, I feel lighter than the plastic that floats in the water bodies and heavier than the waves of rising communal tensions. The largest tazia in Muharram once started from the Maharana’s palace. My Dadijaan, who only had one leg, didn’t leave one corner of their old home, the second tallest building in Udaipur after the Maharana’s palace, unlit on Diwali — even if it left her with a swollen stump where she wore her wooden leg. I want to write it all down to remember it. Before I begin to forget.

Does extinction only happen to animals? What about cities as we knew them?

Why weren’t you and I, two endangered species, better prepared, Udaipur?

Tehsin is a Colombo-based writer and environmentalist