Once again, in the course of a few weeks, I found myself at Hyderabad’s hi-tech airport; once more, the wait for the Uber on the concourse became extended because of the chaotic traffic on the road; once more, the ride to the city over the country’s longest flyover and past the odd-shaped National Fisheries Development Board building (shaped, yes, like a fish) provided an entertaining diversion from checking and sending emails over the phone; once more I found myself checking into the same hotel on the same floor, and damn if it wasn’t the same room too.
But that’s where all similarities, or coincidences, ceased to exist. Checking in, queuing for the lift, I found myself amidst the city’s dazzling glitterati headed for that evening’s celebrations arranged by our hosts. I wasn’t scheduled to make it to the nikaah in the morning at the fabulous Falaknuma Palace, but my wife almost missed it, too, because the alarm she’d set for her dawn flight failed to go off (or so she claimed), causing her — with admirable alacrity — to take an alternative, only slightly later, connection to arrive, as all Dilliwallas do: late, without being embarrassed about it.
I met our hosts and a bevy of friends representing a broad swathe of India’s erstwhile ruling families following my own delayed arrival, when the party was well under way, a veritable Arabian Nights-meets-Princely India. And they didn’t disappoint with their diamond buttons on tunics and glittering emeralds and rubies on lobes and foreheads, swishly clad in fashions that would not have been out of place a century earlier. Salaams, adabs and khamaghanis rang out between the obligatory mwah-mwahs as everyone pecked daintily at rouged cheeks.
The hotel spa was booked with back-to-back (pun definitely not intended) massages; the stylists at the salon couldn’t find time in between shampooing and setting coiffures for tea and gossip breaks; the hotel’s smartest were on floor duty plying room service orders; cars and coaches delivered the chic set to the different venues. The guests had little to do but loll, dress up and eat and drink some more.
The formal reception at Chowmahalla Palace could have put a Sanjay Leela Bhansali film to shame. Chandeliers glittered from the ceiling of the coronation hall where nizams had been crowned and religious durbars held. Fountains misted the air, ropes of fairy lights glowed in the extensive gardens, the carriageway saw stilettos march across the gravel in elegant anticipation. Sufi singers performed in the background as friends and family and the Pearl City’s fashionable set met and mingled. Was it possible there were so many beautiful, debonair people in the same place, at the same time? A sit-down dinner with candle-lit candelabras and a multitude of local delicacies plied by family cooks meant groaning tables that smelled of culinary heaven — vastly distinct from the commercial biryanis and salans with which we’d sullied our north Indian appetites. It would have been decadent if it wasn’t also tasteful. We loved every moment of it.
And then to reality, the airport, delayed flights leading to chaos and frayed tempers, the banal sameness of restaurant and airline food and the crass commonness of mainstream India. For two days, I’d found myself whisked away in a time machine to a more rejuvenating time. For that brief while, life had been a little less stressful, a little more joyful. Any wonder some among us choose to dwell in a romantically imagined past rather than an uncertain future?
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