A bard who learnt to twitter

A fellow bard
A random take on my friend Danish Shafi's unpublished but riveting tale All Birds Left, a novella set in Old Delhi.

Tales about Old Delhi are abound. Tales emanating from Old Delhi are rarity. Danish Shafi, a young hack and an old dilliwala, has ventured to unearth what happened and followed in the lives of people residing in Turkman Gate area when Sanjay Gandhi-ordered bulldozers razed down their houses during the Emergency days. “It was a ghettoised mini Pakistan,” was the government excuse behind the move and so no matter if some of ‘mini Pakistanis’ had to be maimed for that.
Zaibu, who has just gained a wife, loses his house. He escapes to real Pakistan and on return see the revenge and revolution coming via politics. His campaign bears fruit and locals get compensated by new houses. But they later feel cheated and crib about claustrophobic living in the burrows…While Zaibu’s politics doesn’t quite take off, he weaves dreams in his son Khairu’s education in a public school.
Khairu, riding on his public school English, gradually takes on the world and shapes his father’s dreams – he enters Delhi University, get employment in a famous food joint, works in an international call centre…and finally lands up in a newspaper office as a journalist and writes articles about the area. The father can’t be more proud than seeing his son’s name in print. Well, this is the most beautiful aspect of the story when a boy from old Delhi rides on the new city bandwagon and finds the new cultural milieu so palpably different and so vigorously enticing. He helps people from the outside world, his colleagues, shade preoccupied notions about the place and people … But alas, destiny decides otherwise and before he could fulfil all his and his father’s ambitions, he dies all of a sudden.
One may find it hard to agree with the writer’s denouement, but it might well be an indication that people in the walled city find it too tough to come out of despair…
Though well-crafted and an engrossing read, the novel lapses at places — despite starting from the Turkman Gate demolition episode, it fails to comment upon how the minorities were discriminated against by the government and what roles people like Sanjay Gandhi, Jagmohan and very local Ruksana Sultana played during Emergency; it too concisely informs about Zaibu’s political life; and lastly I personally don’t like why Khairu dies all of a sudden… a too depressing a note to end the story. But comments apart, it’s a must read for those who nurture tastebuds for stories about Dilli and Dehelvis.