Can a city be a genre unto itself? A great many urban landscapes have been conjured as iconic and idiosyncratic ecosystems. The Atlanta of Tayari Jones. The Lagos of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. The Istanbul of Orhan Pamuk (or, very briefly, James Baldwin). And, closer home, Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City. Mumbai, Kolkata, Delhi are some of the common fares in India’s literary imagination. Does a new city await its induction in the ways it is read as a character and its archetypes become canonical?
Towards the end of Omair Ahmad’s novella, Homecoming, Hassan, a dentist and transplant from Hyderabad, reflects on his adoptive city: “Lucknow was not a city of conquest, but courtesy, however hypocritical it might be.” It is an aphorism that uses Lucknow as a scaffold, a metaphor to trace familial histories of abundance, loss, exodus, exile, and more.
Homecoming is a story of three characters whose distinctive relationships to Lucknow demarcate their ownership of the city. There is Ahmed Sahib, a patient of Hassan’s, who is one of Lucknow’s Indigent. There is Hassan, the Transplant. Then, there is Samina, Ahmed Sahib’s far-flung relative with lore that ties her to Kothi Firaz, whose homecoming the novella is named after. Flying in from England, she is Lucknow’s Revenant.
At the core of Homecoming is Kothi Firaz in Lucknow’s Shahiganj that is the setting of fungible family fortunes, scandal, murder, a feast of melodrama. Perhaps the goings-on in Kothi Firaz symbolise post-colonial Lucknow itself: how it clings to graces, which is all smoke and mirrors.
The novella begins with an 1871 mausoleum in the city bulldozed for operating as an “unauthorised madrassa.” For Samina, a scholar and art historian who recognises the significance of the mausoleum built by Qudsiya Begum, wife of Mughal emperor Muhammad Shah, this is modernity’s disregard for history, coupled with the spectre of religious nationalism.
The prelude sets up Homecoming as a critique of a cleansing in Indian cities masquerading as civic planning and enforcement. But it is much more. It is a story of Hassan finally acclimatising to Lucknow and using his Hyderabadi heritage to make Urdu more equitable in India’s geographic map. It is a tableau vivant of Lucknawi gentry and the politics of its rupture. It is a hyperbole from the homesick in England, a part of the Kothi Firaz family, of which Samina is the scion.
When the loss of Urdu is bemoaned in the novella, only one city can truly resuscitate this dying language: Lucknow. Only this “one city that was synonymous with adab and tehzeeb,” says Hassan, “words that could be translated as respect and culture…. Only Lucknow, an idea of Lucknow preserved them.” The city becomes a conservatory for gentility. But this Lucknow is aspirational, a projection: what Hassan calls an “idea”. Is Lucknow an urban cultural institution, still? Or just an illusion now?
Hassan becomes Ahmad’s conduit to deconstruct Urdu’s mythical perceptions. His late father, a man “who ran from the Hindu faith of his forefathers into the lap of Communism”, debunks how Urdu is not simply native to “the North.”
When his Baba recounts a rigorous-sounding history of Wali Dakkani, a 17th-century Urdu poet, to support this thesis, he comes close to the subversive interpretations of scholars like Afsar Mohammed and Francesca Orsini.
“Even if civilised things come from the North,” Baba tells Hassan as he tries to disprove Delhi and more generally, India’s northern belt’s monopoly on Urdu, “their people do not have the sense to appreciate them until the South shows them how.”
There is an abundance in this compact carnival of a novella as also the tease of things rushed, unfinished and unfulfilled. The histories of the family in the Kothi distract from Hassan’s resplendent familial vignettes: his Baba’s commercial failures and cultural redemptions, condensed yet monumental, whilst Firaz histories drone on.
The melodrama of a dying Nasreen, Samina’s aunt, whose trite rhetoric of a Lucknawi longing chokes the sophisticated feelings of the second-generation “Sam” (Samina), is presented fleetingly.
The tender waltz of courtesy, financial anxiety and equanimity that define and disrupt the bond between Hassan and Ahmed Sahib is inviting but barely takes up any real estate. And the romance teased between Sam and Hassan feels like an unnecessary, half-baked add-on.
However, what prevails throughout Homecoming is Ahmad’s assured hand: so slyly his language flips between the precision of a modernist and a rolling, abstract poetry befitting a medievalist.
The aphorisms that pepper his prose could very well be excerpts from a ghazal. Perhaps this is a split that Lucknow inspires: between the emulation of literary traditions housed and cultivated by the city and the surgical brevity of a world beyond, with which Lucknow and its storytellers must now reckon. Either way, and despite a deficient plot, its erratic stride and red herrings, Ahmad never reneges on the beauty of the sentence. For that alone, Homecoming is worth a read.
Rohit Chakraborty is a scholar and critic from Guwahati who lives in Kolkata.