Tea and Tombs: Twenty Years of Becoming Hyderabad

The first copies of Tea and Tombs: Poems on Hyderabad arrived today. A speed post parcel from Kolkata. Brown paper. Fresh ink. Crisp pages. A cover I had only seen on screens until now. I held the book for a long time before opening it. There is something deeply unsettling about seeing your own poems in print. These were once loose sheets tucked into diaries, forgotten notebooks, computer folders, and Google Docs. They belonged to years that had already passed. Suddenly they were bound together between two covers, asking to be read again.

I wondered whether I could. Because Tea and Tombs is not merely my first book. It is twenty years of becoming. I arrived in Hyderabad in 2006. Like many arrivals in a new city, the first few months were cautious. Friends became maps. They knew where to eat, where to avoid, how to bargain, which bus to take, which road to cross. I simply followed. Eventually, something changed. Perhaps it was confidence. Perhaps curiosity. Perhaps loneliness. I decided to wrestle the city by myself. I began wandering alone. That was when Hyderabad truly introduced itself. The city unfolded differently when nobody else was speaking. I heard the cadence of Urdu in the Old City and the musical certainty of Telugu in neighbourhood conversations. I walked streets scented with biryani, rain, dust, diesel, tea and incense. Brown buildings stood beside bright glass facades. Roads widened confidently before collapsing into narrow lanes that seemed to carry centuries within them.

The Hyderabad I came to know was never one city. It was several cities living together. I did not know it then, but I had already begun writing my first book. I scribbled fragments into cheap diaries. Some were little more than observations. Others tried desperately to become poems. Most failed. Those notebooks survived hostel rooms, rented houses, cardboard boxes, forgotten shelves, and countless shifts across the city. Years later, afraid that paper might disappear before memory did, I began typing many of those poems into a Google document, rewriting them line by line. Looking back now, I realise that I was doing much more than preserving poems. I was preserving a city. Or perhaps I was preserving the version of myself that could still be surprised by one. That, I think, is what poetry often is: an attempt to codify life before memory quietly edits it. Someone remarked recently that I had now spent twenty years in Hyderabad.

The statement stayed with me. Twenty years? I opened those old poems again. I expected to discover how much the city had changed. Instead, I discovered how much I had. My growth had happened alongside Hyderabad's. The city acquired flyovers.

I acquired responsibilities.

The skyline changed.

So did my ambitions.

Neighbourhoods disappeared beneath concrete.

Certain versions of myself disappeared with them.

I remembered the boy who arrived here with very little. He hitched rides on friends' motorcycles. He travelled by buses. He counted coins before deciding whether he could afford another cup of tea, another secondhand book, or a slightly cheaper plate of biryani.

He walked because walking was free. Walking also happened to be the best way to meet a city. Today, I drive an SUV through Hyderabad at night simply because the roads are pleasant and the weather feels right. I find myself looking for new flyovers, new cafés, new restaurants. I cannot remember the last time I travelled in a city bus. I have seen the Metro many times. I have never travelled in it. I remembered my days on a two-wheeler, when every road felt accessible. Today I sometimes avoid unfamiliar neighbourhoods because I worry there may be too much traffic to safely make a U turn. Somewhere along the journey, I had stopped wandering. Without realising it, I had become someone who preferred comfort to curiosity. For a while, I thought that comfort had killed the poet in me. Perhaps that is not entirely true. Comfort had simply convinced me that there was nothing left to discover. The city had become familiar. Familiarity is a dangerous thing. It quietly replaces wonder with routine. The streets remain exactly where they were. Only our eyes stop noticing them. When I realised this, I made myself a promise.

Go out again. Take roads without destinations. Drive into neighbourhoods that no longer appear in daily routines. Stand before forgotten tombs. Drink tea in places where nobody knows your name. Become lost. Again.

Tea and Tombs is, in many ways, my personal history of Hyderabad. It is also an apology.

An apology to the city that gave me a home while I gradually stopped exploring it with the same hunger that first brought me to its streets. Cities deserve to be rediscovered. So do we.

Today, as I turned the pages of this book for the first time, I realised something unexpected.

These poems are not really about Hyderabad. They are about the person Hyderabad quietly made possible. And perhaps that is why it took twenty years to write them. If you feel like knowing a less-intelligent teenage boy and his fragmented readings of Hyderabad, here's where you can find a copy https://amzn.in/d/01qbqM8A #TeaAndTombs #PoemsOnHyderabad #Hyderabad #TheWritingLife #Poetry #IndianPoetry #CityAsCharacter #Literature #MemoryAndPlace #WritersOfIndia #BooksAndCities #DebutAuthor #HawakalPublishers #ReadingIndia