Hyderabad 2: Charminar

The Charminar is to Hyderabad what the Arc de Triomphe is to Paris.

The Charminar was etched in my mind long ago as a child, even though no one in my family smoked. I was raised in a tee-totalling world in which only movie stars and the local layabouts smoked cigarettes, while servants and laborers dragged on bidis. I remember the sketched logo of the orange Charminar cigarette packs in paan shops and on billboard advertisements that urged everyone to Relax, Have a Charminar.

I saw the actual monument finally, and it is practically as tiny as its likeness on the cigarette packs.

You’re driving down the main drag of the old city quarter of Hyderabad, and there the Charminar suddenly stands before you, dingy and chipped, with that aged yellowness of old dentures.

The ticket office charged me Rs. 5. The staff insisted my husband should pay Rs. 150 even though he has proof of residence in India. “Naagrikta honi chahiye,” a ticket guy said, turning down all government-issued proofs showing he lives in India and is not a tourist. “He has to be a citizen.”

Our family goes through this annoying and humiliating exercise of Indian double standards all the time. When we go travel anywhere in the United States, my husband and I pay the same to see any national monuments. I don’t pay more because I look darker than him, or because the ticket guy thinks I look foreign or because the American government thinks I should pay more because I must be richer since I come from the land of maharajas.

At the Charminar, no documents were asked of me; the color of my skin was enough. My husband paid 30 times more than me. I wonder how the Indian government calculates the exponents by which tourists or anyone not perceived to look Indian should be robbed officially. What a grubby beggar it reduces a government to to dip into the pockets of its guests so shamelessly and for no apparent reason other than it can get away with such extortion.

My husband got the same view of the graffitied minarets, but the ticket he got was printed on nicer paper while mine looked like a bus ticket. The guards let him through with a jaunty flourish.

The Charminar might have been a towering structure in 1591. What you get after climbing up a narrow, glute-challenging spiral staircase is get a pigeon’s eye view of the lanes of fruit vendors, yellow arcs of auto-rickshaw queues, billboards and crowded bazaars. The carvings on the minarets are clearly visible from the balcony.

A grubby jute rope is strung across the balcony to deter people from falling over. Suicidal leaps from the minarets have made the upper levels of the Charminar out of bounds for all visitors except for Very Important Persons. There are taller buildings in the city whose heights can guarantee greater success in creating a bloody pulp of oneself than the stubby Charminar. But maybe there is something romantic about leaping out of stone arches that have an established pedigree in assisting suicides.

The Charminar's walls are gouged with graffiti. “All from before 2006, before they posted us here, Madam,” a guard said defensively. Who are the scribblers, typically? “Students,” he said. “Illiterate people are not our problem because they can’t write their names. It’s these educated people who want to write their names everywhere.”

Hyderabad 1: Fire at the High Court

I went to Hyderabad for the first time ever. The High Court was on fire the morning I landed. The morning after I left, the Chief Minister died in a helicopter crash.

Monday was one of the rainiest days there. The rain started before dawn and had retreated to a drizzle by late morning, when my husband and I drove from the airport to the old city to catch some sight seeing.

My husband’s cellphone rang. “Are you near a television?” a friend demanded. “The High Court is on fire.”

Eerily, we were on the same street, just a block away. We turned our heads right, and there was the fire: the brown onion domes of the stately 93-year-old High Court with black curls of smoke puffing out. There weren’t any fire engines around or police cordons, no signs of sleepy government officials poked into moving with any speed. It just seemed like a normal morning, with cars streaming by on the street outside, while parts of the city’s highest court were into their sixth hour of burning.

The High Court, a magnificent building of pink granite and red sandstone (that now look a drab brown), cost Rs. 2-million when it was built in 1916. Its architect was Vincent Esch, who also supervised the construction of the Victoria Memorial in Calcutta.

The next morning’s paper reported that the fire, started by an electrical short circuit, was detected at 4 a.m. by a guard. There were no fire alarms or extinguishers in the building.

Apparently, the fire department had for years been sending reminders to the Court that it needed to comply with fire safety guidelines. The state's highest Court thumbed its nose at them; its business was to dispense law, not follow it.