Childhood dreams, middle-aged knees

Telugu and Dakkani cascading over each other in the markets, quickened my attention. Unknown places awaken all our senses and sensuously transform us

For much of my childhood, the Golconda Fort was a portal to fantasy and adventure in my imagination. I badly wanted to see it, but never did—even though, from the ages of 7 to 11, we lived in Secunderabad, the twin city of Hyderabad.

I cannot say for sure what made Golconda so alluring for me. Perhaps it was just growing up on things like the Bournvita Book of Knowledge where I read, round-eyed about sites with names like Arabian Nights pastries: Gol Gumbaz, Charminar, Buland Darwaza, Golconda. Forts are always made special by rumours of secret tunnels, secret treasures (Golconda once housed the Koh-i-noor), tricky acoustic architecture and whispering galleries, where a sound in one corner can be heard atop the citadel. 

Perhaps it was all these things, but perhaps it was also that Secunderabad was the first place I lived that was ‘foreign’ to me—a place where the language and culture and surroundings were markedly different from the Delhi and Bombay I had known. Its colonial stone buildings, where khansamas still made trifle puddings covered in tiny cream rosettes, and bathrooms had triple mirrors and chaise lounges, seemed full of mystery and the ghosts of angrez log. Telugu and Dakkani cascading over each other in the markets, quickened my attention. Unknown places awaken all our senses and sensuously transform us.

In the safety of a smaller place, I could roam the cantonment area on my own despite my age, and issue musty, unfamiliar books, once read by colonial children, from the ancient library. In this voluptuous world of discovery, I felt like a Five-Find Outer.

It was a natural extension to dream restlessly of Golconda, a distant fort, where an adventure would surely occur. Unfortunately, my parents were not the kind who felt too interested in doing stuff with kids. I’d be lying if I said this wasn’t sometimes a source of hurt, a ghost of which still roams the tunnels of my soul.

Then last weekend, I visited my friend in Hyderabad. He bundled us into his car and off we went to Golconda with water bottles, two very dodgy knees between us and his eight-year old, brimming with scorn at our slowness. We clambered up those uneven stones, through arches inscribed with lovers’ names until we finally made it to the top and took a red-faced selfie.

Is a childhood dream quite so dreamy in adulthood? Maybe, a little jaded by travel, I cannot now feel the wonder a 10-year-old me might have. But Golconda is magical. Rings of time radiate around it, each present in a layer of the city: trees, lakes, tombs, bastis, buildings, gated communities, Hyberabad’s surveillance headquarters. You wonder which lonely ghost watched these circles of history give way to each other beneath vast skies.

Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at paromita.vohra@mid-day.com

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