My recurring day-dream since childhood is where I find myself famous. Sometime in the near or distant future, I’m being interviewed for a Print magazine, and I’m asked all these revealing questions about myself.
I don’t know what I got famous for. But going by the Vanity fair and Rolling Stone level questions I’m asked, it must be the good stuff.
I was asked one such question recently (just today actually, as I sat in front of my computer, staring out of the window) – now that I’m such a celebrity in my hometown of Hyderabad, what was my most favorite thing to do there? Here’s what I answered:
My most favorite thing to do, which may surprise you is not eating at a swanky restaurant in HiTec city or dinner and a movie by Necklace road, or even hunting for a nighttime haunt for Biryani and Haleem.
Granted they are or were all my favorites, but my absolute most favorite is to go shopping in the by-lanes of Badichowdi and Sultan Bazar.
Something about going into those little shops looking for a matching dupatta, or lace. Buying a fabric for a kurta, dress material as it is called – and dreaming up outfits as you walk the bylanes.
Some of these stores were stuffy and some fancy, read air-conditioned. The narrow lanes can’t stifle one’s mind brimming over with ideas of that new outfit. Looking greedily at the mannequins, soaking in every little and grand detail, figuring out which of those details can be weaved into that new dress about to be born. Passionate discussions about sequins vs mirrors, of Zari and Zardozi.
But more than that, BadiChowdi takes me back to my childhood. We went there with the sole mission of buying new clothes, and not very often. Sometimes, I was the only one who went with mom, during the Summer mostly. As I got older – on every trip, she took me to the Pani Puri shop in front of the police station next to the “matching center”. She would always order Pani Puri or “Gup Chup” as we call it in Hyderabad and Sugar Cane juice, my two favorites. It was our rare shared mother-daughter tradition. An incidental secret nobody else in the family was privy to.
Then we would go about our business buying a matching blouse piece or a fall for Amma’s saree. And one such day, in that tiny matching center with the handsome guy who couldn’t speak but was fantastic at matching the right color – we saw yesteryear starlet Rama Prabha. Yeah – I can’t tell you what movies she was in. The only thing I remember is that she used to be married to actor Sharath Babu. I can’t tell you which movies he’s in, either. But I remember Amma was excited to spot her.
So maybe it was the draw of the sweet sugar cane juice. Or maybe the hope of a beautiful but reasonably priced dress, or the surprise of finding yourself face to face with a random celebrity uplifting my mom’s choice of a store – for that middle class Indian girl, a new dress material was an open canvas, and BadiChowdi – the artist’s lair.
I discovered my sisters only go there when I visit, nowadays. And I do make excuses to go there. Whether it’s a hunt for a bargain, or in search of that rare part of childhood that surprisingly remains recognizable, even today.
Edit: I went there again in my most recent mid/post-pandemic trip to India in August, 2021. BadiChowdi is not the same. There is a metro hanging over it’s head. But there are still glimpses of what is past for me and very much the present for all the businesses there. It was monsoon season, a wet day – and I got a chance to hold Amma’s hand while dodging the rain puddles just like when I was a girl. And I made a monetary contribution to this memory by buying cheap Kurti sets which I then wore for Diwali, and admired Badichowdi and myself in the pictures, back here in the States.
