Dove and longing in Delhi 6

MiD DAY takes the Massakali trail in Purani Delhi and stumbles on a thriving pigeon-flying tradition

MiD DAY takes the Delhi 6-Massakali trail in Purani Delhi and stumbles on a thriving pigeon-flying tradition

YOU can't afford to lose sight of Mohammed Umer's red shirt and tiny white skullcap as he darts along the

Aye Masakkali, Aye Matakkali: Hilal feeding his Hyderabadi flock (above) and Tajuddin showing his birds Pics/Imtiyaz Khan

maniacally crowded intestines of old Delhi.

He is taking you to his father, Mohammed Hilal, noted kabootarbaz of the Jama Masjid neighbourhood.

The nine-year-old jumps over a dog, brushes against a large pan of beef biryani selling at Rs 72 a kg, slices through a tide of passers-by, CD vendors, rickshaws and tied goats, and vanishes into the hollow of one of the thousands of mossy, aged houses here.

Then the climb begins.

You count about a hundred steps up a steep, dark spiral. A wooden ladder comes down from a small, square piece of sunlight overhead.

At last, you stick your head out to an explosion of sparkling winter sunshine over Purani Dilli and a roar of pigeon-flutter around you. Hilal's Hyderabadi flock has just taken off for the skies again.

"Look how they always fly against the wind, cutting through it," says the 31-year-old trader, sporting his morning shadow at noon. "They'll go sit on that masjid there, or fly up to Lal Qila and beyond, but will come back to the same terrace."

Across the jagged expanse of terraces of Delhi 6 a pin code resurrected in our imagination by Rakeysh Mehra's movie by that nameu00a0you find at least seven or eight merry clouds of pigeons gliding, swirling, diving, rising to their masters' whistles and loud calls of "aao".

Massakali, the pigeon after whom a popular song from the movie Delhi 6 goes, is emblemic of pigeon-flying in the old and new Old Delhi, and captures time right from the Mogul royalty to today's weekend wastrels in a gilded cage.

"Babur's father apparently fell to death while flying pigeons," says William Dalrymple. He writes in City of Djinns how laws of this courtly sport were codified in Abu Fazl's A'in-i-Akbari, its delights illustrated by miniaturists, and its art mastered by, among others, last of the Great Moguls Bahadur Shah Zafar.

The sport, not courtly any longer, is alive and surprisingly flourishing where talk of India's princely past fades daily into shantytown sunsets.

"No place in the world is crazier about kabootarbazi than Purani Dilli," says Tajuddin from Turkman Gate, 45, who inherited the ancestral copper wire business and an obsession for dove-flying.

Myths in the air

Both Hilal and Tajuddin claim they spend Rs 200-300 every day to feed their 200-odd pigeons. They swear by their own secret recipes to bewitch others' pigeons into joining their flock.

"Yeh ghar bhula deta hain (this makes them forget their old home)," says Hilal, pointing at a mash of raisin, almond, grain, wheat and what he insists is a potent herbal drug.

But that could just be a part of myth surrounding pigeon-flying, says scriptwriter Sohail Hashmi, who also writes about lesser-known monuments in Delhi. "Many believe, for instance, pigeons are saiyadsu00a0an honorific, something like 'sir' in Arabic. They say when a saiyad dies, the soul enters a pigeon."

The chaotic and shabby sprawl behind Turkman gate where Tajuddin lives used to be a forest. The resident Sufi saint, Shah Turkman Bayabani (bayabani is somebody who lives in a forest), coincidentally was also a pigeon fancier.

During Partition, the area was taken over by Muslims who fled the riot-torn fringes of the Capital like Karol Bagh and Faridabad, and settled in the walled city, which was relatively safe.

Dove-tales

Hilal's flock has pigeons worth up to Rs 2,500 from Hyderabad, Punjab and Agra. He talks about the fancied Multani Shirazi, the Basras and Umars of badshahi lineage, which he may one day own.

In Ahmed Ali's brilliant pre-Independence tribute to Old Delhi, Twilight in Delhi, pigeon-flying is the vivid backdrop of a disturbing love story. The boy's mother urges her husband to stop flying pigeons and address the turmoil in the family.

Tajuddin presents an interesting counterpoint to that 'wastrel' notion about pigeon-fliers.

"Many families here believe it is good for the man to fly pigeons, especially in his youth, because he was certain to come home to feed the pigeons. He won't lie around in places he shouldn't be, get wasted elsewhere," he says.

Terrace love stories that spawn around pigeon-flying are not few.

"Kabootar udatey udatey setting toh ho hi jata hain (very often the lads get the girls to notice them)," says Tajuddin, smiling, as his help 13-year-old, Imran Khan, shoos male and female pigeons into separate cages, his grey eyes fixed on the two flying truants.

The terrace, says Hashmi, is literally and metaphorically an old Delhi youngster's great escape from the bustling, conservative bylanes of Delhi 6. "If a boy and girl speak in the gully, the whole mohallah will know within minutes," he says. "To fly pigeons or kites, you have to climb the roof. And that is where you can steal moment away from the sharp social gaze."

Lovers across ages have allegedly invented a hundred kinds of whistling, which send out entirely different messages to pigeons and paramours.

Alongside the tales of love lie stories of tragedy. "While writing City of Djinns, I remember being told by an old man in Jehanabad how his family came to know about his brother's murder in the Partition riots: his pigeons came back to the roof with their wings singed, plumes bloodied."

At Tajuddin's terrace, someone else's lone pigeon has perched itself away from the flock.

"Usko ghar yaad aa raha hain (it is thinking of its lost home)," he says, cautioning Imran not to force it to join the flock lest it flees. The trick, he says, is to wait...take it easy.

'We shifted to New Delhi. Pigeons were gone'

"I belong to old Delhi. I grew up with the pigeon-flying culture," says maker of Delhi 6 Rakeysh Mehra. "My dad had loads of pigeons. It faded out when we shifted to New Delhi. It's a different city. The culture changed. The pigeons were gone. But I still have childhood memories of it." Mehra went back to shoot in Purani Dilli for his film. He denied paying Rs 13,000 for a trained pigeon for a day's shooting. "It is certainly not that much. I don't know the exact figure. The production guys will know."