Dawn breaks with the clatter of metal shutters. The air is thick with coal smoke from sigdis brewing thick, cardamom-laced Irani chai and the sharper tang of seekh kebabs slapped onto glowing embers 

Bhumika Rajpurohit | Hyderabad 

Tucked into the narrow lanes of Hyderabad’s Old City, Jambagh refuses to be a museum piece. The very name whispers of lost grandeur—Jannat Bagh, “Garden of Paradise,” a Mughal-era pleasure retreat planted in the 16th century under the Qutb Shahi kings. Rose-scented fountains and cypress-lined walks once cooled the brows of nobles. Today those gardens are long buried beneath layers of concrete and commerce, but the poetry of the name lingers like dust motes in the afternoon sun.

Walk ten minutes in any direction and the 1591 Charminar rises above the rooftops, its four minarets still keeping watch the way they have for over four centuries. From its shadow radiate the great bazaars: Laad Bazaar glittering with lacquer bangles in every imaginable hue, Moazzam Jahi Market with its granite arcades and the ghostly elegance of a 1930s fruit-and-flower hall now selling mobile accessories, and the narrower gullies of Jambagh proper—home to more than 20,000 souls packed into crumbling colonial havelis, post-Independence tenements, and illegal fourth-floor additions that lean over the lanes like gossiping old women.

Dawn breaks with the clatter of metal shutters. The air is thick with coal smoke from sigdis brewing thick, cardamom-laced Irani chai and the sharper tang of seekh kebabs slapped onto glowing embers. Narasimha Rao, sixty-two, tailor for four decades, squats on a wooden platform in his eight-by-ten shop, threading a needle by the weak glow of a single LED bulb. His fingers, calloused and steady, have stitched sherwanis for Nizams’ descendants and sequined lehengas for brides who will never know the weight of that history. “Fabric changes, people don’t,” he mutters when customers haggle too hard.

A few lanes away, nineteen-year-old Sana, hijab tucked neatly under her helmet, weaves her scooty through the chaos on her way to an IT coaching class in Banjara Hills. She dreams in code, but her evenings belong to her grandmother’s kitchen, rolling out roomali rotis thin enough to read newsprint through. This is the Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb in motion: Muharram processions pass beneath balconies draped with Diwali lights; iftar plates of haleem sit beside trays of Hindu sweet-shop jalebis; a temple and a mosque share the same crumbling wall, their loudspeakers occasionally duelling in friendly discord.

But beneath the colour and clamour, the neighbourhood groans. The lanes—some barely wide enough for two scooters to pass—are choked with parked bikes, vegetable carts, and children playing gully cricket with a plastic ball wrapped in electrical tape. Open drains overflow when the municipality forgets to send the suction truck. In the monsoons, the Musi River—once the city’s lifeline, now a sluggish sewer—rises to lick the foundations of 400-year-old structures. Environmentalists issue reports no one reads; heritage activists hold candlelight vigils that dissolve into arguments over parking space.

Fires remain the great terror. In 2023, a short-circuit in a godown full of synthetic sarees devoured three shops and two homes in under an hour. Fire tenders couldn’t reach because illegally parked lorries blocked the only approach wider than a bullock cart. Residents formed human chains with plastic buckets from the lone functioning municipal tap. They saved most of the street, but the acrid smell of melted polyester clung to the walls for months.

Water itself is a daily negotiation. Officially, the Hyderabad Metropolitan Water Supply board delivers water once every two days. In reality, tankers rule. A 5,000-litre tanker costs Rs. 800–Rs. 1,200 depending on the driver’s mood and the depth of your desperation. Women line up at 4 a.m. with coloured plastic pots, trading gossip and recipes while they wait for the roar of the approaching lorry. “We are not poor,” one of them says fiercely, “we just pay for air in our water.”

Still, people stay. Mohammed Ali, fifty-five, master embroiderer whose family has worked in Jambagh since the time of Nizam VI, locks his shop every evening at eight. The lane is quieter now; the fluorescent tubes of paan shops cast long shadows. He pauses to light a beedi, eyes crinkling at the familiar chaos. “They keep saying shift to Hi-Tech City, buy a flat, breathe clean air. Arre, what will I breathe there? AC air that smells of nothing? Here, every breath has history in it—kebab smoke, marigold garlands, my grandfather’s attar. This noise, this crowd—it’s our heartbeat.”

Young people are less sentimental. Sana and her friends speak of weekend trips to malls with escalators that actually work, of coffee that doesn’t come in cutting glasses, of footpaths without cows.Still, when the call for azaan drifts across the rooftops on Friday afternoons, even the most restless pause mid-scroll on their phones. Something older than Wi-Fi holds them.

In Jambagh, history is not preserved in glass cases; it is lived in, argued with, patched up with duct tape and stubbornness. The paradise garden is gone, but its descendants have planted tougher flowers—resilient, loud, impossible to ignore. As Ali finally turns the key in his rusted lock, he glances back at the lane now lit only by the moon and a hundred small shops. “People ask why we don’t leave,” he says, voice soft against the distant qawwali straining from a neighbour’s radio. “Because this chaos chose us. And we, yaar, we chose it back.”