To Nizamuddin, where Rockstars of Allah and I shared songs of love, heartbreak and melancholy
I haven't seen him in a long time. I can't. When his one-year-old had passed away, I hadn't called. I hadn't known what to say to him.
He, who sang so many songs in that little room as we sat there in the room of the community centre in Nizamuddin. In the very room, they had tied a goat, too. Three years is a long time. Or maybe not. More than a thousand nights and a thousand nights. Each night an eternity.
Nadeem Arshi has seen a lot. In the film called Mash Up Pankaj Butalia made on the two boys I met long ago at Zaki restaurant in Nizamuddin, I see him sing a song to his daughter. He had a lisp like I do. I remember the songs. This is a story of dreams and lived reality. This is a story of a chance encounter. This is a story of slum boys in a city trying to sing their way out of poverty. The shrine of Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya reverberates with qawwalis. In its streets, these boys sing of love and loss. In a way, the God is a beloved. All songs emerge from love or the lack of it.
Remember this story is in the present tense of the past. But we can go back and forth. Catch the break, collapse time. Some stories move like that.
Pankaj had called me to tell me about the tragedy. I felt sad. But then, I was guilty of the crime of silence. But then, I am the keeper of the silence. When I open my notebooks now, I see the parts of the story that never made it to the "edited version". Is any story complete?
I think I prayed for him to be all right. Can't tell if prayers work, but then I always met him at the shrine of Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya. For years I have read the letters that seekers tie on the jaal and wondered. But one must never question the refuge.
He had messaged after the death. We pretended to not know.
I just asked him if he was fine. In a chat window, you can't tell. You only see the structure of words, sentences and stories. We left it at that. They still sing. That's what defiance is. Against the distrust of the universe, and at odds with the reality of their lives.
The first time I met him was the night that I first heard him sing, at Zaki hotel in Nizamuddin Basti. It was late. Past midnight he had walked in, and sat on one of the orange benches at the restaurant, which would remain open until 3am.
They ordered tea and bread pakoras. In a dark corner of the upper portion of the old eatery, a few men were smoking hashish. The smell wafted in the room. They were unperturbed. Drugs are everywhere in this area. In the eyes of men, and in its newfound wealth, in its despair.
Straight, thin buildings are coming up. Glass and concrete. Tiles and steel.
Cities are places of memories. Dark alleys still lead to the crumbling edifices of the past — houses with beams and sadness, courtyards and roshandaans.He was singing a song. I asked him if it was a popular song. He said it was his song.
"We have a band. It is called Dynamic Rockstars," he told me.
He was with another young man, and a girl.
He sang more. I asked for his number.
We forget. Songs, and other encounters.
Only for so long. But I also believe that nothing is a coincidence.
A few weeks later, I was scrolling through the contact list on a night that seemed too long. I called him and asked if he would tell me his story. Some stories come to us just like that. On a night. At a place of trust.
They would sing their way out this. The slum life, they say. In fact, they repeat it so many times that they almost believe it. I believe it, too. We are naive. Perhaps that is the best thing.
This is that kind of sadness where there is hope. In fact, they like to be sad. It is deeper than other emotions, they say. Growing up in the Nizamuddin Basti was tough. They could go the other way - become addicts, indulge in petty theft, and end up in prison like some of their friends, or be good. Being good is like walking on these streets with blinkers.
After Arundhati Roy's Ministry of Utmost Happiness set in a graveyard, I want to say in these alleys where the author has spent many evenings and where graves lie around as if the dead are equal residents is the Ministry of Utmost Sadness. But then, sadness is not a bad thing.
Nadeem Arshi, Sahil Siddiqui, and Zoheb, and the rest are always singing. Love songs that become sad. Over and over again. As if by the act of singing, of plugging the cord into the amplifier, and switching on the bird lights in the barren room in the Nizamuddin Community Centre, they would be transported elsewhere. These young men sing together. They even sing one anothers' songs. They have their groups - Painfull rockstar, Dynamic Star, ZR, LUV, and so on.
They record songs, upload them on Youtube and ReverbNation, help each other out with lyrics. But they also betray each other. Living in a slum teaches you that. Look out for yourself. You fight to be. Desperation, and ambition. They co-exist.
They are waiting for someone to notice them. They invest what they have in recording, and only one of them — Zuhaib Ali — has been able to make a video so far. That cost him Rs 65,000. He later fell in love with the girl he cast in the video — a beautician from Okhla. I remember having photographed them in a Romeo-Juliet kind of backdrop where he climbs a ladder with roses and she looks out of a window.
The rest of them wait. They know what they would do when they make it. Nadeem Arshi wanted to send his parents for Hajj. Sahil wanted to support his elder sister, who got divorced, and Zuby wanted to help the poor. That was then. The story is in the present tense of the past. Later, all things change.
They are the believers. In the benevolence of the Sufi Saint Nizamuddin Auliya whose shrine defines this locality. There is the other context. Of wealth. In Nizamuddin West, and across the street, in the East, the real estate is worth in crores. The noveau rich have come in. There are Audis and BMWs, and boutiques and coffee shops. There are also boutiques and old vendors of ghost stories, of talismans and amulets, of lost earrings of the beloved and old trinkets of memory value.
A song was lost, stolen, or whatever. But the fact of the matter is that over tea and bheja fry that night at Zaki restaurant in Nizamuddin Basti, Nadeem Arshi, who was 27 when I first met him, said his opening lines were taken by this other friend, the flamboyant bandana and stud wearing young man who has inspired many in this neighbourhood of depravity, and poverty, to look like him. Like a star. That's what he is. A star. With a loyal fan following who stop to say hello to him, and congratulate him on his voice. The rest of them fade out when he walks in. He is always in focus. He also knows this.
Nadeem stopped sporting a smiliar hairstyle. He said he was different. But that night, he would tell more."That's what a song is mostly," he said. "That sets the tone for the song. You return to those lines, and they hold the song in place. He took that, and never gave the track back."
Sahil Siddiqui was nodding. He knew about it, and he didn't condone it. The two belong to two different bands from Nizamuddin Basti — Dynamic and Painfull. They suffix it with "Rockstars" for the effect. Like those faux leather jackets, and those boots with the buckles and the metal straps. Those are "rockstar" things. The world might have moved on to other things. But here that word must matter somehow. It is another story that they mostly sing love songs composed on free tunes that they have downloaded from YouTube.
At the back of the community centre in Nizamuddin Basti, there was a room with two beds and an amplifier. On a pink chart paper, he had scribbled his name, drawn a mic, and an amplifier, and earphones. They had hung bird lights. Blue red, and yellow. The tubelights, the ones that remind you of the sanitised spaces like hospitals or asylums, were too harsh for songs of love and heartbreak. No curtains hung on the window.
Outside, there were stark walls. They blocked most of the view. This could be a room anywhere. Only that this one was in this slum. A turn, and a few steps, and you were out there — face to face with poverty, and deprivation, and ugliness, and heaps of garbage.
In the distance, men in rags were sniffing whitener, or smoking ganja. On the left, beyond the locked gates, the infamous park lies. Now, after the Commonwealth Games, they cleared it and installed lights. But it has a reputation. Of crime and theft, and rapes and other such netherworld things. Straight up, there is another gate and it opened into a space where drunk men were playing cards, and women were picking out lice from children's hair.
Urchins ran around, and then, there was a narrow alley. There were more narrow alleys that were like rivulets and you entered a dark space. There was a small room no more than the size of two double beds. It was a windowless space. Without the bulb, it would be impossible to see anything here.
This is where Nadeem lived with his family. Four siblings, and a crippled father. When he was much younger, he would feel guilty seeing his father sell chai outside the Nizamuddin Baoli Gate. So, he decided to drop out of school, and started to apprentice at a workshop for Rs 5 per day.
now...
He works as a fabricator in Nehru Nagar, and makes Rs 7,500 a month. He spends his evenings and nights in the room that has been given to his father at the community centre, where he worked as a chowkidar. But Nadeem felt it may not be safe for his father to spend the nights there. This is where he wrote his lyrics, and sang. In fact, at his workplace, they referred to him as a singer. He wanted to release an album. Perhaps be like Sonu Nigam.
He was in love then. This was unrequited love. Maybe there was some love when it all started. He would like to believe so. She called him. But she asked him to sing songs of Rahat Fateh Ali Khan. He said she listened to his compositions on her mobile, and cried. That's what the mother of the beloved had told him.
then...
But he writes for her. She is his muse. It is not hard to believe. Look around and there it is. In the daily drudgery of their lives, in the dark alleys of their neighbourhood, and the deprivations of a slum life. Nadeem says how they would sometimes drink water with flour to keep hunger at bay.
They have an old guitar. Someone else's. They strum it. But none of them are trained. Not vocals, not anything else. It doesn't matter, they say.
"If you have sung forever, you will have the voice," Nadeem says. "It is a blessing."
What is pain, then?
It is when you can't help the situation, when you know you could do it but there's nobody to give you that push, it is when you must cut aluminium, and see your time go by without you making it, he says.
He does khidmat at the shrine of the Sufi Saint Nizamuddin Auliya every Thursday. He has been doing it for the last seven years, waking up at 6am, and then pushing water carts, feeding the poor, collecting the refuse, and any other chores. Because he was born near the shrine, and the grace of the saint is what he believes in. That's what faith is. I learned this. Stories are lessons in faith. All you have to do is believe.
Nadeem says they all have sad stories. It is important to suffer so you can create. If you weren't hurt, how would you bring that pain in the music you make. In the scraps of paper, the lyrics are testimony to their love and loss. Almost all of them are in love.
Zuby is in the room. He cuts the air with a toss of his hair. Later, they would speak about his failings, but not now. Because Zuby Ali has arrived with an entourage, and most of his men sport the same hairstyle as he does. Straight hair, cut in layers.
now...
In the slums of Nizamuddin West, in its narrow lanes, and dark alleyways, these young men sang songs of love and loss. The narratives of their lives ran parallel to one another's. Difficult childhood, and heartbreaks. Poverty, and the struggle to defy the prescribed life of a slum kid.
Zuby was a charming man, who seemed to know the plot. Nagma didn't say much, and only smiled. That night, she came to the basti dressed in skinny denims, and knee-high boots, and a cream coat, holding a bunch of red roses for Zuby. Friday was Rose Day. She had got him a gift, too. He sang songs, looked at her, stretched out his hands, and sang to his love. He was good with theatrics. A group of young and old men, and a few girls gathered around them.
"Allah isse kamyabi de," a young man said.
Later, he said he married Nagma five months after they met. He had cast her in his first video, and they had an affair. She said she had fallen in love with him when she first saw him.
Zuby wore stylish clothes, and was articulate. He knew the narrative well. There might have been some truth in it, but it was narrated to maximise the broken heart complex. He said his life is a story of losses. He lost his father to another woman when he was young, and then his brother, and the loss that did him in was his mother's. On the Hyundai Sonata car that is always parked outside the chai stalls, and the new hotels with their tiled exteriors near the Baoli Gate, the sticker read "Maa Ki Dua" and on the left top corner "Painfull Rockstars".
The car was a gift from his girlfriend Nagma. There is a way the poor look different from the rich. You can tell from their sunken cheeks and their frames. Nadeem and Sahil, and the rest were poor boys from the slums. Zuby was different.
Sahil, the one with the fan following
Sahil Siddiqui started it all.
He gave them all this dream, Nadeem says.
The lanky young man got up to sing.
"Kyun is tarah..."
That was his first song.
He recorded the first song at Sai Milan Studio in Lajpat Nagar. Then, he formed the band. That was a fashionable thing to do. And suddenly, everyone was trying to record, write and compose. He met Zuby one evening and asked to join. Zuby had already been singing at Comesum, a chain of fast food joints near the Nizamuddin station, and he was Sahil's elder brother's friend.
"I have a love story," Zoheb told me.
"Mine is a sad story," Nadeem interrupted.
"Actually, I start with love, and then it gets sad," Zoheb replied.
Their sadness is so innocent I had wanted to buy them tea and biscuits.
"Ladki toh nahi mili, lekin ek career toh mil gaya," Sahil said.
There was the voice of a girl crying that he used to play on his mobile. Given my own fascination with love, and its manifestations, I had been curious. But the grieving, amplified and tuned up, was too much to take. They shut it, and Sahil said he would never love again.
The girl betrayed him, and now she had wanted to return. But he had decided he will never give her that power again. When you are in pain, the words come, and the songs come, he said.
"I used my pain," he said. "I will use it always."
His father Mohd Zafir Nizami came to Delhi from Bihar's Bhagalpur district before Sahil was born. He owns a flower shop at the shrine in Nizamuddin. He used to tell Sahil to focus on other things. Singing would need other things than just a good voice. His elder son had tried. He gave up and started working at the Aga Khan Trust. But Sahil is obstinate.
"My father said, once you have started on the path, don't turn back. I won't. I am still pursuing an education, and help out at the shop, but this is what my life is going to be about," he said.
Now, Sahil has a loyal fan following. Many a girl wants to be his girlfriend but he is nonchalant about it. I met him on Saturday and he was courteous. He is a man who knows he has the charm.
They didn't own a sound system. When he recorded his first song, he played it on his mobile phone to his parents, and they asked him who sang it. It was a surprise, and they were happy. He had figured out everything on his own through the internet. He met others from other neighbourhoods who had come to the recording. They were all trying to make it. You'd pray for all of them, he said.
"When the heart breaks, the sound is from there. You can't fake it," he once told me.
Zuby, the maverick
Zuby says he smoked too much. He had never known anchors in life. Those he loved left him. In death or in life. Like his father who abandoned his mother when he was much younger. And then, his elder brother who took poison one day because he couldn't deal with a heartbreak.
It was a complicated affair, he said. Another sibling died in a freak accident and the ailing mother, who he remembers as always holding the prayer beads and muttering blessings, died two years later.
Zuby was a maverick. He roamed around with men who he referred to as his friends, but you'd know they were there to protect him. They didn't interfere with his narrative; didn't correct him or add their bits. They hung around, and watched over him. To me, Zuby looked like a man who wasn't afraid of self-destruction.
In his case, sadness and melancholy were irrevocable conditions. Each time, he started out with a love song, he found himself engulfed in sadness. That he had a terrible breakup when he was much younger had a lot to do with it. Young love destroys you, he said. In a way.
Love could happen later. But who knows, he said. It is like this freeway. You fall in and out. In between, you write and compose sitting in a car on a busy road. You smoke incessantly and you drink numerous cups of tea. You like to think you are an artist, and that all artists must suffer a case of acute melancholy to make any sense.
Boys would stop him and tell him how they have found his songs so relevant.
"Bhai, aapke gane sun ke humko lagta hai hamari zindagi ke upar likha hai," they would say to him. He patted them on the shoulder and smiled.
"This is a universal theme. Love, loss, sadness and abandonment," Zuby Ali said.
He said his mother loved him the most, and always urged him to sing. He dropped out of school when his brother died and took care of his mother. He remembered how they returned to their maternal grandmother's house in Nizamuddin Basti, and lived in a room that was too small for six of them. The walls would leak during the rains, and then they started building their house. Now, it is a five-storey building.
He got lucky with his mobile repair business and his brothers earned well enough. But the house wasn't that tall when his mother lived, and this is what makes him miserable.
Some people just go away without a moment of respite in their lives. There is no balancing out in this universe, he said.
He had sold his first car, Maruti Suzuki Zen for his mother's eye operation. She couldn't see well and it irked him. She had cried then.
"She kept praying. During the day and the evening. She cooked my favourite things, and she was just there — someone who waits for you always," he said.
In 2003, he fell in love with a girl he met at a wedding in the neighbourhood. They were doomed lovers. He was miserable. It lasted a year. But it left him damaged in a way, he says. His brother told him to focus and that's when he wrote his song.
"Aaja tujhe vaasta..." the lyrics go.
The video shows him and Nagma. The plot revolves around love. In the end, the guy in love hangs himself and the girl falls on her knees and wails. There is no way out of love, he says.
"I am always sad. I don't know why. I have always been like this," he said.
"I don't sing for anyone. I sing for everyone," he added.
Then (from the notebook)
They are all eating together. At Zaki.
Nadeem says he also wants to buy his father pigeons when he earns money. His father used to fly pigeons as a hobby. Now, he can't.
"I don't know how much money is good enough. I also want to get them a house," he says. "I don't complain. I was blessed to have such parents. I am happy living here. It makes me who I am," he says.
Zuby, in his dramatic way, says he wanted to sing on a stage in front of his mother. If he ever makes it, he will cry. Nagma says it doesn't matter. As long as she has him, she is happy.
"We will be together. If Sahil gets an offer, he will take me along. If I get, he is there by my side. I said to him long ago. We are in it together. If one falls behind, the other needs to turn back. All I want is one label," Zuby says.
Sahil looks away. Nadeem goes on sipping his tea.
Now
Some stories don't leave you. I find them on most evenings at the shrine. I have moved out of my barsati since. In June 2014, Nadeem got engaged. His girlfriend had agreed to marry him after the magazine published the story. We were both happy. Sometimes, a story doesn't need to change the world. I always joke with friends that I don't break stories. "I break emotions," I say.
We went to celebrate his engagement. He smiled and I took pictures. We took pictures together. Sometimes, we must let the story evolve on its own. We shouldn't abandon the stories.
But one day, he called to say he married. I asked him why wasn't I invited and he said the girl who he got engaged to didn't marry him eventually. So, I hadn't even saved this one love story. But stories can't save you. They can only tell about a time and people in that time and if you walked away with something, that's job done. He married the girl his parents found for him. When it appeared, we called it Allah's rockstars. It was a story of slum boys trying to sustain a dream. It was also a story of us.
The film called Mash Up by Pankaj Butalia chronicles their lives from when we left. Watching it made me smile.
I still listen to their songs. They have come to my house to sing for my friends. There are stories beyond the brief. This was one such. I hope they find what they are looking for. But do we ever know?
He knows, they would say.
I agree. The Saint knows. He is the keeper of all our stories and our faith.