saleem kaka had a hundred homing pigeons. 99 for the names of allah and one for his beloved safina. saleem kaka had a hundred homing pigeons and he lived in mehrauli at the heart of purani dilli. saleem kaka lived with a hundred pigeons in mehrauli at the heart of purani dilli where there was the jagannath temple, khawaja kaki dargah, qila rai pithora, and qutub minar. with the tourists and the locals, the sahibs and the sufis, the hindus and the muslims.
saleem kaka lived with a hundred pigeons, in mehrauli, at the heart of purani dilli where there was a dudh wali gali and this purani sabzi mandi where you could haggle for the prices of fruits and legumes, kachoris and bhel, where you could walk down to shamsi talab, pay 10 rupees, dive into the reservoir with gangsters and businessmen, swimming along side to side, right there at the corner of aam bagh and zafar mahal.
saleem kaka lived in mehrauli at the heart of purani dilli with a hundred pigeons and his beloved safina. now take a city, delhi, divide it into 11 districts and pick a region, mehrauli, having 65 thousand people. now divide that by the august of ‘21 and you get what? i’ll give you a hint. it’s the same as if you were to divide it by religion.
so now you’re left with corrupt power, and one of many statements saying that people like saleem kaka don’t belong in mehrauli, or the heart of purani dilli. so no more bartan baazar with the clanging of lustrous utensils and no more of mir chacha ki kiraane ki dukaan with scattered grains of rice or abida’s dance classes echoing laughter that fights to be heard over the sound of ghungroos.
after all of that, you’re only left with bulldozers. levelled buildings. raised land. broken glass and brick. not even sunlight filtered through this part of town because even that wasn’t saffron enough.
saleem kaka moved the 15 kilometres to nizamuddin, packed up the pigeons in their cages and left mehrauli at the heart of purani dilli. he left bhagwati hospital where thousands of babies like his own were born every year, and left the 147 hand pumps around which you could watch the women do their laundry and gossip about their mother-in-laws, three times a week. he left his house next to main chowk, in mehrauli, at the heart of purani dilli, and moved the 15 kilometres to nizamuddin.
and he lived there for weeks, driving sometimes past the empty plot of land where his house no longer stood. and the winds blew hard and they swept through the dust and the dirt, and every blade of grass bent beneath the weight of what was no longer there. after three months, the bird droppings in the bottom of the cages became five layers thick, and saleem kaka decided it was time to let the birds fly free. fly free, so they could find their way back. and he knew, not all of them would return home that night, and he knew, that next time, some of those cages might not be as full. but he also knew that being confined can get too familiar sometimes. so that morning, he opened the doors on the cages, and the winds that swept through purani dilli, swept through and lifted all hundred pigeons into the air in a cloud of feathers and covered the blue sky.
that night, he returned home from work, turned off the car, went around to the back of the house and cried out in pain. because there in front of him, were the empty pigeon cases filled with bird droppings and feathers but no pigeons, because not a single one had returned back to him. and the man who had watched them level his house to the ground without shedding a single tear suddenly felt his mind grow fuzzy and his rib cage as empty as the ones the birds had abandoned.
so he got back into the car to take a drive to try to clear his mind. and as he drove down the long streets of purani dilli, the wheel moved under his hands and he found himself on the abandoned roads of mehrauli. and as he neared main chowk, he slowed to a stop. because there, on the empty plot of land where his house once stood, were pigeons, all hundred of them, sitting amongst the dust and the dirt and the broken glass, looking up at him as if to ask: where is our home?
Kaavya Kochar is a physics student at the University of California, Berkeley. She has performed spoken word with Slam Out Loud and at inter-school events across India, and is a scriptwriter and actor for Ready Steady, a film on access to education. Her name is the Sanskrit word for poetry.