I was patted down expertly. Security was tight at the Indian vice-president's residence. Which, fittingly enough, since he was a Muslim, was on Maulana Azad Road -- Maulana Abul Kalam Azad having been the most prominent Muslim Congressman opposed to the 1947 partition. Our names were checked off against a list cleared for entry, after which came the metal detector gate. Only then were Ritu Menon (publisher of Women Unlimited, a Delhi feminist publication enterprise) and I free to walk on the long driveway curving towards a classic Raj-era bungalow set amidst croquet-quiet green lawns.
I had come to the Indian vice-president's house for a book launch: the two-volume Oxford India Anthology of Modern Urdu Literature. When Ritu had asked if I wanted to go, I'd been surprised. At the vice-president's residence? We from Dhaka were used to far more modest book launches.
In Delhi the words 'Urdu literature' tug - it was here that Urdu was born. After a whole lifetime in a Karachi school hating having to memorize Urdu poetry, like English schoolboys numbed to Virgil after having to conjugate Latin verbs on wintry mornings, in my ripe middle age I had come around to it. Bangladesh at times felt like a macrocosm of Delhi ravaged by the British after 1857, with kerosene lamplights flickering out over the vermilion-stained waters of provisional autocracies:
Baat karnee mujhey mushkil kabhee aisee to na thhee
Jaisee ab hai teree mehfil kabhee aisee to na thhee...
(Never had speaking been as difficult for me as it is now
Your gatherings never were what they've become now...)
The attempted imposition of Urdu had lit the fire of Bangladeshi nationalism, had blazed it all the way to independence, but Urdu shairs could capture our post-independence fall in ways that not even the most ardent nationalist could have once dreamt of.

Urdu is dying in India. The Hindu-Muslim communal divide meant that the original Hindustani language peeled off into two separate streams: Urdu became the Muslim half, weighted with Persian and Arabic words and written in the Nastaliq script, while Hindi -- beginning with Pratapnarayan's 1892 three-word formula: 'Hindi, Hindu, Hindustan.' - went the other way with its Devanagiri script and Sanskrit words. In Anita Desai's fine novel on the politics of language, In Custody, the old Urdu poet Nur spurns Deven, the college teacher who loves Urdu: "'Urdu poetry?' he finally sighed, turning a little to one side, towards Deven although not actually addressing himself to a person, merely to a direction, it seemed. 'How can there be Urdu poetry where there is no Urdu language left? It is dead, finished. The defeat of the Mughuls by the British threw a noose over its head, and the defeat of the British by the Hindi-wallahs tightened it. So now you see its corpse lying here, waiting to be buried.' He tapped his chest with one finger."
So what would they say at the book launch? What would it be like?
Delhi, where Punjabi refugees streamed to in the wake of the Partition riots, is a Punjabified city. As a result a central tension runs down its socio-cultural spine, as William Dalrymple noted in his City of Djinns: "The old Urdu-speaking elite who had inhabited Delhi for centuries- both Hindu and Muslim- had traditionally looked down on the Punjabis as boorish yeoman farmers. With their folk memories of mushairas (levees) of the old Mughal court and the mehfils (literally evenings) of the great Delhi poets, with their pride in the subtlety and perfection of Delhi Urdu and Delhi cooking, they could never reconcile themselves to the...essentially uncivilized Punjabi colonizers...In their turn, the Punjabis despised the old Delhi-wallahs as effeminate, slothful and lazy...Today, the two worlds, Mughal Old Delhi and Punjabi New Delhi, mix but rarely. Each keeps to itself, each absolutely certain of its superiority over the other."
It was into Mughal Old Delhi that I stepped into at the vice-president's residence, with the affair conducted along simple, elegant lines. Old World Urdu hung in the air. Whenever the first line of a ghazal couplet was recited from the lectern, invariably some voice behind us would murmur the second line. Just as the core of medieval Urdu poetry contains certain stock themes and conceits, so too most in the audience knew its glittery lines by heart. The speakers were the vice president, M. Hamid Ansari (ex-diplomat and former vice chancellor of Aligarh University), the OUP chairperson, the anthology's editor Mehr Afshan Farooqi (professor of South Asian literature at the University of Virginia), and Professor Mushirul Hasan, (vice-chancellor of Jamia Millia Islamia university). India's vice president had a light touch, raising a laugh when he pointed out that he was now fast becoming the chief guest in his own house. I had met Mushirul Hasan at his university office a few days before, where he had steered clear of the topic of the state of Muslims in India, only saying that aside from government posts, they were doing fine in the private sector. Here he lamented the loss of Urdu. In fact, the dominant air in the room was that of a nazuk elegy for a language fallen on such hard times. Later, after tea and snacks on the lawn, this gave me the opening to riposte at Ritu, who was prone to comment that Bengalis were insufferable with their Nobels and constant Tagore harping. Why damn the Bongs, I now grinned, you Urdu-wallahs are just as bad, getting together in your little mushairas and moaning about lost days of the rose, the nightingale and the nigha-i-teer (the arrowlike glance) of the beloved cruel...
A few days later, at my Fort Siri guesthouse I noticed that the stitches of the sleeves on my blazer had torn off at the back. I needed a quick fix. I walked to the dirt alley market beside the ruined 13th-century fort walls where I'd 'top up' my Reliance cell. This morning I kept on going past the phone shop, into more dirt and chickenshit, asking about a darzi. Way down I entered a side galli at whose dark end were two tailor shops, but there the women took one look at my blazer and said, no quick fix, this was complicated. As I stood there, one of the women said something in Bangla to a young man. What, I said, switching to Bangla, you guys are Bangalis? The man replied, yes. In fact, he was Robi da from Kolkata. I began a rap: "Come on, man, I'm from Bangladesh, I'm in a fix, what the hell was this, no damn dorji here who can repair a coat, you kidding me, what kind of a baajar was this?" He smiled, thought hard, then said come with me. We went across to a building where five stinking floors up was a room with a man sitting behind a sewing machine. Boys sat on the floor weaving coarse blankets on handlooms. "Ustad," Robi da said, "There's a coat you have to fix." The instant Ustad took the blazer in his hands I knew he could do it. I said, in Urdu: "Ustad, you the man, fix me up. Look at this, I get up in the morning and find the sleeves on my blazer like this. There are places I must have looked like some fool wandering with torn sleeves..." Ustad let slip a grin, and said okay, let me work on it. He spoke Urdu, too. As he expertly began to fold and stitch, I asked him about it. He said his father had taught Urdu in a school. He asked me about mine. I told him. And that was it -- sitting in that sad, desolate room with child labour at my back, like two old friends, we began to lament the loss of Urdu: What a lovely language! All gone! Born here in Dilli, and look at it now. Just fifteen kilometers from here in the mohallahs of Chandni Chowk. My children have no time for it, they teach Hindi in schools. I complimented his accent. He said as much of mine. Then the blazer was done, and he handed it back to me. "It'll last," he said, "unlike Urdu." Then we began a courtly dance, me pressing money into his hands and he backing away, me pleading please, you have to, and him saying no way, till I just laid the note on his sewing machine before saying goodbye. Downstairs I thanked Robi da, and walked off beneath dusty neem tree leaves, thinking that if a darzi in a raw hovel, a galaxy removed from the haughty world of the old Urdu elite, could grieve the loss of his language then that loss was real, there was no brushing aside the hurt here...
Just the other day I took out my blazer and looked at the stitches. Ustad's sewing was holding up fine, while his Urdu...
Khademul Islam is literary editor, The Daily Star.