Muda was my neighbor. I knew her through my sister, her classmate at Loreto. She was at home on alternate days, mostly to watch the television, which back then was found only at our home in the whole neighborhood. We liked each other, would steal glances, made excuses just to be around, but we were scared to say it. Abba was very strict. He wanted me to become a doctor, anyhow. Sometimes, when no one was around, we would look at each other, and if my sister came she would move her face toward the TV. I would see her face in the glass cabinet, where Amma kept her ceramic cups and plates.

It took me two years to convey my feelings. I wrote it all on paper and put it in her palm that day when she was leaving the house. “What is it?” she asked, smiling nervously, then crumpled the paper in her sweaty palm. She ran towards her home—God, she would have gotten hit by that speedy motorbike, and I looked angrily at the driver and the woman seated behind him, who was holding his belly. Then I silently Muda, who knocked at the door of her house, and then turned back at me and smiled. Even today, now, when she is only a distant memory, if I close my eyes, for two seconds, I see her standing at that door, covered with Muharram posters, looking back at me, with an unforgettable smile.

We started meeting after that day, mostly at the Imambara , running shadows inside the vast labyrinth. The Asafi Imambara, completed in 1791, is nestled within a series of three vast, arcaded enclosures linked by monumental gateways, culminating in several significant architectural works. Once a year, Lucknow is overcome with grief as thousands of Shias ritually mourn the martyrdom of the Prophet Muhammad's grandson, Imam Husayn. During Muharram, the first month of the Islamic lunar calendar, they gather in processions that wind through the city and attend religious assemblies (majlis), joined by people of other faiths. The first forecourt (jilaw khana), no longer enclosed, is distinguished by its highly unusual gate, known as the Rumi Darwaza. The elaborate Rumi Darwaza cuts a unique profile with its arched profile, large leafy ornament, and radiating stone-rose flourishes. Midway through the court stand two tall, triple-arched gates that closely mirror each other. One is known as the Drum House (nawbat khana), while the other is an unnamed gate that leads to a second, rectangular, arcaded court encompassing a circular lawn. On the same axis as the two preceding gates, an even more elaborate third gate leads to an irregular third court, arcaded and bounded on the right by a Friday mosque and straight ahead by the Great Imambara, joined by a dramatic, continuous staircase. On the left, the court also incorporates a modest entrance to a charming arcaded stepwell once known as the Stepwell Palace (hamam baoli) or Assembly Hall (diwan khana). The mosque, with its eleven-arched facade, three turnip-shaped domes, and towering, engaged minarets, has six interconnected chambers, all whitewashed on the interior, and an unusual sunken mihrab. The facade of the Great Imambara features a rhythmic series of thirteen arches, and its interior consists of nine eclectically painted chambers. The central chamber incorporates an awe-inspiring, pillarless vault with resounding acoustics; spanning 50 meters in length, 17 meters in width, and 15 meters in height, it is one of the largest preindustrial masonry vaults ever built. At the center lies the skewed, canopied grave of the patron of the Imambara and its complex, Nawab Asaf al-Dawla, the vizier of the troubled Mughal Empire and the third Nawab of Awadh.

There is a shrine reserved for mourners. You can hear the sound of wailing even after the mourners have left. There is water, a step well, and a flowering garden. The shadow of the tourist guide on the front door, lighting a cigarette, though he died last autumn. There are hidden tunnels and whispers. There is a chandelier in which candles are always burning, and never blows off. There is a labyrinth with infinite doors and corridors from which one can keep an eye on the road like an ancient sniper.

The step well is centered on a broad, descending, tiered staircase that collects monsoon rains and is surrounded by multiple levels of arcaded chambers that were once inhabitable. An octagonal well completes the building. The Imambara complex forms a pleasing architectural composition built mostly from broad, lakhori bricks, resilient mortar, and pliant, formerly white stucco. Constructed between 1786 and 1791, it was even more impressive then than now, as it adjoined a palace compound named the Panj Mahal, part of an elaborately fortified area known as the Machi Bhawan. Most of this was destroyed after the historic rebellion of the city's British Indian troops in 1857, divorcing the Great Imambara complex from its original urban context. Over the past centuries, many visitors to Lucknow have remarked on its impressive cityscape. Perhaps the most complimentary words came from English war correspondent William H. Russell, who visited Lucknow in 1858 to cover the Rebellion. He wistfully described the embattled city as “a vision of palaces, minarets, domes azure and golden, cupolas, colonnades, long facades of fair perspective in pillar and column, terraced roofs—all rising amid a calm, still ocean of the brightest verdure.”¹

I and Muda would mostly sit on the black sooted stairs of the Asafi mosque, she would always have a rose in her hand, that I plucked from the garden, we would look at the faces of passerby towards the main hall, a new tourist guide, telling about the fake history of Imamabara, and the city that he eavesdropped from other tourist guides, most of the men and women were couples, the women’s hand dyed with henna, the men had a new Seiko watch on their feeble hands covered with turquoise veins, like roots of a tree coming out a house, where once a family lived, but suddenly disappeared, like that old tourist guide disappeared, they said he was eaten by the candle’s ghost burning near the Nawab’s grave, for telling a fake history of his city to the tourists. Muda would tell me about every married woman who was getting a picture clicked with her husband in that rose garden, she would know everything about them, just by the way, they held their husband’s hand, or the distance between them when they got photographed. ‘You see that woman, which, that, that woman near that gate, yes, she doesn’t love her husband, she had been married against her wish, her lover was an old man, her father said if her got her married to an old man, they would make fun of him, that he sold his daughter for money, but she loved him, age has nothing to do with love, and now when that photographer would click a picture and give it to them, she would look at it, when her husband has gone to work, and in that portrait she would see that old Nawab and not her husband, and when he would make love to her in the night, his face would get metamorphosed into that of her lover, my friend Zehra told me about verses from Talmud, if they said in reverse before love making, a husband could get the face of your lover.’ I would my face back and look at her, and she would be innocently playing with the petals of the roses, like those girls lying on the bed, with legs crossed plucking roses, and saying he loves me, he loves me not.

“Who lives inside the Imambada?” Muda asked me one day when we were there after school. She told me that when she was a child, she had accompanied her mother to the Asafi Imambada for an azadari event. Inside the Imambada she saw the grave of Nawab Asad.

“What’s that, Amma?” she asked.

“It’s a grave.”

“Whose grave, Amma?”

“Nawab Asaf.”

“Why isn’t he buried at Karbala like Grandpa?”

“He felt lonely inside a graveyard. So he asked his children to bury him at a place where visitors could keep coming. Also, through us, he sees the changing landscape of the city he once built.”

“Won’t he get disturbed when the mourners wail here?”

“No one gets disturbed by wailing. He is also wailing inside his grave.”

“For what?”

“For the ruins the city has become.”

I kept on looking at her childlike face, the innocence through which she told that story. She would look at me, then put the lock of her hair falling onto her forehead behind her ears, her golden earrings glistening like a moon over a city where everyone is dead. “Do you think he is alive in his grave?”

I looked at her face again. I didn’t want to tell her that her mother was a liar. And no human could be alive in their grave. But I didn’t. I know no one would want to hear such a thing about their mothers. “Maybe we could ask him.”

I asked her to put her ear on his grave. I went closer and cried, “Nawab Sahab, can you hear us?” I said it twice. “Don’t worry, we will rebuild the city and the monuments again.”

“He is asleep,” Muda said.

I asked her to put her ears to the grave again. Then I spoke in a husky voice. “Who is disturbing my sleep?” “It’s me and Muda Nawab Sahab, the residents of your city.” “Go away you two, or I will make you rats,” I said, again in his voice.

Muda understood that it was me who was making those voices. “I will kill you,” she said, and ran after me. We ran inside the whole Imambada. Still today, when I go back to Lucknow and go back to the Imambada, I can hear her footsteps. Like little children running over the roof of an abandoned house, on which an old painted board hangs, reading “House for Sale.”

Muda doesn’t live in Lucknow anymore. She is married and lives in Abadan with her husband. He is a geologist. We couldn’t get married. Muda was adamant that we should get married. But her father said I didn’t have any future. I had dropped out of the medical course after the first year. I wanted to become a writer. Muda said I would never become a writer. “If you didn’t run away with me, you will never become a writer.”

“Where we would go? The world is a small place. How far we would run?”

“I can run around the world in two days.”

“You can run, Muda. I can’t. I am a tired writer.”

“We would go and hide inside Nawab Sahab’s grave. Maybe he would make some space for me,” she laughed, hiding her face with her slender fingers.

Muda kept rubbing her feet on the ground, but her father didn’t let us get married. I even met him twice at his clinic and told him that I had a promising future as a writer. “I have seen the fate of writers. My brother was a poet. He spent his last days locked in an isolated room of that mental institution in Ranchi. Also, you are not a Shia. How would I face my ancestors if let my daughter marry you?” He was reading an old newspaper and didn’t even care to look at my teary face.

I left the city in two months. I knew if I lived close by, Muda would never get married. In 2001, I was offered a residency program at Oxford. I lived in London for three years trying to finalize the draft of my novel about the French surgeon Jean de Pozzi. I came back in 2004. There was an old rusted lock on Muda’s door, covered with new Muharram posters. Her parents had gone to Najaf for pilgrimage.

One afternoon, when I was tired of working on my draft, I went to Imambada. The hall was empty, a young married couple was walking towards the alley. I stayed there for a while praying for my deceased father. Before leaving, I went near Nawab Asaf’s grave. “Muda are you there?” I asked in a loud voice, that is still echoing in that hall, even if you go there today.

“Let me sleep, for God’s sake,” the old Nawab cried in a loud voice.

¹"Architecture and the Twelver Shi‘a Tradition: The Great Imāmbārā complex of Lucknow,” Muqarnas, vol. 23 (Nov.), Leiden: Brill, 2006, pp. 219-250