Another of my mentors was Nawab Habib Jung. Nawabsaab had horses and his son Mohammad (called MP) and I were good friends and we used to ride together. They lived in Begumpet, where Nawab Habib Jung had built his own house on the grounds of his father Nawab Wali-ud-Dowla’s house which was called Vilayat Manzil (today the Country Club). Nawab Habib Jung’s house was my all-time favorite for its architecture. It had a large central courtyard open to the sky with a lawn, in which there was a swimming pool at one end and a low marble platform with inlay work at the other end, on which he used to pray. All around the courtyard were bedrooms, the dining room, and the drawing room; all opening onto a wide veranda that ran right around the courtyard. Most of the time we would sit on the veranda and look at the swimming pool and chat because it was so airy and lovely. In the basement was a huge formal drawing room and Nawabsaab’s office. Nawab Habib Jung typed out my first reference letter on his blue portable typewriter, when I applied for a job in the tea gardens to Harrisons & Crosfield. I remember the words exactly, ‘He is keenly interested in saddle seat equitation, has an excellent seat, and shows respect where respect is due.’

Outside the house there was an old well and several huge old trees. At one corner were the stables. MP and I would usually ride near the house in an open area overlooking the lake. One day I went to see the film ‘The Horseman’ with Omar Sharif as the hero. I was enthralled by the film principally because of the scenes of Buz Kashi and the many sequences of riding on Akhal-Teke horses (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akhal-Teke) The Akhal-Teke is a beautiful breed that combines beauty with strength, endurance, intelligence, and loyalty. Akhal-Teke horses have everything good that horses are known and famous for. This film was a delight for all horse lovers like me.

I loved horses and riding passionately. In one scene in the film, they showed a riding competition where the riders would pick up a small piece of cloth from the ground with a dagger while riding at a full gallop. On the morning after I watched the film, another dear friend Anoop (Vicky) Randhawa, MP, and I rode our horses to the schooling area. I was thrilled with the horsemanship display that I had seen in the movie, and still hugely pumped up with vicarious adrenaline, I decided to try the maneuver of picking up the cloth while riding at a gallop that I had seen in the film. The problem with this intention, which I discovered too late, was that the Akhal-Teke is 14.3 – 15.5 hands tall, whereas the Thoroughbred that I was riding was a full 17 hands. Also, the gait of the retired racehorses that we used to ride was a hard, pounding run that was very harsh and jolting. It was many years later when I rode an Arab stallion in Saudi Arabia that I realized what comfort in riding is. The Arab is the Rolls Royce of horses and seems to simply float over the earth as it gallops. To come back to my story, I dropped my handkerchief in the middle of the field. I then wheeled my horse, trotted to the end of the field, and then turned around and came straight down at a full gallop. As the horse neared the handkerchief, I went down over the right shoulder and reached down with my right arm for the handkerchief. I picked it up alright but realized by then that I was too far down over the side and the pounding gait of the horse was further throwing me lower and lower. And sure enough, in another two or three strides, I fell. I landed on my arm and shoulder and there was a terrible shooting pain. I tried to scramble up and found that my right arm was twisted at an unlikely angle and my shoulder had dislocated. I was in severe pain. MP and Vicky came running and helped me up. I told them to take my arm and pull it hard so that the ball joint would go back into the socket. I have no idea why I said that or how I knew that this was the right thing to do, but it was, and my arm was back in its normal position though the pain was still severe.

The next item on the agenda was to catch my horse which had spooked at my fall and run away. It took us more than half an hour to calm him down and get close enough to catch him. Then, one armed as I was, I mounted him, and we got him back to the stable. Then I took the bus back home. By the time I got home my shoulder looked like a mini football, red and angry and excruciatingly painful. My mother was home, and I told her my story and showed her my shoulder. Contrary to the, ‘O! My poor baby!!’ kind of response of most mothers, my mother recited a couplet in Urdu.

“Girte hain shahsawar hi maidan-e-jung mein.
Woh tifl kya gire jo ghutno ke bal chale – Mirza Azeem Baig
(Only the horseman falls on the battlefield.
How can that child fall who crawls on his knees!)

Then she promptly sent me off to my father’s office. My father, as I mentioned earlier was a physician and surgeon and the company doctor of Hyderabad Allwyn Metal Works. My father looked at it and said that the muscles had been torn and that there was nothing to be done except surgery, which he didn’t think was advisable as in those days joint surgery was dicey. As for the pain, he said that I would have to live with it for a couple of weeks as it would not go away until the muscles healed. He gave me a couple of painkillers and I returned home.

That afternoon my father’s compounder, Qayyum sahib came to see me. Qayyum sahib was a small, polite man who always wore spotless white and very powerful perfume (attar). If he walked down a corridor you would know he had passed even if you came there half an hour later from the aroma of his perfume that would permeate the air. Qayyum sahib suggested that I should go with him to the Jarrah (bone setter) in Shahali Banda in the old city. He said, ‘They have medicines that will give you immediate relief. But don’t tell Doctor Sahib (my father) as he does not believe in Unani medicine and will be angry with me for taking you there.’ I agreed to go with him, and we took the bus from Sanathnagar to Charminar and walked the rest of the way to Shahali Banda.

The Jarrah massaged my shoulder gently with some oil and then put a heavy cream liberally all over it and bandaged it and told me to come again two days later. As I got up to go, I suddenly realized that the pain had gone. Completely gone. When I went to him, I had been in terrible agony. By the time he finished it was as if there had never been any pain. I will never forget my intense relief and thankfulness to Allahﷻ for sending Qayyum sahib to me. The result of all this was that the pain went away, but my right arm joint has since then been a little loose and prone to dislocate if I do any extensive overarm movement. I discovered this to my horror many years later when I was swimming across a river in the Anamallais when my shoulder dislocated in the middle of my swim and the only thing that saved me from drowning was that when I sank, my toes touched the bottom while my nose was still above the water. My friend Berty who was also swimming alongside saw that I was in trouble and helped me across and then he did the relocating routine, and I was well again. So, I must be careful. But there has not been any other impediment because of this accident.

Another day MP and I decided to take our horses and go camping. I was riding a black stallion, and MP was riding a chestnut gelding. My horse was rather highly strung and as is the way with many stallions, constantly testing his will against mine. We rode from Begumpet all the way to the Green Masjid (Masjid-e-Hussaini) on Road # 3 Banjara Hills intending to go on to the gate of Chiran Palace and then ride along the wall and descend the hill to what we used to call ‘Secret Lake’. Seeing it surrounded by buildings today it is clear that it is no longer a secret. This lake connects with the lake on Road # 1 near Taj Banjara hotel which used to be called the Banjara Hotel and was the first hotel on Banjara Hills and the first 5 – star hotel in Hyderabad. As I mentioned earlier, there was a dirt track from the Green Masjid to the gate of Chiran Palace. In those days, Chiran Palace was surrounded by a 12-foot wall and had a large black gate.
As MP and I rode up to the masjid a small boy threw a firecracker under the hoofs of my horse. The firecracker literally exploded under us, and the horse bolted. I let him run because he was scared and to try to stop him would have been fruitless. He galloped full tilt all the way to the gate and then stopped, foaming, and blowing. MP caught up with us and we continued our ride.

As we rounded the wall and were crossing a flat granite rock on which my horse’s shoes rang like bells, a brace of partridges exploded in flight right under his nose. He was already skittish with the firecracker incident. When this happened, he neighed and reared then slipped and fell on his side. I fell with him with my leg under him. By the grace of Allahﷻ I was wearing knee high boots with a very thick and stiff sole designed just for such accidents. The sole protected my foot from being crushed and my helmet kept my head from cracking on the rock. I kicked my feet free from the stirrups and rolled clear of the horse as he scrambled up, keeping a hold on the reins because if he had run away here, catching him would have been nearly impossible. I mentally thanked Habib Jung for his advice about the soles of my boots.

Once the dust settled, I realized that neither my horse nor I were any the worse for wear and MP and I decided to go on. We reached the lake a few minutes later. The lake had a dam at one end with a small building at one end of it. The valley floor spread out all around the lake with some Acacia and Tamarind trees dotted on it. There was not a single building of any kind in sight. The lake really was a secret. We unsaddled and hobbled the horses and put on their halters with long ropes so that they could roll in the grass and graze but would not be able to run away. Then we made our camp.

It was a brilliant starlit night with a three-quarter moon and not a human in sight. This was pure wilderness, within a stone’s throw of the habitation on Banjara Hills, peaceful and quiet with the occasional ‘chirr’ of the nightjar or the flight of an owl on silent wings floating overhead in search of the unwary mouse. We ate our sandwiches and drank the water from the lake and lived to tell the tale. The water was clean enough to drink.

Vicky’s mother was a wonderful lady, very loving and made the best Aloo Parathas in the world. She loved feeding us and we loved eating, so it was a mutually beneficial partnership. Vicky ‘s father was an aeronautical engineer and a motorcycle enthusiast. Both Vicky and his father were perfectionists. I remember the uncounted hours that I spent in their house, building model airplanes, and then flying them in the Parade Ground in Secundrabad. To record this correctly, they built the planes, and I watched and learnt from the conversation. The bonding between Vicky and his father and brother as they worked together was a delight to watch. Vicky’s father taught his sons while he worked. I was part of that conversation as he treated me also like his son. Like most Indians he spoke in three languages interchangeably – in this case Hindustani, Punjabi, and English. I heard so much Punjabi in my youth, thanks to all my Sikh friends, that I have a fair understanding of it even though I didn’t formally learn to speak it.

My first flight on a small plane was with Vicky, in a single engine Cessna. Before the flight Vicky explained the controls to me and the theory of lift – which is created when a solid object moves through a fluid – in this case air. I understood the theory or thought I did until Vicky started the engine and we taxied to the end of the runway in old Begumpet airport. He then turned the plane to face into the wind as indicated by the windsock at the end of the runway and opened the throttle while still standing on the brakes. The propeller reached its peak speed, the plane vibrated with energy, raring to go. Then Vicky released the brakes and opened the throttle, and the little plane leaped forward. As we reached critical speed, I recall the sinking feeling in the pit of my belly as he drew the joystick back between his knees and the Cessna took to the air. That is when I truly learnt the principle of flight, not in my head but in the pit of my belly.

One day while working on his Sunbeam motorcycle, Vicky showed me what happens physically when you accelerate an engine, how petrol sprays and so petrol consumption goes up with sudden acceleration. Whereas if you drive smoothly without sudden acceleration, you get better mileage and a smoother ride. Vicky and I have many things in common, chief among them a love for the outdoors. In the Hyderabad of our day, you had to only drive 15-20 kilometers in any direction to be completely out of the city and into wilderness. There were small lakes everywhere with Neem trees bordering them. Typical Deccan Plateau semi-arid landscape. Scrubby tough grass, granite outcrops, many in amazing balancing acts – huge boulders balanced magically on small ones. Wild Seethaphal (Custard Apple), Lantana with its black berries, wild Ber and the ever-present Acacia dotting the landscape. Decades of grazing by goats makes the landscape drier and more barren each year. Goats don’t just crop grass like sheep do but reach out and eat the leaves of the short trees and their urine is extremely acidic and toxic which prevents seeds from germinating. Goat grazing destroyed many lands, though in our land we did a much faster job with our greed, filling in lake beds, cutting down trees, drying up the land for real estate development projects. Environment be damned. The earth be damned. We be damned. It is amazing how people who know what is happening still do it all.

Vicky and I would find a small lake that suited our fancy and sit on any convenient rock and try our hand at fishing. I can’t remember ever catching a fish on these trips, but it was fun to try and just be with a dear friend. Then we would unpack our lunch and eat and talk about the world. Such friendships of childhood are impossible to replicate. There is a sense of closeness that bonds and remains alive for life. And when you meet such friends after decades of absence, it simply feels like a continuation of your last meeting.

At the time, I had a blue Vespa scooter which saw a lot of service under Vicky and me. One day as Vicky recalled, “You came and said to me, ‘Baith peechay’ (get on behind me). You were very aggressive, so I got on behind you. Then I asked, ‘Where are we going?’ You said, ‘Warangal. To see the 1000 pillar temple.’ He said, “I was flabbergasted. We were just going to drive to Warangal (about 150 kilometers) on a scooter?” But off we went. Then we had an argument about who would drive. Eventually we took turns and reached Warangal late that night. The temple was a bit of a disappointment because it was almost abandoned and full of trash and dirt everywhere. But it was interesting to see what builders did before they learnt the arch from the Persian architects and were able to get a longer span. The reason why the temple has 1000 pillars is apparently not spiritual, but architectural.

Sometimes, Vicky would go horse riding with me. We would ride my German friend’s horses, Gulfam the gelding and Julie, the mare. I used to get Vicky to ride Julie who was a natural jumper while I would ride Gulfam who needed some coaxing to go over a wall. We would ride to Golconda and could get a couple of good gallops along the way. When we got to the Qutub Shahi tombs, we would unsaddle the horses and let them graze while we relaxed under the old mango trees in that complex. Julie and Gulfam were partners. They never ran off anywhere and brought us back home safely in the evening. Speaking about all this, today seems like a fairy tale because every inch of land that we rode over has been built on. And it is for this reason that it is necessary to record that there was a time when it was different.