For a certain generation and class of people Lucknow is a city that exists only in faint memory. Ab kya reh gaya hai Lucknow to tab tha jab...
The nicest part about Shaam-e-Awadh, an anthology of writings on Lucknow edited by Veena Talwar Oldenburg is that it is completely unembarrassed about wallowing in nostalgia for that city.
There&rsquos Margo True&rsquos description of Awadhi cuisine (&lsquoFragrant Feasts of Lucknow&rsquo) made truly wonderful by an account of the attempt to create a definitive Lucknow cookbook. An attempt almost thwarted by the determination of the various family cooks interviewed to carry their secret to their graves.
Saleem Kidwai&rsquos &lsquoZikr Us Parivash Ka Begum Akhtar in Lucknow&rsquo re-creates not just the journey of Akhtari Bai Faizabadi but also a whole way of life.
There&rsquos the interesting connect with Mishi Saran&rsquos &lsquoMy Nani Remembers...&rsquo where Malti Shukla recalls her father&rsquos motor accident in 1933 as he drove to meet Akhtari Bai, who she describes as his girlfriend.
Where the nostalgia for the past ebbs and the selections tentatively step into the Lucknow of today the sense of loss is palpable.
It&rsquos there in Suleiman Mahmudabad&rsquos despair at the vanishing of the city of his youth in the extract from William Dalrymple&rsquos &lsquoThe Age of Kali&rsquo.
And in Nasima Aziz&rsquos tongue-in- cheek look at the new Lucknow nawabi, the money and muscle combination that is the Sahara Parivar in &lsquoThe Double Wedding of the Century I was There&rsquo.
There are things that are missing &mdash the middle of the last century and how Lucknow responded to the freedom movement and was changed by it, for one, and a good piece on Shia Lucknow &mdash but it&rsquos hard to blame an anthology for not packing it all in.
It&rsquos honest in its premise &mdash a look at Lucknow&rsquos glorious past. It&rsquos a wistful collection of writings about a city that now exists only in fragments. A city of refinement and elegance of poetry and music of fine food and even finer conversations.
