Al-Hilal: A Bandra building that once held Urdu salons

In 2013, Javed Akhtar lamented that Mumbai used to have a stellar list of Urdu writers like Ali Sardar Jaffri, Majrooh Sultanpuri, Yusuf Nazim, Qamar Siddiqui and many others who would meet regularly. "They are all dead now, the remaining writers do not interact with each other." In my recent visit to Mumbai I saw the debris of a building in Bandra which used to be a meeting place for poets, writers, and intellectuals. Al-Hilal, located close to Lilavati Hospital, once housed renowned academics and acclaimed Urdu writers but will now be replaced by a high-rise. Javed Akhtar and his brother Salman Akhtar were just among the several litterateurs who had friends and acquaintances in Al-Hilal.

Away from South Mumbai's belt of Mohammad Ali Road and Nagpada, where bookshops and Urdu societies did the heavy lifting, Al-Hilal, in somewhat distant Bandra, shone bright in the city's Urdu world of the 1980s and 90s. The first set of flat owners were government officials who came together to get a plot in Bandra West and named the building Al-Hilal. Officially it was called New Deep Co-operative Housing Society. On a deeper reflection Al-Hilal and New Deep mirrored the dynamics of the buildings occupants. They were in government service but officially and in some cases unofficially were aficionados of Urdu. Several of them lived in government quarters in Bandra East and moved to Bandra West in the late 1970s.

On the fourth floor lived humorist Yusuf Nazim. He retired as deputy commissioner of labour in 1976. Blessed with a long life, he remained a prolific writer till his last day, having started writing in his college years in 1940s Hyderabad. He dealt with knotty files and political leaders in his official capacity, but in literary circles he was a figure of calmness and fortitude. 

Yusuf Nazim on extreme right

During a conversation in 2008, he told me that top Urdu writers and poets would constantly think about being better than the rest. "There was a constant feeling of one-upmanship among them," he proclaimed with one arm on a gao takiya. Humorous anecdotes flowed naturally in conversation and out of his pen. In the 1980s he went to Karachi to attend few events and carried with him dozens of letters from writers and poets to be delivered to their friends and relatives.

Famous lyricist Majrooh Sultanpuri and Urdu scholar Zoe Ansari were relatives. At a later stage, relations soured between them and they were not on talking terms. In the early 1990s when Zoe Ansari died Majrooh Sultanpuri rushed to Yusuf Nazim's house. "He wanted me to accompany him to Ansari's house." Yusuf Nazim, an admirer of Shaukat Thanvi and Farhatullah Beg, rubbed shoulders with the high and mighty of the Urdu literary world and was a popular figure to preside over Urdu mushairas and meetings.       

"Javed se betakalluf dosti hain meri," I remember him saying to me, also reminding that he enjoyed a close friendship with Khadija, who was Javed Akhtar's stepmother and Jan Nisar Akhtar's second wife. He attended their last rites. "Maine yeh flat mein Salman Akhtar ke liye ek mehfil rakhi thi, yeh saare furnitures hata dene ka baad, paitis-chalis log aaraam se aa gaye the." The other figure Yusuf Nazim would fondly remember was Akhtarul-Iman - "We have known each other for a very long time." Perhaps, it helped that Akhtarul-Iman too lived in Bandra.

Yusuf Nazim was on the fourth floor of Al-Hilal and just as you would wait for the lift on the ground floor in the flat to the right lived the scholarly couple Professor Abdus Sattar Dalvi and Prof Maimoona Dalvi. Prof Dalvi was a gold medallist of University of Bombay from where he did two PhDs and a stint at SOAS. He was associated with the Maharashtra State Urdu Academy since its inception and worked closely with Dr Rafiq Zakaria and Khwaja Gafoor. Prof. Maimoona Dalvi wrote a monumental history of colonial Bombay's Urdu milieu and was a much-loved lecturer. The main door had both their nameplates, and it will be an understatement to say that a conversation with them would be an unparalleled lesson on Bombay and Urdu.

Prof Abdus Sattar Dalvi's interest, and by extension his flat, was always open to new ideas and interesting people. As a native Marathi speaker his interest and familiarity ranges from Sant Tukaram and Sethu Madhavrao Pagadi, to A A A Fyzee and Ali Sardar Jaffri. Rajinder Bedi, Manto, and Faraz flow easily in conversations with him as does the names of prominent contemporary Urdu writers. City and print historian Murali Ranganathan, writer and researcher Gautam Pemmaraju and many other Urdu and history enthusiasts kept in touch with him.   

One of his student is Urdu journalist Javed Jamaluddin, who wrote a biography of Inquilab founder Abdul Hamid Ansari. Over the last few years he has kept Urdu prose in conversation with history by soliciting and commissioning pieces for the journal Nawa-e-Adab published by Anjuman-e-Islam and edited by him. He leads by example for Urdu writers to shun unnecessary superlatives and stick to records. I have regularly heard him say, "I definitely have reference for this somewhere in my house, but it is difficult to find now with so many books and papers."    

Prof Abdus Sattar Dalvi on extreme right

Al-Hilal was the abode of one of the daughters of the famous scholar Professor Ibrahim Dar. Hamida Dar was a school inspector and carried the grace of her illustrious father. Professor Dar was an authority on Urdu, Arabic, and Persian and was an indefatigable scholar. Although born in Punjab, his working life was spent as a professor in Gujarat which explains his prodigious output on the region's social and literary activities. From Gujarat College in Ahmadabad he was transferred to Ismail Yusuf College in Mumbai, which explains Hamida Dar's employment in Maharashtra.     

Noorul-ain Ali, the author of well-received works like Cancer, Hai Aur Koi Raasta, Soch lijiye lived in Al-Hilal for several years. Ali was associated with the teacher training college in Mumbai and was involved in state's Urdu textbooks. Endowed with an outgoing personality, Noorulain Ali moved and interacted in circles which included Ismat Chugtai, Aziz Qaisi, Dr Yunus Agaskar, and her neighbour the Dalvi couple. Ali's husband was the mild mannered and soft-spoken Riasat Ali who was a teacher in Anjuman Islam. He later took to law. Old timers marvel how Riasat Ali, always dressed in full sleeve white shirt and black trouser, would carry wheat in a big aluminium box to be grinded into flour.        

The name Al-Hilal came about at the insistence of original society members like Abdul Majid Khan. A graduate of Osmania University, he played hockey and was a bureaucrat in Mantralaya. The household used the Arabic term Mauz for bananas and Persian charshanbe for Wednesdays. 

There were some tense moments in the early days over the nomenclature but the residents ultimately got around with Al-Hilal as the building name and New Deep Co-operative Society on official papers. 

Some other society members taught in Sydenham College and Akbar Peerbhoy College. Quite a few flats doors had the 'In', 'Out' sign under the nameplates reminding us that the BA and MA earned by the patriarchs belonged to a different era. The original members of Al-Hilal had their roots in Hyderabad, Jalna, Amravati, Aurangabad, Konkan, and Nagpur. Most of them were bureaucrats and professors so government service bound them together. In later years, Ather Khan, a second-generation resident from the excise department was inducted in the state education ministry. Prof Dalvi's daughter Moeeza became a lecturer in University of Mumbai's Urdu department.    

Once I was visiting Al-Hilal with veteran community affairs reporter Saeed Ahmed Khan of Inquilab. As we were coming down the stairs he kept looking at the nameplates. By the time we reached the ground floor, he exclaimed, "Yeh saare log to yahi par hain."

Al-Hilal held on for a long time. Buildings around it were going down at a quick speed, and Al-Hilal, too, went down that road over a year ago. Now, all that remains are vanishing memories and anticipation of a mechanical high-rise built over the debris of a culture fast eroding from around us.