a torrential question maneuvered my body into the juncture where I caught languages transforming into verse. Huna means ‘here’; the title stems from an early moment in the memoir where, inside the prison, seventeen-year-old Abdelrahman ElGendy, recovering from a state of starvation, heard one of his cellmates’ nasheed 

Where is ‘here ’, and does it answer when the state decides where your body may be?

At any moment, you can be rebranded— your life skewed into an angle so bleak you fail to see through yourself but only through the label taped around you with authoritative care. It turns out it was not the question of 

, the corpse whose heart you can still hear beating, the corpse of the people wishfully ours, the corpse of the people, weak and timid before power. Huna reminds us that persecution, however blind to the present, is always direct and systemic in hindsight. That the language, however pliant, can never bend forever at the altar of oppression. That sharp vocabulary: 

Inmate, Parole, Defiance, Warrant, Block 

are bound to be softened through the force of memory and recollection.

In 2013, the Egyptian state dropped any pretence of restraint. In July, the army removed the elected president. In August, at Rabaa, security forces killed hundreds of protesters in a single day. Arrests followed by the thousand, and disappearances with them. That state believed in the power of demonstration. A person was taken not for what they had done, but so that everyone else would watch what happened to them. You could hear it in the hubris after each fresh arrest was made: setting an example had become the state's first law.

On October 6th, 2013, Abdelrahman ElGendy drove through a protest with his father when he was seventeen, when they were pulled out of their car by the brutal state forces and then assaulted on the charge of being of the 

 (Islamic Brotherhood). His camera suddenly becomes the lens of the ‘other’. The guard shouts 

He, along with his father, would go on to be sentenced to serve fifteen years in prison for that.

_________________________________________________________________________________________

Wounded from my wakefulness as I woke up into the morning of 20th July, 2026 and having read the opening chapters of 

almost immediately— Delhi Police was all over the live television, whipping down the batons, cracking down on the student protesters. In a similar state of awe and shock, everything around me seemed like just another playground for oppression. Thousands had gathered at Jantar Mantar, the capital's main protest site, in a movement led by the Cockroach Janta Party, demanding the resignation of the Education Minister, Dharmendra Pradhan, over his handling of the NEET paper leak. Twenty-one students had died by suicide in its wake.

Being a Muslim in the fascist Indian State that fixates on criminalisation of that identity, this protest overarched our collective memory. It brought us back to 2020, when fighting for our existence in the country during the CAA protests, we were humiliated, tortured, arrested, and lynched, all while the majority slept on us. This latest protest over the NEET Papers was more about finding the terminology where you can invent a distance but also, through that essence, cry out solidarity. In family gatherings, they would voice repeatedly to be cautious, to not go near the protest site, all while everyone felt those beatings to their own bones. A friend, I remembered, jokingly said to me on a call

, We don’t want a terrorism angle to this. 

My body, I thought— my political body, I thought— was not enough to change the wheel of my car but enough to dismantle a protest of millions.

On that same day, baptised with fury, I contained myself. My mother on the phone made me promise that I wouldn’t find my way to the protest site. My head instantly plucked a string that was not a voice I had heard, but one that came from the book that very morning. 

I recognised it was Abdelrahman's mother, warning him against going to the Armed Forces Day Protest, the same one that would bring him behind bars for six years.

________________________________________________________________________________________

In the wake of his capture with his father, he recounts the farshas, the changing floors on which he’d find his blame body every morning. Abdelrahman ElGendy’s brazen accounts in 

 confront more than memory the will of trust. It starts with a voice realising the downhill of what is going to come forth, the snapping process of seeing oneself obliterated again through the pages in the chasm of literatising. The trust is the marvellous angelic writing with which we are seeped deep into the consciousness of his captive teenage years. Vibrantly, he is the teen of the 2010s, carrying the emerging culture of staying free and wild with him to seclusion. His words stem up through his clear and soundful anxiety, and a sonic remorse as he finds his father is bound to his same fate. Yet his words are anything but paints of self-pity; throughout it resembles the sharp rattling of prison bars inside the groin of the authoritarian society, one that is empowered by surveillance and collective silence. In the state of hereness, it dissolves ElGendy’s past into the reimagination of his coming time.

ElGendy was a minor. Any time an officer could come to take him out of the cell, to ask for a pardon for what was a meaningless incarceration. Nothing such ever arrives. The path of waiting for the right keys to turn takes us to his memory that gets in the way of hereness. It begins with a father and a seventeen-year-old son swept up together in the crackdown after the 2013 coup, and carries them from overcrowded holding cells to the Scorpion, the country's most notorious prison complex. What the state leaves a boy in there, he uses. He forms friendships that will outlast the sentence. He studies his way to an engineering degree. And he writes, slipping pages out in laundry bags, until the pages become this book. He remembers speaking into a cellmate's hair; the politics of the prison, and its diverse economy; Hassan's rosy nasheeds; facing Mama and Salma across the visiting area; the basketball court, a stretch of borrowed time where he spoke with Fareeda. That waiting is the constant here. The waiting prospers, the waiting lurches, the waiting becomes the lubricant to the fanatic machinery of oppression.

______________________________________________________________________________________

When I decide to not go to the protests, the protest comes to me on my internet. And with it comes the Arms. Stubborn Arms— Power-frenzied Arms— Arms scavenging on your personhood— Arms moving towards you with tear gas— Arms knocking down houses on a hint of your dissent.

The Arms arrive with a vocabulary. In an essay for The Nation, ElGendy describes how, after the 2013 coup, the Brotherhood was declared a terrorist organisation almost overnight, and the label did not stay where it was put. Leftists became Ikhwan. Liberals, Ikhwan. Seculars, Ikhwan. Even football Ultras, Ikhwan. If every opponent is Ikhwan and every Ikhwan a terrorist, then tens of thousands of political prisoners simply cease to exist. I recognised its vocabulary, too, in the words of the Indian ministers, who asked that "anti-national forces" not be allowed to exploit the protest.

Along the pathway to Jantar Mantar, the street was laced with CCTVs. Clamped on top of the four-wheeled beasts, on the cop’s mobile phone. In India, the bodies are currently in the government depository. No matter where you go, you will always be identified, noted, tracked, profiled. Throughout the years that followed 2014, one of the vilest registries of the resisting is being completed.

Surveillance means nothing where people don't bother being looked upon. But it should lead us to the question of 

what happens when the tyrant remembers every face that protests? 

What happens when you are somewhere in Delhi, and your home in Lucknow has already been raided, your bloodline identified, your family detained, your house maybe even bulldozed? In Kashmir, following the killing of a personnel, 3000 people were taken out of their homes and detained within a single day.

It is said that a prisoner counts time by the largest unit they’ve endured. At first, it’s hours. Once you’ve trembled through your first night, you count in days. Survive a week, and it becomes week one, week two, week three. Then it’s May, June, July. When you cross the nine-month threshold, the heft of the creeping anniversaries settles deep in your gut.

It is through the construction of this ecosystem that ElGendy brings to our vision the newly modified relationship that we can have with a cell. Suddenly we are no longer holding our ears to the walls and overhearing the rummaging breaths of hope and glory attached to the idea of confinement. We clamp and harrow on how prisons are, in fact, a place that breaks you, that despite even the fact that you’ll come out, you are— in the belly of the beast. Truth in this narrative is not cyclical; it descends. It seeps into the limbs one day and the stomach the next, in the truth of hunger:

We passed the bag around. Each person grabbed two pieces and swallowed them whole. People looked hungrier by the time the bag made full circuit.

The last cellmate patted down by a guard outside dared to sneak a look, and a slap resounded through the tube.

In the truth of sight and touch, truth is the relation with which we see the six years of ElGendy’s hostile incarceration.

And within all that, there are places in the book where truth is for the eyes of the one understanding. They are to be listened to rather than read. For brief moments, ElGendy turns to Arabic as a resort for being understood in the borderless wisp of the region. Occasionally, he leaves words in Arabic, 

to speak strictly to the one who can listen and who has listened to him throughout his years of turmoil behind bars. It becomes the grooves of whose climbing is hard to fetch with a coloniser’s eye.

The protests intensified. And the protesters with the same momentum were handed over what they laboured for. The voice was heard, and everyone knew which part of that voice was heard. On 25th July 2026, the Education Minister resigned only to be replaced by Prahlad Joshi, another figure of the notorious 

the fascist outfit that has its hold over the Indian State. I saw everyone rejoice as nothing changed for me, as the iron hand did not leave the room even when the door opened once.

 does something revolutionary even in the context of resistance literature; it destabilises the vices associated with the life of a prisoner held on the count of politics; it destabilises the relation we have with time. I think of Sharjeel Imam, one of the key visionaries of the CAA-NRC protests, who has been in custody since 28 January 2020 as he goes on to complete seven years still behind bars. Sharjeel Imam, in one of his letters from the jail, writes, “

As the years drag on, I do worry about my mother, my brother, and the world outside. I wonder if my presence could have made any difference, or if I have missed something that can never be recovered.”

__________________________________________________________________________________________

Toward the end of his memoir, ElGendy reaches America, which, in the wider imagination, stands for open space itself. The Arms followed. In March 2025, ICE agents took Mahmoud Khalil off a New York street. ElGendy found his name had appeared on a doxxing site, and that any moment he would be the next target. He packed his cases and has now fled to Europe.

What ElGendy has achieved is a premier almanac of loss, and the blueprint of what could become our collective memory when these horrors are unleashed upon us despite anything we find might protect us from it. I began Huna thinking about the language of power; I finished it reminded that language still sides with us.

is an Egyptian writer and translator from Cairo, and the Literary Editor of 

Huna: A Memoir of Revolution, Prison, and Becoming

; longlisted for the National Book Award. 

Abdelrahman's work examines state violence, empire, and exile, attending to the entanglements of local and global oppressions and the solidarities that emerge across them.

, pursuing his B.A.LL.B (Hons.) in Law from 

The opinions expressed in this Publication are those of the author. They do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of The Jamia Review or its members. 

READING HUNA IN DELHI

Mujh ko diyar-e ghair men mara watan se dur

rakh li mere khuda ne miri bekasi ki sharm

[He] killed me in an alien country, far from [my] watan

My God kept intact the honor of my friendlessness

— Mirza Asadullah Khan “Ghalib” (1797–1869)

 photograph stays with me. Taken from a skewed, dingy angle, it captures an old building propped somewhere between earth and sky, with a dark flag waving silently above it, almost out of tune with the shifting tides of time. The walls are white, yet it never occurs to you that it actually might be for mourning. How could it, with all that empty space; the limitless canvas of the sky, the gentle bowing of the tree, the stillness that seems to stretch beyond the frame?

There is no obvious main character here, except for that dark flag. Everything else recedes into the background. If I could offer one revealing fragment, it would be this: the flag seems to be taking everything from the house, even as it tries to give everything back.

This flag belonged to the Muslim League, and the year was 1946. This was the city of Allahabad, which would find itself inside the boundaries of Post-Partitioned India. I know this because the house in the photograph is the house I live in.

I know this because living here as an Indian Muslim, the phantom of the border fences so far away from our city was demarcated even within our courtyard. You could see in the tidbits of the walls, the ghosts of the ones who departed proclaiming that they lived here once, that this was once also their home. For us, the generation living now, we carry their resemblances, their quirks, their manners, and smiles without ever knowing them more than their names. More than their existence, their actions frozen in some past now stay with us.

My great-grandfather was a member of the League and devoted himself entirely to its cause. His story follows a familiar arc in the history of Indian Muslims during Partition. He transferred his savings and business dealings to Habib Bank in Karachi and even arranged for a property there. Everything was prepared for migration. Yet on the day of departure, my great-grandmother gripped the legs of her cot and refused to move.

"Merey baap dada yahin dafan hai! Meri duniya yahin maujood hai, aapko jana hai toh jaayen, mey is dar ko nahi chodungi!" (My father and forefathers are buried here. My whole world exists here. If you want to leave, then leave. I will not abandon this doorstep.)

Had I been my great-grandfather then, a man who had done everything for the creation of a state he would never live in, who had transferred his entire savings into the Bank that overnight became foreign, I might have searched for someone to blame. I might have cursed the speeches that urged Muslims to stay, especially the famous address delivered by Abul Kalam Azad at Jama Masjid. But history is rarely altered by a single speech. What kept people rooted was something deeper: attachment to the land, to family graves, to familiar streets, to neighbors, to routines so ordinary they seemed invisible until the moment they were threatened. In the end, the decision was not shaped by ideology alone. It was shaped by the daily texture of life itself.

And so my great-grandparents made a choice that would echo through generations. They decided that this was their country, and that nothing, not borders, not slogans, not the promises of a new state, could change that. One night, the Muslim League flag was quietly lowered from its pole. In its place remained something less visible but far more enduring: a faith that they belonged where they stood. A dream had come and gone, but the house remained, the land remained, and so did they.

Meanwhile, the people who left, in counts of millions, were also us. On foot, trains, carts 

– they reached various parts of newly formed Pakistan. Sindh became their respite; Karachi accommodated most of them. They came to be known as 

. The term was previously alluded to the migration of the first Muslims from Mecca to Medina. The state of migration turned them into pilgrims rather than refugees. The people already living in Pakistan were enacted as the Ansars, who provided hospitality to these pilgrims, fulfilling their quasi-religious duty.

As the years passed, the term Muhajir gradually morphed from being a sympathetic term for migrants to a medium for alienation. The term in itself became an element used for subjugation. Noting the shifting meanings of Muhajir, 

writes: ‘Once it had meant “welcome”, now it meant: “you are not from here”. In the 1970s, fairly visible instances of such started taking root. The rise of MQM (Muhajir Quami Movement) led by Altaf Hussain attracted repression from the state. Its members and supporters saw its rise as that of a revolutionary party made to safeguard the rights of unprivileged sections of Muhajir identity. Then in 1992, Nawaz Sharif launched Operation Clean-up, and conjured one of the most oppressive army operations against the Muhajir population. House checkups, bureaucratic isolation, arrests and encounters took place at a mass level. Corralling every member of the Muhajir community into solidarity with each other, and stifling their identity into an invention of a 

an ethnic identity in themselves through their shared diaspora. Once depicted as the most self-sacrificing people who ensured the successful formation of the state of Pakistan, were now perceived as unwanted refugees.

On the other hand, Muslims in India, now further reduced, struggled for their own identity and stability. The curious case of Hindustani Musalmans is actually a case of anxiety that kept repeating its cycle of struggle. They have been fighting for representation on both sides of the border. Needless to say, ever since Independence, the conditions of Indian Muslims who stayed back in India have only deteriorated in inexpressible ways.

Muhajir hain magar hum ek duniya chhor aaye hain,

Tumhare paas jitna hai hum utna chhor aaye hain.

Kahani ka ye hissa aaj tak sab se chhupaya hai,Ke hum mitti ki khaatir apna sona 

During the early days, the families divided between these two states could meet each other, could take a train to each other’s cities, attend weddings, hand each other Eid cards, and have delightful summers in their farmlands together. But soon, nearing the 1990s, with a growing presence of a new form of Hindutva communalism in India, and growing tensions between these states, nobody could further imagine things to be the same anymore.

What happens when this identity clashes on the internet, where there are no borders? The sociologist 

 coined the term "Third Space" to describe a cultural in-between: a zone that is neither the original home nor the adopted one, but something that emerges in the negotiation between them. It is a space that destabilises fixed identities, that allows hybrid and fluid forms of belonging to exist.

For decades, the Hindustani Musalman identity, belonging fully to neither the India that suspects it nor the Pakistan that has largely absorbed and then marginalized it, had no Third Space. The physical space of undivided northern India was gone. The social space of a shared neighbourhood was severed. The political space was actively hostile on both sides.

What the internet did, almost accidentally, was create exactly this Third Space. In 2025, there was a noticeable surge in Instagram accounts that pointedly centered around the Hindustani Musalman Identity. These were meme pages, the kinds of which we hadn’t seen in the previous years. This was a modern weapon of something that could be understood as a Memetic Warfare. These pages mobilised the followers on the grounds of the cultural grandeur of their community, glorified its leaders, even at times downcasting other cultures to scripturalise their identity.

We cannot ignore the relevance of memes in our modern consciousness; they are the swiftest media that we have yet perceived. It is the architecture of transmission of information in our age. In an essay ‘It's time to embrace Memetic Warfare’, Jeff Giesca conceptualises how Memes could be better used as a means of cyber warfare. He says, 

“Memetic warfare is about taking control of the dialogue, narrative, and psychological space. It's about denigrating, disrupting, and subverting the enemy's effort to do the same.”

What makes these pages distinct from ordinary nostalgia accounts is their refusal to be merely elegiac. There is an almost aggressive quality to the pride on display, which makes sense when you understand that pride itself has been made politically dangerous for these communities. To post about the magnificence of Urdu culture, to claim it loudly and without apology, is for an Indian Muslim a small act of defiance against a political climate that wants them to be ashamed of exactly this. For a Muhajir, it is a refusal to accept the provincial second-class status that Pakistani ethnic nationalism has tried to assign them.

I had the privilege of having a conversation with some of these accounts that are quite renowned in this subculture:

on Instagram. Much of the content is focused around the culture of the Hindustani Muslims. From Sherwanis to Kebabs to Urdu as a language, which nearly transformed the entirety of Pakistan. It highlights the Hindustani Muslim faces in various industries such as 

Fawad Khan, Mehdi Hassan, Zia Mohyeddin, Saadat Manto,

 and many others. It also has a lot of content revolving around the history of the Gangetic Plains, as this is where a lot of Muhajirs find their origins to be. One of the fascinating things about these accounts is that you’ll always find something pertaining to pre-Islamic India in their works, as they refuse to diminish that part of their cultural identity.

, who was instrumental in the entire movement.

May I know where you originate from? And what was the first cue that made you enter this space? I know for sure that since you trace your roots outside Pakistan, it would have acted as a slow burn, but was there any incident where you were incited to be more vocal about this identity?

: If I were to give you a brief about my origin, my family belongs to Lucknow, our family is that of the Rajawara of Nanpara. My great-grandfather was a follower of the ideals of the Muslim League and was also a government employee, and so he migrated, and we also got our quarters there. After the death of Bushra Zaidi in Karachi, and the surge of MQM, following my father’s active presence in the resisting community, naturally the brunt of all this injustice came down on me. This slow transformation is what converted Pakistani nationalism inside of us into Muhajir nationalism, meaning those people who used to take pride in being Pakistani started taking pride mostly in our community, which migrated.

On the entire ecosystem of the growing Muhajir and Hindustani Muslim-centred pages, I laid the basic foundation. Being politically active since childhood, when I came on the internet, I took in a lot of observations with me. Sindhis, Punjabis, all other such ethnicities were running their nationalist pages, and we, Muhajirs, had nothing to combat that. And most importantly, the Sindhi nationalists had run a propaganda campaign around us, denigrating us to the status of beggars who had come from outside, who were under merciful refuge from them. Then I looked at my phone and wondered what I could do to counter all this for my community. And I worked tirelessly, making edits after edits, because I understood the power of this media. It took me 2-3 years of hard work to reach here.

Now with God’s grace, we have a huge group of friends who all work for the same cause. And one other primary reason was to unify Indian Muslims with us again. The Indian Muslims sitting in UP, Bihar, Bhopal, they are all from our community. We have the same blood, language, lifestyle, and tehzeeb. The only difference is that my grandfather migrated and theirs did not. So I aimed towards ending this disconnect through the means of the internet.

Similarly, there are also India-based accounts in the ecosystem which are fighting their own battles. 

 is one such account, handled by a girl from Lucknow, who also manages 

 that caters to her Pashtun ethnicity. @theawadhh’s posts stand in rebellion to the Indian government’s repression and the lack of Muslim representation in the polarised Indian society. Her posts resurface the under-recognised elements of Muslim culture in India, specifically Awadh (Lucknow). Her pages translate identity into the language of contemporary digital femininity: pastel shades, the visual grammar of Barbie packaging, the aesthetic of girlhood and smuggle serious cultural commentary inside it.

She describes switching to this mode because the comments on overtly political content were disheartening, a deeply honest admission about the real cost of visibility for Muslim women speaking about Muslim identity in India's current political climate, and the racism involved in understanding the cultural contribution of the Muslim populace.

framework for diaspora: dispersion, homeland orientation, boundary maintenance helps explain why this project has such urgency. The Muhajir community satisfies all three criteria. They are dispersed. They maintain an orientation toward a homeland (the Gangetic plains, the cities of UP and Bihar) that they cannot physically return to. And they actively maintain a boundary, a sense of who they are and who they are not against the pressure to simply dissolve into the broader Pakistani identity.

But what is striking about this internet subculture is that it extends Brubaker's framework across the border, drawing Indian Muslims into the same structure of feeling. The 

 account's use of the title "Gangai" is emblematic of this. The Ganga becomes a mnemonic device, a way of anchoring identity to a geography that exists simultaneously in the physical world and in the collective imagination of everyone who came from its banks or descends from people who did. When a Muhajir in Karachi claims the Ganga as his, and a Muslim in Lucknow who has never left India also claims it, they are meeting in the geography of memory rather than the geography of the state.

ab to yahan ke mausam mujh se aisi umiden rakhte hain

jaise hamesha se main yahin hun ganga ji aur jamna ji

amrohe men ban nadi ke pas jo larka rehta tha

ab voh kahan hai, main to vahin hun ganga ji aur jamna ji

Now the seasons here have such expectations of me

As if I have always been here, o Ganges and o Yamuna

The boy who used to live in Amroha by the Ban river,

Where is he now? I am still there, o Ganges and o Yamuna

It might not be well placed to suggest that meme pages are going to resolve the India-Pakistan conflict, or undo the structural marginalization of Indian Muslims, or restore Muhajirs to the political dignity they were denied in Pakistan. The state is real. The hostility is real. The surveillance, the violence, the discrimination- none of this evaporates because two communities are connecting on Instagram.

But something is happening that is worth taking seriously. For the first time in perhaps two generations, a significant number of Gen Z on both sides of the border are actively constructing a shared identity, not the identity of two nations learning to co-exist, but the identity of one people who were divided and are feeling their way back toward each other. They are doing it not through politics but through culture, through affect, and through the ungovernable, borderless space of the internet.

Maulana Nomani, in his works, writes about the three women who are regarded as 

(in terms of purity and morality) in the entire world: Mary, Ayesha [RA] (Prophet’s wife), and Sita. Accusations have been hurled on the character of all three. For Mary and Ayesha, all the matters were cleared up. Sita’s matter, however, couldn’t be cleared up. Even though Ram was considered the man of most ideals, he didn’t absolve Sita of such an allegation.

While the construction of such a world that doesn’t solely revel in memory undergoes, Hindustani Musalmans on both sides of the border, like Sita, will go on with their daily ordeals, trying to prove their faithfulness. As Sita could only try to purify herself from the taint of abduction, Indian Muslims and Muhajirs have a load of stain from the Partition that they’d go on cleaning, until some dawn could arrive that might clear the sky into white and ultramarine and vivid, perhaps into the same sky from the picture of my house so many years ago and for a brief moment or two, we all would, irrespective of the borders; live loudly.

IS INTERNET FINALLY REUNITING INDIAN MUSLIMS & MUHAJIRS OF PAKISTAN: The Rising Internet subculture of Hindustani Musalman and the Third Space

On a list of never-ending lifestyles and rituals that are fading, there is one that revolves around a public space. Once, at every crease of the colonial cities, the Irani Cafes have been repositories of an eclectic culture and mundanity. Brought into South Asia by Parsi refugees, the cafes stitched their way into the daily life of the people, into the broad theatre of dialogues, ideas, rest, and collectiveness. Yet as years pass, the significance of their tea has dipped, and the doors that swung open early are becoming closed shutters, much owing to the rapidity of life and the loss of culinary and taste. As the cities get populated by flimsy eateries and trend hoppers, TJR Writer Syed Kabeer Hassan writes a personal essay on a memory, crawling upon the architecture and history of Iranian Cafes.

In Pune, when I was nineteen, on the foothill of some kind of anguish that I predicted would stay as long as the chaos remained on its streets, I stumbled into a time capsule that knowingly or unknowingly carved in its moments of contact, a certain balm that I could not very easily explain without having to pull you to the place.

Every afternoon, my cousin and I would drive over to Ali Bhai’s, watch the sun dunk its brittle rusks into the farthest horizon, catch up with a cigarette from the shop nearly adjacent to the café and talk until the ends of the world came to coil us back to where we were. A sight used to be enough: Antique bentwood chairs, magnificent glass jars storing dry cakes, biscuits, jams, spreads. There was a waiter who served us tea and toast every time we went. And there sat Ali bhai, at the wooden counter, always smiling if he caught your eye.

You could feel the time pausing in those moments, watching the teem of people unburdening some invisible weight on those wooden tables, watching them read newspapers, debating on the economic framework of their housing society, discussing in that liminal place about something which occurred only outside its folds. Here, the chequered floor, scent of fresh omelette squeezing between the breads, old Marxist men was a walk into a phantom memory, of a time lost, of a hope lost, of a senseless wandering that you can just be, besides the time.

 Café. A living microcosm of what happens when the past intermingles with hospitality, and when the future makes you oblivious to whether it could sustain.

Though the Iranians, such as my family, came to India over a period of the last 300 years. One of the largest exoduses took place during the 1910s, when the Iranian economy was crumbling under the incompetent Qajar dynasty, and Great Powers like Russia and Britain had started thirsting for Iran due to its strategic value. A large mass of Zoroastrians and Shia Iranians came and settled in different parts of British India, alluding to the combined impact of the Great Famine of 1917 and the persecution of the minority community by the ruling dynasty. Many Iranians settled in Bombay, Pune, Karachi, Hyderabad, Gujarat, and other parts of Western India.

The origins of several Iranian café-owning families in Bombay and Karachi can be traced to places in eastern and central Iran like Yazd, Kerman, and Sistan, where there used to be comparatively more Zoroastrians living. In their migration towards the west coast of India, the Iranians were heavily aided by the Parsi Community of Bombay. For many Irani Zoroastrians, the Parsi housing colonies in Bombay's Fort district were their first home in India.

The Irani Café is in a huge number in Mumbai, Pune, and Karachi, which are popular for its 

 (tea). Irani Cafes hold a reverent existence; they aren’t merely a café, they are the town halls of daily life.

Legend goes on to say that in the early days of the Iranian immigration, the second-generation immigrants provided domestic help, working in Parsi homes and later gathered in the evenings to reminisce about their homeland. At one such gathering, one of the immigrant men served tea and dry cakes in a tray to the people gathered there and charged a small amount for them. This sowed the idea for Irani cafes.

And soon, as they settled in the area, they honed in on a niche in the food market to serve baked goods to the British. Their cafes began by offering English-style teas, wedding cakes, and pastries. They embraced the elegance of English interiors, with rich, dark wood furniture and lustrous marble countertops. Yet, after the British departed India, the cafes gracefully adapted, reorienting their offerings to nourish a primarily Indian patronage.

, in the 1950s, there were 350 Irani cafés in Mumbai alone, but only 25 remained in the city in 2005. Currently, it is estimated to be as low as 15. A similar trend is relevant in cities like Hyderabad and Karachi.


These unpretentious cafés had swift service, affordable prices, and introduced Indians to 

, a rich lamb curry simmered with tomatoes and onions.

Patrons often dunk a buttered piece of bun into their chai, savouring the morsel as a glossy layer of butter floats atop the tea, reminiscent of an oil slick on the sea. Some refined Zoroastrians frown upon this habit, deeming it coarse, fit for tanga-wallas (horse-cart drivers). Yet, for my cousin and me, despite rebukes, this is almost a tradition towards finding some peace.

An alternative to bread is the range of different biscuits, each holding a different persona and shelf life. One of my favorites share the same delicacy as Osmania biscuits of Hyderabad. The art lies in timing: dip the biscuit briefly and eat it at once to relish the warm, intact bite, avoiding a soggy mess. With those biscuits, precision is key. Dip just a quarter-inch beyond the edge to prevent disintegration. Done right, the moistened portion melts cleanly in the mouth, no biting required.

No two Irani cafés are quite alike, each bearing the unique imprint of its owner through distinctive decor quirks. Special menus, tailored to local tastes, often swayed patrons to pick their favourite haunt. Many cafés featured screened-off family rooms, offering women and children a private space to dine in comfort.

 café, which we are natives of, is a small place at the corner responding in its own ways to the mundanity of dailiness. That café had a smoking allowed policy in the outer area because the owner himself is a heavy smoker, and because, as he points out,

 “When it rains (which it does quite often), watching the city move from this angle often brings you a peculiar sense of heaviness—would I sin to disallow smoking then?”

Such things are not quite common in other cafes. Many Irani cafes offer sweet and salted biscuits like 

 (sweet, crisp, flaky Irani biscuits), and 

 (tutti-frutti biscuits), which Ali doesn’t keep at his place. Yet I doubt others could boil the tea as well as he did.

in South Bombay dates back to 1920, when Rustom Aspandiar Bahmani left Yazd with his companions, all on muleback, towards Zahidan, from where they took the sluggish train to Quetta, then to Karachi, and finally to Bombay, where they arrived by sailboat.

wrote one of his famous poems based on the instruction boards found in the café:

, located close to the Taj Mahal Hotel, was also the first target of the terrorist attack in Mumbai. The Leopold gained worldwide fame first in G

, and then on November 26, 2008, as the first target of the 26/11 terrorist attack on well-known Mumbai landmarks. 

"Leopold's was a place for people to see, to be seen and to see themselves in the act of being seen," 

Like Mumbai, Karachi is a mosaic of migrants, including a shrinking Parsi community that settled there instead of moving to Bombay. These Zoroastrian immigrants, fleeing religious persecution in Iran during the early 1900s, founded Karachi’s early Irani cafés.

While alcohol was neither sold nor permitted in the cafés, some patrons, drunk on drinks elsewhere, stopped by for a meal. This lively subculture faded in the 1970s under the policies of 

, who suppressed “un-Islamic” practices. In contrast, Mumbai’s Irani cafés adapted by securing liquor licenses to boost business. Karachi’s cafés also served as informal betting hubs for horse racing, with bookies taking wagers as patrons later headed to the Old Race Course grounds to learn the results. Additionally, the cafés’ relaxed ambiance made them discreet spots for marijuana transactions.

The fading of Irani cafés in Karachi, much like in Mumbai, erodes a way of life tied to the city’s Zoroastrian heritage and its vibrant, eclectic past.

The Iranian cafes are on the brink of disappearing within 10-12 years. At least it seems like that. Nobody is interested in coffees that will spark conversations; everyone wants a coffee for their Instagram feed. Now, no more chai and bun maska are queued to be served. The concept of chai and bun maska seems to eventually go out. And it’s all happening at such a fast pace, we are all witnessing another Corinth of our society rust into a dim bronze.

Ali Bhai’s café remains a timeless memoryscape for me. There are still days when I yearn to be sitting in that cynosure of warmth, with a cup of tea, a cousin, and probably a cigarette. I wonder if the rain still brings a ‘peculiar sense of heaviness’ in the café. I wonder if that city is still running at the same angle.

What dies with a café is a recipe of sitting, a recipe of listening, of being seen. We are losing the rooms where time used to wait for us.

 is a student pursuing Law at the University of Jamia Millia Islamia.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the author. They do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of The Jamia Review or its members.

Articles by Syed Kabeer Hassan

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