Let me introduce myself. They call me Hassan, sometimes they call me Madrassi, and sometimes I think of myself as a Hyderabadi. Each name is as good as the other, and each one a lie. Hassan was the Caliph that was and was not, Madras is long gone and Hyderabad was never really my city, only the city I ran away from.

It was my father’s choice, my naming. Maybe my mother had a hand in it as well, but I knew his reasons better. He ran from the Hindu faith of his forefathers into the lap of Communism, and then ran farther still into the poetic lamentations of the Shia wailing their distress of “O Hassan! O Hussain!” as they lamented a world where power could overwhelm justice, where the arguments of saints could not turn aside an arrow or a blade, could not even provide a cup of water to the grandson of the Prophet himself.

It was my father, in love with defeats, who would burn that name into me, who would regale me with his useless histories of poets. And in the end, maybe that is what set me on this road to Lucknow.

It was a chance conversation, the last one I really recall with Baba, but all children who adore their parents hear more than they are told.

“It was Wali Dakkani,” he had said that day so long ago, “that brought Urdu poetry to Delhi, carrying it from Aurangabad.”

His eyes were red. He had been drinking the night before. I knew about that, even though I was not supposed to. I knew about the business problems with his brothers that had led to the drinking – some little bit of it that came through in the family gossip that reaches children, children who are not quite adults, and see adults fighting like children.

I don’t know why Baba chose to speak about Wali Dakkani and poetry then, at lunch. Maybe he and Ammi had been fighting again, and he knew it would irritate her. She had a strict protocol at the table. Eating was a serious thing, an appreciation of the good things we had been provided. It was something that marked us out from my aunts and uncles, although my mother’s Muslim faith did that too. Still, that latter fact was no great thing in those days, just as my father’s Communist ideals were not unknown either, even among the children of business families like ours. Except, of course, that Baba took his ideas seriously. There were few like him, vanishingly few, and there was good reason why.

There must have been love between them, Baba and Ammi, possibly great love, to bridge the divide they had overcome. I do remember some affection. Those memories are of my early childhood, though. By the time I was in my teens they were set on radically different paths, not so much at odds, but separate.

Much of it had to do with Baba’s inheritance, as he was sucked into the family business after my grandfather’s death. Reddy Steel, you may have heard of it. I am told it is still a successful business in Hyderabad, with factories in both Andhra Pradesh and newly created Telangana. I have not really kept in touch with my family, so I do not know if my uncles still run it, or whether my cousins now do, but it was one of the first Indian manufacturers of steel parts in the South, established before our independence.

As the youngest of four children, though, Baba was not really involved in it until grandfather’s death. His two older brothers were well settled into the growing family business, and he was allowed to be the free child, to chase education and culture, free from all responsibilities except to give a gloss of cultivation to the growing business. Even his marriage to a Muslim, not a thing casually done, garnered plaudits from some of the press, as part of the young country’s continuing progress towards “national integration”, especially since he was from the South, and she came from a well-known family in Bihar, from the North. Once in a while my cousins would even tease me about it, good-naturedly, until my father’s decline robbed the teasing of its joy.

Everything changed with my grandfather’s heart attack. A meticulous man, he had divided his businesses in his inheritance, and my father had received the two factories that manufactured ball-bearings. In some ways it was a prize part of the company, even if it was smaller than the businesses his brothers inherited, it had long-standing contracts with the Indian Railways that ensured a stable income with limited intervention.

Baba intervened, and the business was not ready for his idealism. The contracts had been lubricated by bribes that he was unwilling to pay. The company might have managed the loss, become merely the supplier to the middlemen who were willing to slip bundles of cash to the right officials, but Baba insisted on promoting a new culture of worker-management relations, starting zero-interest loans for employees, and involving workers in management decisions. When a rival business suborned a group of workers to hold one of the factories on strike for a month, Baba surrendered to their demands, only to see the factory being taken over. At this point his brothers stepped in, and while Baba continued as the titular owner of the one factory that remained, the management decisions were no longer his.

He lapsed back into history, and through some alcoholic substitution, his own failures became my mother’s, because she had not supported the business decisions he had taken. She had, in fact, opposed nearly all of them, telling him that he was being naïve, even foolish, that it was not just his own business to run but also the future of both her and their son.

Maybe it was that which needled Baba the most, and that day, when he spoke of the North, he spoke of something else. Despite the red eyes, despite the weight he had put on, the hunched posture, when Baba spoke of Wali Dakkani I heard again the adored father of my childhood, not the confused, raging man of my adolescence. And before Ammi could say anything to stop him, I asked, “But didn’t Urdu come from the North?”

Baba snorted. “Little do you know. Even if civilized things come from the North, their people do not have the sense to appreciate them until the South shows them how. It was Wali who composed the first divan in Urdu. It was his visit in 1700 that transformed the city of Delhi into Urdu lovers.”

Ammi had spoken then, softly, “And what did it gain them? Did they rise in power again, regain their wealth, did it stop their decline?”

Baba’s silence was a ponderous thing, even if it lasted only until he managed to say, “I remember when you used to like poetry.”

It was an accusation, a rebuke, and a plea. It made me cringe, the way he said it, like a beggar encountering unexpected abuse.

“I love it still,” Ammi said, “I just can’t eat it.”

Baba blinked, slowly, and when he spoke next his voice had changed. He was loud and harsh as he declared, “I am speaking to my son, woman.”

Ammi had looked at him for a long moment, with an expression on her face that I was too young to understand, and then, with a quick glance at me as I sat silent, rose from the table.

“Sit down!” Baba thundered.

She was beautiful that evening, even as she said, “You talk to your son,” and turned her back on us.

Baba picked up his glass and threw it. She flinched at the noise and the splintered glass as it shattered upon the wall close to the door she was walking towards. I still don’t know how to describe the emotion on her face as she turned back to look at him, at us, but it was not anger. She said nothing, just stood there for a moment, and then left.

Excerpted with permission from Homecoming, Omair Ahmad, Speaking Tiger Books.