Hyderabad is often introduced through its biryani, Charminar or booming IT corridors. But in Tea and Tombs: Poems on Hyderabad, author Manu S Kurup tells the city’s story through quieter moments — a cup of Irani chai shared between friends, the silence of centuries-old tombs, forgotten neighbourhoods, and the many languages that drift through its streets. Published by Hawakal Publishers, the collection brings together poems written over nearly twenty years, capturing a city that is constantly reinventing itself while never quite letting go of its past. Having arrived in the city from Kerala in 2006, he says the poems became an unexpected record of both Hyderabad’s transformation and his own.
For Manu, the title itself captures the city’s dual identity. “I didn’t really think much about the title initially. But I realised Tea and Tombs brings together two aspects of Hyderabad that have fascinated me from the beginning,” he begins. Tea, he explains, stands for the ordinary moments that make up everyday life — the Irani cafés, long conversations and friendships that shaped his years in the city. The tombs, meanwhile, represent Hyderabad’s history, memory and layered past. He reflects, “What fascinates me is that these two worlds exist side by side. You can spend an afternoon over tea and then walk past a monument that has witnessed centuries of history.”
Among the many poems in Tea and Tombs is a striking piece in which Muhammad Quli Qutb Shah returns to modern-day Hyderabad. Looking upon a city that has grown far beyond anything he could have imagined, the founder reflects not on its remarkable expansion, but on the hurried pace of the lives unfolding within it. As Manu writes: “The city he imagined has multiplied beyond comprehension. Flyovers cross flyovers. Glass towers rise from rock. Languages intermingle. Food arrives by motorcycle. He watches quietly. A king understands cities.”
Unlike many cities where the old and the new remain confined to separate quarters, Manu believes Hyderabad wears its history everywhere. “As a student of literature and history, that coexistence fascinated me. You don’t have to search for history here; you simply live alongside it,” he notes. Interestingly, Tea and Tombs was never conceived as a book. The poems accumulated over the years while he built a life in Hyderabad. Written across different phases of his life and published individually in magazines before being collected together, the poems reflect changing perspectives. Manu shares, “When I finally assembled them, I realised they were speaking to one another across time. There’s a huge difference in language and sensibility between the earlier poems and the later ones. The book could only have existed after twenty years.”
Among the biggest challenges while writing the collection was capturing Hyderabad’s unique linguistic rhythm. “I kept wondering how these languages express both the city’s past and its present,” he says. Revisiting poems written years earlier also revealed how much he himself had changed. He adds, “The poems began as observations of the city but eventually became reflections of my own life within it.”
After nearly twenty years in Hyderabad, he no longer sees himself as someone merely living in the city. “When I came from Kerala, I thought I was here simply to make a living. Now, whenever I go back, I can’t stay away for more than ten days. I want to come back to my home and space,” he concludes.
And perhaps that, more than anything else, is the story Tea and Tombs tells — not merely of a city changing with time, but of how a city quietly changes the people who choose to stay.