The Shayari Battle at My Cousin's Wedding
Two uncles, one microphone, and forty years of rivalry in rhyme.
The DJ never stood a chance. He had a laptop, two speakers, and a playlist called WEDDING BANGERS FINAL 3, and he lost the entire evening to two men in their sixties armed with nothing but rhyme.
It was my cousin Zoya's wedding, the sangeet night, a lawn full of fairy lights and three hundred relatives in various stages of biryani. Somewhere between the dances, the microphone made the mistake of being unattended.
Rafiq Chacha reached it first. My father's eldest brother, retired bank manager, a man who irons his kurtas with the seriousness of a surgeon. He tapped the mic twice, said “Arz kiya hai,” and the lawn went quiet the way a courtroom goes quiet.
You have to understand what “arz kiya hai” does to a gathering of my people. It is a starter pistol. It means a sher is coming, a couplet, and you are all now participants, expected to moan “wah wah” at the good lines like the poem is being pulled out of your own chest.
He delivered a couplet about marriage being a garden where the flowers argue about the sunlight. Wah wah. Applause. He smiled the smile of a man who believes the evening belongs to him.
Then, from the back, near the paneer station, a voice like a tabla wrapped in velvet... “Irshad. But if I may.”
Yusuf Mamu. My mother's uncle by marriage, retired railways, owner of exactly one blazer, worn tonight. He did not walk to the stage. He processed, holding his teacup, while three hundred people turned like sunflowers.
My cousin Adil leaned over to me. “Get your phone out,” he whispered. “It's happening.”
“What's happening?”
“Nineteen eighty four,” he said, as if that explained anything. It would... eventually.
Yusuf Mamu took the mic and answered the garden couplet with one of his own, something about how it is easy to praise gardens when you have never once held a spade. The crowd made a sound I can only describe as three hundred people saying OHHH in formal wear. Rafiq Chacha's smile tightened by exactly one millimetre.
And the battle began.
For those who have never seen a shayari battle between two elderly rivals at a wedding, imagine a rap battle where every diss is in metre, half the insults are borrowed from dead Urdu masters, and the audience response is graded.
A weak line gets silence, which is death. A good line gets “wah.” A great line gets the full ritual: someone's dadi raising one hand like she is testifying, uncles slapping their knees, one man shouting “kya baat hai” so loudly the caterers came out to check.
They went at it for forty minutes. Couplets about pride. Couplets about men who count other people's applause. At one point Rafiq Chacha delivered a sher implying that some poets, like railway trains, are famous mainly for being late, and Yusuf Mamu responded with one implying that some poets, like banks, give you nothing and charge you for it. A plate of jalebi was dropped in the excitement. Nobody mourned it.
Between rounds, I finally got the story out of my mother, who narrated it like a war correspondent.
College, 1984. Rafiq and Yusuf, best friends, inseparable, both mad about poetry, both members of the same mushaira circle. They wrote together on the hostel roof, one starting couplets, the other finishing them, a two-man factory of borrowed heartbreak. Then came the annual college mushaira, a real trophy, a real audience. Rafiq recited a ghazal that brought the house down. Yusuf sat in the third row and recognised every second line as one he had finished on that roof.
He never said it publicly. Rafiq never admitted it. Yusuf married and moved to Lucknow, Rafiq stayed, and for forty years they met only at weddings and funerals, exchanging couplets like duelling pistols, each one polite, each one loaded. The family treated it as entertainment.
Nobody, in four decades, had asked either man if it hurt.
Back on the lawn, it was getting late and the battle had gone somewhere quieter. The joke couplets were done. Rafiq Chacha, sweating slightly, called for one final sher, “for the bride, for family, for whatever is left after everything.”
He began it.
Two lines in, he stopped.
Not for effect... I have seen my uncle pause for effect, and this was not that. This was a man reaching for the next line and finding air. The mic hummed. Three hundred people held their breath. He tried the opening again... and again the couplet ran out from under him like a tablecloth pulled too fast. He is sixty eight. It comes for the sharpest ones too, my mother says, the forgetting. It just usually has the decency not to come during a duel.
The silence got long enough to have a taste.
Then Yusuf Mamu stood, without the mic, and finished the couplet from the back of the lawn.
Word for word... Cadence perfect. The way you can only finish a line you have carried for forty years because you wrote it, on a hostel roof, in 1984, with your best friend.
Nobody said wah. This was above wah.
Rafiq Chacha looked at him across the fairy lights and the abandoned jalebi, and did the bravest thing I have ever seen a man of his generation do with an audience present.
He said, into the microphone, “It was always his line. Half of that ghazal was always his.”
Forty years, dissolved in eleven words. My aunt was crying. The DJ, sensing greatness, wisely stayed dead.
Yusuf Mamu walked up, took the mic, and said, “And half the applause was always mine, so we are even.” Which is exactly the kind of forgiveness our family specialises in: real, but with a receipt.
A shayari battle, I learned that night, is just a forty-year conversation between two people who never found a plainer way to say I miss you.
They recited together after that. Old ones, roof ones, trading lines like the wedding was 1984 and the lawn was a hostel. Zoya, the actual bride, whose actual wedding it was, told me later it was her favourite part of the entire week, better than the horse, and the horse was excellent.
I went home that night and could not sleep. I kept hearing the hum of the mic in that long silence, the moment a proud man's memory failed him and his oldest rival caught him like a net. By 4 a.m. I had written it all down, badly, then less badly. A month later I polished it into something with a spine and sent it to a monthly poetry contest, my first submission anywhere, because apparently watching two old men forgive each other in metre will radicalise a person.
It did not win. Rafiq Chacha asked to read it anyway.
He rang me after. I could hear him folding and unfolding the printout, the way he does with documents that matter.
“The middle is weak,” he said. “The ending is honest. Bring it Sunday. We will fix the middle.”
And that is how, at the age of twenty nine, I ended up on a roof.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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