Essential Hindi and Urdu phrases

The Urdu greeting, said with the right hand raised toward the forehead. It works on anyone in Lucknow regardless of religion and marks you instantly as someone who has bothered.

'After you.' The city's most famous phrase and the shorthand for Lucknawi manners — there is an old joke about two noblemen who missed their train exchanging it. Still used, half-seriously, in doorways and queues.

How are you? The everyday Hindi opener. Lucknow speaks both Hindi and Urdu and the boundary between them here is a matter of register, not of communities.

Refined courtesy — the quality Lucknow believes distinguishes it from every other north Indian city. Being called be-tehzeeb, without it, is a real insult here.

The labyrinth of interlocking passages above the Bara Imambara's central hall — a structural device that lets a 50-metre vaulted ceiling stand with no beams, not a folly.

To stroll Hazratganj in the evening with no purpose beyond being seen. It is a verb, locals use it unironically, and it is the closest thing the city has to a nightlife.

The air quality index. From late October to January, Lucknow sits under Gangetic-plain winter smog and residents check this the way other cities check rain.

The city's GI-tagged white-on-white hand embroidery, worked in Chowk and the old lanes. Machine imitations are everywhere; hand work has slightly uneven stitches on the reverse.

How much is it? Essential in Aminabad, Nakhas and every autorickshaw negotiation. Ask before you get in, not after.

The melt-in-the-mouth minced kebab supposedly invented for a toothless nawab. Tunday Kababi is the institution; the Aminabad branch is the original.

A winter-only dessert of milk foam set overnight in the dew and sold from steel trays at dawn in Chowk. It exists roughly November to February and nowhere else in India.

112 is the single national emergency number. 108 is the free state ambulance service and is genuinely fast in the city.