Beloved City
| Author: |
Bapsi Sidhwa |
| Publisher: |
Oxford |
 Table of contents
Description:
This book is a collection of both poetry and prose by well-known writers celebrating the special relationship that they share with Lahore.
Bapsi Sidhwa writes about her “love affair” with Lahore and the inspiration this city has provided for her novels.
I have spent most of my life in Lahore and the city of eight million provides the geographical location of my novels. The city’s ambience has moulded my sensibility and also my emotional responses. To belong to Lahore is to be steeped in its romance, to inhale with each breath an intensity of feeling that demands expression. This is amply illustrated by the bouquet of essays, verses, chronicles and memories that celebrate this anthology.
The very spelling of this hoary city causes one to indulge in linguistic antics — as I did in my first novel, A Pakistani Bride: “Lahore — the ancient whore, the handmaiden of dimly remembered Hindu kings, the courtesan of Mughul emperors — bedecked and bejewelled, savaged by marauding hordes-healed by the caressing hands of successive lovers. A little shoddy, as Qasim saw her; like an attractive but ageing concubine, ready to bestow surprising delights on those who cared to court her — proudly displaying Royal gifts.”
According to popular myth, Lahore or Loh-awar (from the Sanskrit word “awar” or fort), was founded by Lav or Loh, one of the sons of the legendary Rama. But Lahore as we know it today owes its splendour to the Mughal emperors. Emperor Akbar moved his capital to Lahore in 1584 and built its massive fort; Emperor Jehangir and his son Shah Jehan — the indefatigable builder who commissioned the Taj Mahal — extended it. Shah Jehan also commissioned the terraced Shalimar Gardens. But it is the Badshahi Mosque, its massively billowing marble domes ignited by the setting sun as one approaches the city from the Ravi bridge, that conjures up the image of Lahore for me. Reputed to be the world’s largest mosque, it is laid out like a jewel before the main gate of the Lahore Fort. Both structures originally stood on the banks of the Ravi but the depleted river has meandered into a new course a couple of miles to the north. The Badshahi Mosque, its elegant proportions and the way it is situated in relation to the city, is sheer architectural poetry.
| DesiStore # |
PBS00960 |
| ISBN |
0-19-547248-9 |
| Pages |
373 |
| Weight (kg) |
0.45 |
| Shipping Weight (lbs) |
0.99 |
| HB/PB |
Paper Back |
|
For, above all, Lahore is a city of poets. Not just giants like Allama Iqbal or Faiz Ahmed Faiz, but a constellation of poets. Given half a chance, the average Lahori breaks into a couplet from an Urdu ghazal, or from Madho Lal Hussain or Bulleh Shah’s mystical Punjabi verse and readily confesses to writing poetry. But if I toss up the word “Lahore” and close my eyes, the city conjures up gardens and fragrances. Not only the formal Mughal gardens with their obedient rows of fountains and cypresses, or the acreage of the club-strewn Lawrence Gardens, but the gardens in thousands of Lahori homes with their riot of spring flowers. The trees bloom in a carnival of jewel-colours — the defiant brilliance of kachnar, bougainvillea and gulmohur silhouetted against an azure sky. And the winter and spring air are heady — they make the blood hum. On summer evenings the scent from the water sprinkled on parched earth signals respite from the furnace of the day — for the summers are as hellish as the winters are divine.
One of the earliest Muslim saints to visit India, Data Gunj Baksh was embraced by all communities including the Hindus and Sikhs. I was regularly hauled to the shrine as a child. My mother had a committed and confidential relationship with the saint and was forever asking him to either grant her some favour, or thanking him for having granted it. On those visits, prompted by her gratitude, she would insert one or two crisp 10-rupee notes in the collection box just inside the grills of the tomb’s window.
Sometimes, when the resolution of a particularly knotty problem merited extra thanks, she would also donate a deg or cauldron of sweet or savoury rice. The shrine provides food at all hours and the path to the shrine is lined with merchants hawking enormous degs of steaming rice and lentils. Once the deg is paid for, two men haul it on bamboo struts to a comparatively vacant distribution lot a few yards away, and immediately a long line of labourers and beggars materializes before it as if beamed down from an airship. The labourers hold out the flaps of their shirts and the women portions of their ragged dupattas, to receive saucerfuls of rice ladled out by the hired help. It is alleged that the saint saved Lahore during the ‘65 and ’71 wars with India. Sikh pilots are believed to have seen hands materialize out of the ether to catch the bombs and gentle them to the ground. How else can one explain the quantity of unexploded bombs found in the area? They can’t all be blamed on poor manufacturing, surely.
From Data Sahib’s, I take my visitors to the monumental Lahore Fort. Running along one side of the old Walled City, it is your standard Mughal bastion with thick, impenetrable stone walls, tall ramparts and neatly constructed turrets from which small cannons were fired long ago. One enters the fort through dwarfing gates that open on the wide canyon of the “elephant walk”. The walks gradual granite incline is marked by a series of small steps placed wide apart to accommodate an elephant’s stride. As an awed child, I once watched three richly caparisoned elephants conjure the spirit of bygone empires as, trunk to tail, they lumbered up the ancient path for some visiting dignitaries.
The walk leads to a spread of open courtyards and halls bordered by marble pillars and arching canopies, and finally we arrive at the million-mirrored Sheesh Mahal, the queen’s and princesses’ private chambers. If my preferred guide has not already attached himself to us, he can be counted on to do so now. Respectful and non-insistent, a rare quality in this indigent breed, he appears always to be loitering inside the Fort. He leads us with a somewhat diffident air of mystery to the darkest portion of the Sheesh Mahal and fetching a tiny box of matchsticks from the depths of his baggy shalwar, strikes a match. (The striking of a Lahori match is a chancy thing. It might ignite a sterile spark that produces no fire, or it might produce a weak fire that gutters out if not nursed.) Holding the anaemic fire like a fledgling in the cupped palms of his hands, the guide finally cajoles it into a robust flame and holds it aloft. For a few seconds all the little mirrors imbedded in the arches and vaulting ceilings of the chamber burst into flames and, as the guide slowly moves his arm about, the flames dance like a glittering chorus of Broadway fireflies.
Akbar’s son, the Emperor Jehangir, is buried in the magnificent Shahdara Mausoleum near the Fort. Jehangir’s wife Nur Jehan’s small, darkly crumbling tomb lies in the Mausoleum’s shadow, as the empress had expressly wished it. Its gloomy domed decrepitude is visible from the Grand Trunk Road and although I remind myself to visit it each time I pass it on my way to her husband’s tomb, I have yet to do so.
Next to the Badshahi Mosque lies Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s samadhi. Lahore was captured by the famous Sikh warrior Ranjit Singh in 1799, and after his death, the city was swallowed up by the British to satisfy the Empire’s boa-constrictor appetite. Maharaja Ranjit Singh died in Lahore and his samadhi is set in a complex of religious buildings and gardens. I visited the samadhi once in the 1980’s, when the Sikh demand for a separate state was at its most fervent in India. It was around the same time that an Air India plane was hijacked by a group of Sikh separatists. I remember the plane’s insistent drone above our house; it was desperately seeking permission to land at the Lahore airport. The Pakistani authorities, nervous of being implicated in the hijacking, would not allow it to land until it was almost out of fuel and their Indian counterparts’ appeals had become frantic. The Sikh hijackers routinely surrendered to the Pakistani commandos and were shunted off to jail to await trial
There is another Lahori haunt that cannot go without mention. It is the Hira Mandi or “diamond market”: “hira” or “diamonds” are a euphemism for the alluring dancing girls who ply their trade in this bazaar. Comprising a thick jostle of narrow streets and rickety buildings in the Old City, Hira Mandi lies on the other side of the Lahore Fort and is undoubtedly one of Lahore’s liveliest spots. Here the girls dance and flirt, and sing the verses of Lahore’s poets, selling romance as much as they do sex.
My evening forays to the district with friends are infrequent, however, and very few guests are treated to the perilous drive through its narrow lanes. On spotting women in the car the men will bend to peer in and make lewd comments. Once when the window was open, a couple of men poked their hands in to muss up our hair, and asked the men: “Where are you taking these birds to? Take us with you!” Peeping out of the car window through my dark glasses, wrapped in a shawl, curious and at the same time nervous that someone might recognize me despite my attempts at disguise, I watch the reactions of my guests. They are infected by the gaiety of the banter and by the colour and movement in the brightly lit streets. Unlike the corpse-like lassitude of the girls penned in their separate cages in the notorious red-light district of Bombay, the dancing girls of Lahore display an impressive animation of gesture and speech. This is in unhappy contrast also to the dispirited women penned in their homes in the more respectable neighbourhoods of an increasingly puritanical, segregated, and Islamicized Lahore.
This then is the ancient city, described before Partition as the “Paris of the East”, which insinuates itself in each of the pieces in this anthology. After all, it is the city in which our memories are lodged and where the people who are dear to us live. But at times I have felt that the magnificent tombs of Lahore, the mosques and gardens, and the colonial edifices built by the British, form only an essential background; it is the people who throng Lahore’s bazaars and streets and inhabit the city’s buildings that occupy centre stage. And therein lies the emotional landscape of my writing, the memories I draw upon in my novels
Next to the Birdwood Barracks was my home on Warris Road and down the street on Jail Road — opposite the Salvation Army complex with its glass-shard entrusted walls — the one-and-a-half-room home of Tehmina Sahiar. It was my haven, my refuge from the chill air of violence that swept Lahore during Partition and disrupted all our relationships.
Beloved City
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