It is a kind of blindness that one acquires when he/she lives in an area too long. The nature of what you see, the streets where you build your own footprints since childhood, may get so familiar as the fact that they become invisible. The outstanding degenerates into the routine. In my case it was Lahore. My Lahore was reduced to a place where people commuted to work and back, where the commutes of people were drawn on maps, direct flights back to work and back to home. It was an urban area projected through the blurred glasses of a vehicle, its great past and dynamic pandemonium watered down to a collection of hindrances and traffic jams. The large dome of the Badshahi Mosque has been turned into a landmark designating a turn, the vast Lahore Fort a setting to a traffic signal. The soul of the city, with its intoxication, messy chaotic, beautiful, soul had been hushed over by the sheer sound of the routine run of my own life.
I was living in a city which the poets have swooned over and sung over and over again, yet I had had but two or three principal contacts with it and they had all been of a slightly perfunctory frustrating kind. It was all oppressive; the thick humid air of a Lahori July, the kind of air to be worn like a heavy blanket. Rickshaw roar was nothing but noise. The grid of the electricity wires hung like jungle along the sky was simple urban blight. I had lost the sight. My eyes were open, and in a certain sense I was awake; but the sleep of habit is a very potent sedative, and my senses were dreaming. I am a native but I am no longer an inhabitant. I had been taking up room; there had been my own story on a parallel plane which only occasionally touched the great continuing story of the city. My ancestors love affair with this place seemed like it was a family affair in another family.
The transformation did not start with some dramatic breakthrough, but with a small question asked by one of their cousin who came over (internationally) to visit. On our way through the old city he indicated a crumbling haveli, with a beautifully carved wooden balcony, a jharoka, overhanging the tiny lane. Wow, he gasped putting his face to the window. WHO was there? What kind of explanation does it make?” I opened my mouth to reply and the words that came out of them were a mockery of silence. I just did not know. I had seen that building scored (maybe thousands of) times with my car. I had recorded it as old building, categorized it and forgotten all about it. My ignorance, exposed as it was to his natural, straightforward interest, seemed a dis-service. I was the local, at least supposed to do. At that moment, I came to realise that I was a strange alien in my own territory.
On that night I made a resolution. I would go suing my city. I would attempt to be able to view it with new eyes of my cousin, to discover magic that I had permissively rendered unseen. I determined the following day to try a very easy, but a very radical experiment. I forgot to take my keys to the car and I chose to walk. I went to a place I knew too well, one of the most famed food streets off the Fort, but the road at which I had never walked. As soon as I stepped on the street, the city began to change. The July heat was still there of course, but it was relieved with the startling coolness that came off the thick, old walls of the old city gates. The sound was not a continuous roar anymore it was a group of individual sounds. I could hear the dull beat of the hammer of some blacksmith at work in a by-alley, the shrill sweet voice of a fruit vendor crying his edibles, the cry of boys playing cricket on a roof, their voices muffled in the dark gullies.
I found myself in deeper maze unto Walled City, Androon Shehr. This was in the human rather than the automotive scale. The lanes were also too narrow to be driven easily by a car and there was the use of a slower and more conscious movement. though I did not only see a jumble of wires, but a dance of life itself in the balconies above. A woman was putting out clothes, the vivid colours a gay banner against the old brick. With a peaceful air a charpoy-sitting figure of an old man was fanning slowly up the world in front. These were not buildings but up-right villages whose windows kept their stories. The air was awfully full of scents that were not normally present when I was in my air conditioned vehicle. The heavy, earthy smell of uncooked spices in a burlap bag hanging outside a store, the sweet, sickly smell of jasmine, or motia, as it is called, twisted into garlands or the heady smell of new bread being whacked against the scorching hot walls of a tandoor. I purchased a skewer of burning meat kebabs off of a street vendor, and the flavor of charcoal and spice was booming on my tongue. It was an assault to the senses in the most glorious fashion. I did not just go through my city as I questioned it, I tasted and smelled and felt it.
My experiment reoccurred in the next weeks. I chose to concentrate on the human aspect, the history of life of the location. I visited Anarkali Bazaar not to purchase anything, but to meet people. I sat with a book-seller in a small and dusty store filled floor to ceiling with texts in Urdu and English. As he explained to me, his grandfather had opened the shop after the Partition, and as he informed me there was a distorted photo of a young man just like him, stoically standing in the same position, hanging on the wall. It was not longer a simple shop in my mind, it was something more, a cultural heritage, something that showed, how one could survive and deal with the written word, a story, which had to be passed on through countless generations. I even had a cup of tea with one of the craftsmen whose family had been producing the traditional khussa footwear more than 100 years ago. He gave me a worn tool or two formerly used by his great-grandfather, and, his hands handling with a hereditary unconsciousness, sewed me a piece of vivid leather. He talked of the times that he had witnessed, of trying to make a living out of his craft in a world of industrialisation. At least hearing his story I felt connected with the economic and cultural pulse of the city that I could never get in a textbook.
then I started to transfer this new kind of viewing to the great monuments I have been accustomed to take so much for granted. I visited the Badshahi Mosque one evening, when it was dusk a moment before sunset time. I did not hurry in, snap a couple of photos and out, I stepped out of my shoes and tasted the cool marble pavement under my soles, and I simply sat. I lingered even an hour, as the sky turned a deep blue to a delicate weave of orange, pink and purple. I was looking as the white marble of the domes drank the sunset tints, and glowed like a backlit object. Evening Azan, the call of prayer, started playing on the minarets, the sound so common, it was often white noise. However this time I paid attention. I listened to the rich, heart-welling melody, the sound which had filled this very space day after day during more than three centuries. I had the thought of the millions who had stood there in the same spot that I, and had their own dreams and fears and prayers lifting to the same sky. I could hardly help feeling my own little short-lived time instituted like a drop to this great flowing river of time. The mosque was not a postcard. It was alive and breathing and I was a continuity of it.
The process of rediscovery made me feel different, not only towards the city, but towards myself. My everyday existence started gaining some complexity. The trip over to the corner shop was a chance of discovery. The commute to office was no longer interspersed with periods of observation, spots of noticing, a bit of new street-art, pay attention to the change of seasons in the Gulmohar trees, this quirk of light and impression on the High Court building in early mornings, etc. I had entered on a conversation with my environment. In July the slave heat of the city was now forever connected with the soothing coolness of a salty lassi or the ripe juicy taste of a mango at its peak yet. The traffic was in chaos which was a quality of the city that was uncontrollable desire to exist and survive.
Looking at a familiar site with new eyes does not mean finding new things in it, but finding a new way being in the world. It is getting rid of the layers of routine and presumption and simply being open to the beauty and the history and the humanity that has already existed and has been waiting your visit. It is a conscious intentionality that we do, the intention to become present again, to fall in love with the place that you thought you already knew. Lahore is not invisible to me any-more. Here I have discovered its fables in the language of its folks, its loveliness in the detail of its building, and its spirit in the beat of its lives. What I have learned is that being at home it is not merely having a place where one lives but to be in an on-going and giving dialogue with the place, in the home where I belong. I was born again into the new eyes of which I had so yearned, probably into the same eyes that I had old ones in before, though larger, and more open than ever.
Soon I discovered this awakening was not an ending but a beginning. It was one thing to view the city in eyes unopened before; it was another thing altogether to live in the city with a heart unopened before. My first rediscovery was courtship, almost romantic: at least I found the excitement of gratifying my senses and discovering objects of historical beauty. Of course being like any other serious relationship, it could not be in a permanent phase of honeymoon. The genuine relationship requires not only admiration but involvement, accountability and readiness to tolerate the difficulties and flaws. Now I would not be able to un-see things, to forget them. Haveli with beautiful jharoka The decaying face of the haveli was not only a romantic ruin anymore; it was a tongue of heritage that was actively yielding to the force of gravity and passive abandonment. In addition, the knotted wires stopped being only unsightly; they became a situation that locals merely had to live under on a daily basis. My affection to the city started to be inflected with the feeling of protection urgency.
This sentiment made me advance more as a mere observer to an active, though reluctant, participant. I began joining social media networks in which people interested in Lahore heritage had formed their own community; communities belonging to a group of people who shared my interests and were infinitely more knowledgeable than I was (about the heritage of Lahore, at least). Through such of these groups it happened that I heard a rumour passing along as it were a tingling down my spine: the same haveli from which the whole adventure had sprung was in danger. Some developer had purchased the property and had intended to tear it down in order to build a new commercial plaza. It was an old tale in Lahore of the ruthless tread of money-making modernity stepping on the spirit of the city. The former me would sigh, complain about the way things are and then get going. But the man who had sat in the Badshahi Mosque and had awe of centuries, could not walk away. I went to a little gathering of a nearby conservation society, in the dusty back-room of a library. I have felt intimidated among people of architects, historians, life-long activists. I was fraudulent. However, I recalled what I learned in the public speaking class: one does not have to be an expert in the first place to have a voice. All you have to do is to care. I did not take a technical view, I took the bare, human interest side of that building, the story of how it had thrilled me out of my civic lethargy, out of my blanket-ridden dreams. The fact that they were saving my story made it a little part of their bigger story testified to its dynamism of life. The fight over that haveli is still to be over, however in enlisting myself to take part in that struggle I had passed a critical line. I was not merely gazing at the tapestry now, but attempting to make good the broken fibers of it.
My searches also started to pursue new more complex maps. The thing is I understood that there was not just a map of streets and places, but there were many invisible maps over Lahore. I made a decision to map its gastronomic map, which is governed by the flavor and custom. It was a trip that was beyond the popular Food Street. It was an inquiry as to why, in order to have perfect Sunday breakfast of halwa puri, one had to go to a given, narrow lane, somewhere within the depths of the ancient city. It was a search into the scathing loyalties that brought fans of Butt Karahi against fans of Billu. On weekends I would follow these routes and speak with the chefs and the clientele and discover that these culinary traditions were Protected identities of eating. A recipe did not merely indicate a list of ingredients, it was a matter of family honour, an account of migration and a direct connection to the tastes of a pre-Partition era. I found out that the real culinary map of the city did not go neighbourhood by neighbourhood, but craving by craving. It had its own area of the best lassi, a certain street to get the fish fried in the winters, and one sole vendor on the outskirts of a college campus who had made the best creamiest kulfi. It was to keep this map in order to know the palate of the city, and once you know the palate of this city, then you were a step nearer to the heart of the city.
It has guided me to follow other topographies that are non-visible. I had been searching the literary map of the city and appeared in legendary Pak Tea House. Its good old times long gone, still sitting there and sipping a cup of sweet, milky tea, I could almost see the ghosts of Faiz, Manto and other icons of literature who had made the air smell of radical ideas and sweet poetry. I began to read them as an historical documents, but as present day city guides. I would read some poem of Faiz about the Lahore Canal and then I would go on to sit on the actual banks and enjoy the familiar waterway in his view of love and revolution. The physical landscapes of the city got permeable with intellectual and emotional power. I was looking into its crafts map, finding whole communities still engaged in one single trade. I met the kite-makers, the patang saaz whose shops were as full of colour and excitement approaching the Basant festival, when the festival itself was technically outlawed. I discovered the silent street of the instrument-makers, and everywhere in the air I could hear the trials of a new sitar or the adjustments of a tabla. These were living cultures, cultural economies, fragile ecosystems of craft and cultural, a cultural marrow in the city, it is also not a quaint lingering of a lost Golden Age.
The stronger the attachment I felt to Lahore however, the more compelled I felt I was to look at its wounds as I had sought to admire its glories. In order to love place, it is necessary to embrace its wounds. I started to research the 1947 Partition that was a huge tragedy that devastated the city, and an entire subcontinent, in two. The tales I studied in school as a history lesson were suddenly very intimate. I would stand in front of a lovely, foreclosed house in another neighbourhood such as the Model town and think about the Hindu or the Sikh family that had constructed the building who had held births and mourned the deaths there, and who had had to abandon everything that was holdable in a bag. The silence of these houses was hammering. I talked to my own grandmother once more but this time I did not ask her to share with me her happy memories, but share with me her memories of that time. She had stories of loss, of fear, but of tremendous courage and of friendships with neighbours of other orientations that were unwillingly broken. This exploration did not take away my affection over Lahore; it added a deep, somber beauty to it. It helped me realize that the current identity of the city comes in the form of its particular mix of hope and optimism, its intense anger and its pervasive loss, to have been carved out in that fire. The cackling of its bazaars made somehow a sweeter music as I knew behind the laughter of that cackling what weeping had done before.
This was a different, multi-layered vision that even transformed my vision of Lahore and the relentless modernity of its character. I used to perceive the blinding bright New shopping complexes and the huge housing colonies in the Defence and Gulberg as some sort of betrayal to the historical core of the city. But now with my new eyes, I started seeing something more of them being one of the latest event in the long history of Lahore assimilating invaders, traders and ideas and call it their own. I began to approach these contemporary spaces using the same anthropological interest. What were non-verbal social rules of a food court in a mall? What messages were the of the new minimalist galleries sending about the contemporary desires and fears of the city? I witnessed the transformation of olden times and traditions being readjusted. A centuries-old ornament scheme of a mughal tomb would turn up in the imaging of an uber-cool new clothes firm. The ancient principle of grouping in space was being regenerated in the mass of people on weekends in a contemporary movie theater. All this was one chain of story. The city was no museum but the actual discourse between its history and its aspiration and I was witnessing it all in real-time.
This process, this process of looking and re-looking, has become the main pillar of my life here. It is no more a project that has a start and a closure. It is the actual fabric of my life. I have been led to comprehend that, confidence in belonging in the world should not involve being a specific identity, but being involved in a changing association with what is around. Lahore is no longer my inheritance to love this city but rather an action that I have chosen to embrace every single day. It is the decision to go on foot rather than on wheels to enquire rather than make assumptions to hear what the history gently whispers and the present loudly shouts. That means the decision to share in its successes, and to share just a measure of its burdens. The first adventure was to discover a well-known place with a new opening. Nevertheless, the best gift of the two has been to come together. This place is more of a home to me than ever before and my eyes are never seen again, always seeking more there to see, there to hear, that little miracle we all ignore. I no longer feel like I am a foreign guest in my own home; I am contingent of its complicated, gorgeous, and infinite history.
