BAPSI SIDHWA ON LAHORE: A JEWEL AND A WHORE

Lahore, the capital of the Punjab in Pakistan, the city in which I grew up, is a thriving metropolis of over 8 million people. 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. Pillaged over centuries by hordes from central Asia, Lahore was finally stabilised by the Mughals. Emperor Akbar moved his capital to Lahore in 1584 and strengthened its fort.

But if I toss up the word ‘Lahore’ and close my eyes, the word conjures up gardens, 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 private houses with their riot of spring flowers. There is a carnival of jewel-colours embedded in emerald lawns and hedges—a 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 water sprinkled on parched earth signals respite from the furnace of the day–for the summers are as hellish as the winters are divine.

There is a certain route I follow when I take outstation guests on a tour of my favorite Lahori landmarks. From my house in the cantonment near the Lahore Interna-tional Airport, we drive to Mall Road, grandly renamed Sharah-e-Quaid-I-Azam after the founding
father of Pakistan. But old names like old habits die hard, and it is still commonly called Mall Road.

Shaded by massive peepal and eucalyptus trees, its wide meridians ablaze with Seasonal flowers and rose vine, the avenue provides an impressive route for the dignitaries being wafted in their darkened limos to the Government House. Sharah -e-Quaid-I-Azam is also a part of the famed Grand Trunk Road that ran across the breadth of India from Peshawar to Calcutta. At least I think it is.

Past the delicate pink sprawl of the British built High Court and the coppery Zam-zammah, the cannon better known as ‘Kim’s gun’ after Kipling’s young hero, past the deadly little fighter jet

displayed on the traffic island a little further along the road, our tiny Suzuki noses through the congestion of trucks, horse-drawn tongas, bullock-carts and scooter-rickshaws to Data Sahib’s shrine on Ravi Road. One of the earliest Muslim saints to set up shop in India, Data Gunj Baksh is embraced by all communities, including the Hindus and Sikhs before they fled Lahore at Partition.
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 ten-rupee notes in the collection box just inside the grills of the tomb window. Sometimes, when the resolution of a particularly knotty problem merited extra thanks, she would also donate a daig of sweet or savory rice.

The shrine provides food at all hours, and the path to the shrine is lined with merchants hawking enormous colanders of steaming rice and lentils. Once the daig 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 materialises 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 duppatta-wraps, to receive the saucers-full 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 aterialise out of the ether to catch the bombs and gentle them to the ground. How else to explain the quantity of unexploded bombs found in the area? They can’t all be blamed on poor manufacture, surely.

Also I wondered what prevented the Indian army, massed along the canal on the outskirts of Lahore during the ’65 war, from marching to the Gymkhana Club for the celebratory ‘chota pegs’ the generals had promised each other. One of my two cousins, who was in the Indian army, explained that they could not believe the front was as unprotected as it appeared to be; fearing a booby trap they had held back. The saint must have again intervened.

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 long ago fired. One enters the fort through dwarfing gates that open onto the wide canyon of the Elephant Walk. The walk’s gradual granite incline is marked by a series of small steps placed enough apart to accommodate an elephantine 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 Elephant 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 matches from the depths of his baggy shalwar, strikes a match.

Now 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 anemic fire like a fledging 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 ignite; and, as the guide slowly moves his arm about, dance like a glittering chorus of Broadway fireflies.

Akbar’s son, the Emperor Jehangir, is buried in the magnificent Shahadra mausoleum near the Fort. His wife Nur Jehan’s own 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.

Jehangir’s son Shah Jehan—the indefatigable builder who commissioned the Taj Mahal— extended the magnificently domed Badshahi Mosque. 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 and the Shadara mausoleum are known for a startling architectural feat. They are so geometrically aligned that if one climbs to the top of any minaret on the mosque, one can see only three out of the four minarets of the mausoleum, and vice versa. In my doubting youth, I laboriously clambered up the steep winding brick steps of each of the eight minarets to dizzily verify for myself the astounding truth of this.

Lahore was captured by the famous Sikh warrior Maharaja Ranjit Singh in 1798, 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, set in a complex of religious buildings and gardens, lies next to the Badshahi Mosque.

I visited the samadhi once in the 1980s, when the Sikh demand for a separate state was at its most fervent in India, and an Air India plane’s insistent drone above our house meant that a hijacked flight 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.

Lahore’s old city, built by the Mughals and fortified by a wall, which has since crumpled, is a city within the city, and is the nucleus around which modern Lahore has shaped itself. The wall was breached by gates, some of which are still standing. There is another Lahori haunt I cannot resist. It is the Hira Mandi, or Diamond Market—‘diamonds’ a euphemism for the dancing-girls who ply their trade in this bazaar. Comprised of a thick jostle of narrow streets and rickety buildings in the old city, the Mandi lies on the other side of Lahore Fort. If one does not go looking for its seamier side, this is one of Lahore’s liveliest spots. Here, the girls dance and flirt and sing the verse of poets, and sell romance as much as they do sex.

The word ‘haunt’ is misleading. My evening forays to the district with friends are infrequent, and very few guests are treated to the perilous drive through its narrow lanes. On spotting women in the car, the men peer in and make lewd comments. Once when the window was open, a couple of men poked their hands in to muss my hair and ask my husband and his friend: ‘Where are you taking these birds to? Take us with you too.’

Saturated with the smoky fumes of grilling meats and frying pakoras, occasionally laced with perfumes or the scent from flowers in a girl’s hair, the lanes throng with bands of jostling men ogling the girls. The women lean from wooden balconies above, or are seen through wide-opened doors lounging against satin bolsters while they await custom. The sound of their ankle-bells and the notes of musicians as they tune their harmoniums and tablas, leak out of the rooms.

Peeping out of the car window through my dark-glasses, wrapped in a shawl, curious and at the same time nervous that someone might recognise me despite my attempts at disguise, I watch the reaction of my guests. They are infected by the gaiety of shouted 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. A stark contrast also to the dispirited behaviour of the women penned in their homes in the more respectable neighborhoods of an increasingly puritanical, segregated and Islamised Lahore. One waits for the day when the Hadood ordinances let loose by General Zia are rescinded by General Musharaff. Benazir tried to withdraw them, but once religious law is introduced, it is almost impossible to remove.

This then is the ancient city, described before Partition as the ‘Paris of the East’, which insinuates itself in each of my novels. After all, it is the city in which I grew up and inhabited the longest. It is where my memories are lodged, and where the people who were dear to me lived: godmother, slave sister, mother, father. My books, Ice-Candy-Man, The Crow Eaters and An American Brat are peopled by them and the junglewallahs, toddywallahs, bankwallahs and a host of other wallahs. But growing up in Lahore as a child, for me this metropolis with its checkered history and historical sites, its fortified walled city and its suburban sprawl, was ompressed into tiny pockets of familiarity. Next to the Birdwood Barracks was my sombre, joyless home on Warris Road, and down the street on Jail Road—opposite the enigmatic Salvation Army complex with its high, glass-shard encrusted walls—the one-and-a-half room home of Tehmina Sahiar. This was my haven, my refuge from the air of suspended animation that chilled all our relationships on Warris Road.

Although she was not related to us, ‘Tehmina aunty’ or ‘Motta-mumma’, as she was called by some, was dearer to the Parsee community of Lahore than a blood-relative might be, and she commanded an esteem afforded only to sages. At least that is how I viewed her as an adoring and grateful child, and that is how I have portrayed her in her reincarnation as ‘godmother’ in my novel Ice Candy Man.

Godmother was witty and, in a typically nutty Parsee way, delectably eccentric. Considerate of those who might misunderstand her, she sharpened her wit and practised this nuttiness only on members of her immediate household. No one in the house was ever spared—neither her lachrymose polio-stricken sister Jer, who dragged herself from chair to chair to accommodate visitors, nor her prickly old husband who sat at his book-strewn desk, or lurked in some corner of the room clearing his throat and mumbling prayers.

But the broadside of her humour was reserved for poor ‘Dodhoo aunty’, who remained perennially her kid sister, and who was instructed and ordered about as if she were a child into her dotage. Dodhoo aunty’s patient expressions and martyr’s smiles triggered godmother’s ire, and fuelled her wit. I can hear them clearly: “Oh, we are doing too much, are we? We are feeling put-upon?”

“No … who am I to feel put-upon?”

“Then why are we sighing like a dying swan?”

Short and squat, Dodhoo aunty was anything but swan-like; and, if struck by the incongruity of the comparison, I laughed, which I readily did in this house, Dodhoo would take the jibe she might have otherwise ignored to heart, and tearfully mumble: “I know I’m no swan… Don’t I know it … but why do you have to say such things in front of the child?”

The astonishing thing is that their bickering forged a bond that accommodated the needs of their peculiar circumstances, and my presence brought added drama to a house never without theatrical tension: the lives of the poor are remarkable.

Our households couldn’t have been more different. My parents’ house was an isolated bungalow with a sunken garden in front and twelve servants quarters at the back. Ours was a deep house and two portions at the rear were let out. The servants did all the housework under the nervous direction of my mother—we were all nervous because of the pressure father exerted on our mother. My childhood provided me with my characters, and Lahore’s buildings, streets and bazaars the landscape and flavour of my fiction.
Most of my first novel, The Bride is set in Lahore. Qasim, a Kohistani tribesman from the Afghan frontier, wanders through the city with his adopted daughter Zaitoon perched on his shoulders. They stroll down Anarkali, “the crowded bazaar named after the beautiful girl who was bricked-in alive by Emperor Akbar because his son, Prince Salim, was determined to marry her.”

I was always uneasy with this story. It was inconsistent with everything I had heard about the judicious character of the gentle monarch. Mughal princes, after all, were almost obliged to fall in love with dancing girls—it was a rite of passage, a means of acquiring carnal sophistication and courtly manners. How, then, could Akbar call such a vengeful punishment upon a young girl whose status compelled her to seduce princes?

What I recently learnt gives Anarkali’s story a more credible twist. Anarkali, a pomegranate flower in bud, was neither a dancing girl nor, as some suggest, a handmaiden to one of the queens. She was, in fact, one of Akbar’s junior wives. This version gives a more serious complexion to the transgression—one that smacks of royal adultery and incest—and thus liable to invite dire punishment.
But the real trigger for The Bride is an actual incident involving a sixteen-year-old Punjabi girl. To my mind, the story of the bride, the girl I write about, is indelibly linked with the journey I took in the region described by the ancient Chinese pilgrim Fa-Hsien as the Black Mountains.

In January 1965, Colonel Safdar Butt, the genial engineer in charge of constructing the Karakoram Highway, invited my husband and me to a remote camp deep in the mountains. The construction of the road was a joint venture, with the Chinese building the Highway from their end. They had already paved the road through the Khunjrab Pass, 16,000 feet above sea level, which provided a gateway through the Chinese frontier into Pakistan.

The Karakoram Highway follows the ancient Silk Route of traders from Central Asia. It runs along the Indus gorge and then swerves east from Gilgit to push through the Hunza and Baltistan agencies, where the Hindu Kush to the west, Karakorams to the north and north-east, and the Himalayas to the south interlock with the Pamirs, at the very ‘Roof of the World’.

The Karakorams, the most rugged of all mountain ranges, are also the cradle of some of the world’s loftiest peaks. Nanga Parbat, Rakaposhi, and K2, which, at 28,000 feet is second only to Everest. With its sheer flanks, treacherous avalanches, and glaciers, K2 is certainly the most formidable: it has claimed more lives than any other mountain.

On a day that was bitterly cold even in Lahore, we flew north to Rawalpindi, and spent a night with my brother Minoo Bhandara. The next day we drove two hours up a gentle incline to Abbotabad. Named after a British deputy commissioner, Abbotabad was one of the outposts created by the British to guard—and endeavour futilely to advance—the Northwestern Frontier of their Indian Empire.
The colonel had sent a jeep to fetch us. While bumping and winding along the perilous unpaved highway carved from perpendicular buffs and overhangs, we learnt it was to be an “all-weather-road”—in lay terms, a road negotiable even in winter. The junior officer accompanying us told us that they had already lost over a hundred lives to dynamite, avalanches, landslides, and to sudden gusts that lifted men clear off ledges and flung them thousands of feet down the gorge.

Once we had joined the river at Bisham, the scenery of the Karakorams, already spectacular, became heart stopping. The immense Indus churned like a sapphire snake in its dark canyon of soaring rock. There was a pristine quality to the loveliness, the mystique of space unsoiled by man, his technological advance, or his covetous eye.

Every short while, we had to stop to clear boulders from our path. At intervals, small groups of men—mostly taciturn Kohistani tribesmen wrapped in sheepskins and cloth made out of beaten wool—worked with shovels and pickaxes to clear the debris from recent landslides. The light-skinned tribesmen working on the highway, and the sprinkling of darker-hued army jawans from the plains who were supervising them, were the only humans we saw. The road was already opening up the immediate area on either side. Men, who had never seen cloth, let alone transistors, jeeps, or money, were being abruptly exposed to some of the artifacts of the twentieth century.

We were made to feel extravagantly welcome at the Dubair camp. Colonel Safdar Butt and the junior officers (among them Major Jan, who was a passable palmist) were eager for conversation and Safdar Butt, whom I had not met before, proved to be a raconteur. He was full of historical references and speculation: “Alexander the Great, they say, stopped at Bisham for a night on his way to plunder India. Of course, I think this route might have been a bit out of his way, but then who knows?” And he would point out passes through which other scourges had swooped down on the Indo-Gangetic plains, and describe the colourful composition of bygone armies on the march.

In the incandescent afternoons we half-slid, half-stumbled down the precipitate gorges to the white sand bank on our side of the Indus. The opposite bank, about half a mile away, marked the frontier between Swat Kohistan, where we were situated and which has a semblance of administration, and the Unadministered Territory.

Although it is part of Pakistan, the Unadministered Territory has no law and order, as we know it. Secluded by the Karakorams, the isolated tribes live by their own notions of honour and revenge. The cultivated steppes, hewn out of the mountains over successive generations, yield only a meagre crop of maize. The communities live on an almost unrelieved diet of maize bread softened with water. The harshness of their terrain, so rugged that a man has to trudge 30 days over the mountains to fetch a bag of salt on his back, dictates their severe code of conduct. A trickle of water stolen and directed into the wrong channel, a man’s pride slighted, and the price is paid in bloody family feuds.

A sagging rope bridge, a horrendously unstable contraption that looked as if it had been crocheted out of rotting wool and matchsticks, spanned the Indus where it was harnessed by a narrowed canyon. A little downstream, the cliffs stood away, allowing the sun to ignite the water to turquoise, and the river gentled to form a wide lagoon.

A few days later we discovered how deceptive the relative stillness of the lagoon was when we ventured onto its surface on a log raft navigated by a Kohistani oarsman, and trailed our hands against its powerful, icy current.

That was a most foolhardy excursion. In the flicker of the time it took the eye to sweep across the water, five tribesmen, like pieces of fur strewn on the sand, suddenly materialised on the opposite bank. It was as if they had sprouted from the sand in their supine postures, heads propped up, and their dangerous yellow eyes focused their disfavour with an intensity that compressed the distance. Like most Kohistani tribesmen, they carried antiquated Lee Enfields and hazardous looking handmade guns. I realised then that we were intruders in their terrain.

An authoritative voice carried a message across the water in a tribal dialect. We were warned—we must stay on our side of the river. Our oarsman abruptly changed the course of our skimming raft.

I had already heard the story of the girl from the plains, and this incident triggered in me a reaction. As I began to imagine the girl’s plight in these mountains, my vision became more acute. I began to register the detached, one-room stone-huts clinging to cliff-edges like eagles’ nests, the contemptuous expressions on the faces of the men whom Sir Bindon Blood and the might of the Raj had failed to subjugate, the desolate nature of this barren granite that did not yield even a blade of grass.

A couple of months before our arrival, the jawans working on the road had been astonished to see a beautiful young woman from their part of the world in this remote region. This girl, with her dark brown complexion, was accompanied by an old tribal who had the light weathered skin of the mountain people.

Filled with curiosity, concerned for the girl, the jawans presented the strange pair to the colonel. The old Kohistani told them that he was taking the girl to his ancestral village across the river to marry her to a kinsman. The girl, though embarrassed by the scrutiny of the strangers, did not appear to be under any constraint. The colonel and the other officers were invited to the wedding a few weeks thereafter. They politely declined. It would not be prudent to venture so far into tribal territory, or be beholden to the hostile, tribesmen.

A month later, they heard that the girl had run away. The girl had somehow managed to survive in that stark wilderness of trackless mountains without food for almost two weeks. Some instinct had guided her through the maze of canyons and ridges to the white sands, to where she was almost exactly opposite the camp at Dubair. Had the girl managed to cross the rope bridge spanning the river, she would have been safe. But the huntsmen were sure of their terrain and of their quarry, and they are infallible.

The jawans discovered her body the next morning. Death was the only acceptable punishment for a runaway wife in the highlands of the Unadministered Territory in northern Pakistan.

The girl’s story haunted me on my return to Lahore, as did the expressions on the faces of the tribesmen, the incredibly harsh conditions of their lives, and the rules by which they lived. I was obsessed by the need to describe them, to relate the girl’s story. The tragedy appeared to reflect the condition of many women on the Indian sub-continent who have no more control over their destinies than straying cattle or flood-swept insects have over theirs.

And the awe-inspiring splendour of the mountains, and the pure blue expanse of the Indus, had had their effect on me. I had felt something of the mysterious lure that causes mystics to wander off into the Himalayas, and experienced fleetingly the bliss that comes of becoming part of a larger all-encompassing entity. It was a mystic experience and it released a great surge of creativity in me. I wanted to write, to communicate my experiences and thoughts, and it was not just a wish, it was a compulsion.

I thought I would write a short story, narrating the girl’s experience and describe the mountains and the river that had so impressed themselves on me. However, without my being conscious of it, my imagination began to create a past for the girl. Where was she born? Who were her parents? Did she have siblings? How had she spent the 16 years of her young life in the plains? How did she meet the old Kohistani, and what were the circumstances that brought her to the remote region? In creating her background, in unconsciously fabricating the answers, the short story turned longer, and into my first novel, The Bride.

Imagining the girl’s past, Lahore, as it always does, crept into my story. La-hore: the very spelling of this hoary city causes one to indulge in linguistic antics, as I did in The Bride: “Lahore—the ancient whore, the handmaiden of dimly remembered Hindu kings, the courtesan of Moghul 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 aging concubine, ready to bestow surprising delights on those who cared to court her, proudly displaying royal gifts.”

Yet, the magnificent tombs, mosques and gardens, and the later colonial edifices built by the British, form only the essential background; it is the people who throng Lahore’s bazaars and streets and inhabit the city’s buildings that occupy central stage. And therein lies the emotional landscape of my writing, the memories I draw upon.