Going it Alone

Sabahat Zakariya went to independent candidate Saira Dar's corner meeting and ended up musing about middle class morality and the meaning of these elections

My worn Nokia handset peeled its trademark tune on a drowsy Sunday afternoon. A quick peek identified the caller as one Ms. Saira Dar. Bracing myself to hear the worst from a friend who had been a colleague at Aitchison several years ago and with whom the extent of my relationship ever since has been an accidental run-in at the local cinema, I hit the answer button. A call from a friend long missing usually means one thing, divorce-validation - a service divorcees provide as preliminary counselors and water-testers for those contemplating the plunge. Her monumental news, however, turned out to be of a variety I had not anticipated-a breathless announcement of her candidature from my constituency, NA-125. Full marks on the surprise factor. I have lived in NA-125 for the past 17 years but confusion over voter registration and polling stations has meant I have never cast my vote. This year, with an upgraded NADRA infrastructure, calls for registration well within time and a savvy technological network of verification I am finally in a position to take my politics off twitter and into the polling booth. But getting ambushed by an independent candidate wasn't quite how I had envisaged spending my first precious vote. If personal relations be the criteria then my cousin, the PML-N candidate from my constituency, would be the default choice, but my virgin vote was a responsibility I was taking seriously and I had no intentions of casting it away flippantly.

What she lacked in shrewd political planning, she made up for in sincerity of purpose and the ability to deliver a rousing speech

But vote or no, Saira, the former art teacher-turned politician's is an interesting story. Often in our zeal to talk about the more tangible oppression of rural women, the moral niceties that chain the women of the middle class are overlooked with a swift brandishing of their MA degree as incontrovertible proof of their liberation. Those with any insight know the truth to be far more complicated. The unstated expectations of middle class morality are often as binding as feudalistic and overtly religious expressions of absolute forbiddance. To be a wife and mother who is neither the poor worker nor the Birkin-toting daughter of a rich feudal is to swim in a murky netherland of wifely duties and structured expectations that are incompatible with the fluid energy of political life. The allegiance to the middle class code of conduct is threatened by the personal ambitions of a woman with neither the excuse of avenging her father's death nor the luxury of her family's minions conducting her election campaign for her. Saira told me that her intent was initially met with great resistance by her husband and son, on the pretext that she would end up making a fool of herself, but she persisted -from what I could tell once I met up with her - with considerable personal cost to herself. With her poise and refined convent-girl air it was hard for me to imagine her as a hard-boiled candidate who could get down and dirty in Pakistan's murky political arena, but her story intrigued me, and I decided, out of rather selfish reasons - the need to find out more about my constituency and to make an informed decision about my vote - to follow her on her campaign trail.

The next day I rang the bell of Saira's mother's austere house in a shaded old street of DHA Phase 1. One dupatta-clad woman and the candidate herself ushered me into an echoingly empty house. Her mother was away visiting her son in Dubai, providing Saira with 'a room of one's own' to conduct her affairs away from the domestic pressures and naysaying of her husband's place. Piled into her Cultus we set off for Nishat Colony, one of the poorer neighbourhoods of NA-125, where an old family painter of hers had organized a corner meeting. Poking fun at her own lack of resources Saira felt her low budget would be the key to capturing the people's love and trust. Just as I inwardly scoffed a little at her naivette she made a small joke that illustrated her point well:

'I used to have a Suzuki FX a few years ago and this beggar was constantly bothering me with solicitations for money. A huge Prado stood right next to my car, so I asked her why she didn't go beg from them instead, "Magar baaji ghareebaan nu hee ghareebaan daa dard honda ae na" (but sister, only those who are poor themselves can understand the pain of the poor) came the beggar's reply'. Laughing over this anecdote Saira expressed the hope that a similar kindling of solidarity with the poor would propel her to victory in the elections.

By this time (end of April) she still didn't have any pamphlets or posters and the ones she had ordered were sepia; coloured ones being too expensive to afford. She felt that the only areas she could possibly cover were those with some family or friends of her domestic staff and didn't even hope to attempt to visit her whole constituency. No seasoned political journalist myself, even I could tell that this amount of effort was not enough to win a national assembly seat, but here we were passing through the labyrinthine streets of Nishat Colony, festooned mainly with PML-N candidate Kh. Saad Rafique's banners, going to a poor man's house who apparently had enough faith in the woman to have put together a corner meeting for her. Soon we reached the painter's dimly lit, single-roomed quarters in the middle of a narrow alley. A slightly torn poster of Christ plastered on one wall, a couple of chairs and a charpoy neatly placed beside another, and a verandah with cracked cement floors where a couple dozen relatives and neighbours had converged to hear Saira speak. What she lacked in shrewd political planning she made up for in sincerity of purpose and the ability to deliver a rousing speech without becoming a caricature of the dais-thumping politician. The poor people she had come to address seemed swayed by her ideas that centered on working for the welfare of the poor, providing them with education and the vague but effective promise of returning their dignity to them. Obviously pleased and honoured by her visit, most of the women present immediately pledged their vote; female solidarity, something in her manner or the fact that she had 'honoured' them with her presence being enough to convince them to pledge allegiance, making me marvel at the arbitrary nature of these decisions, amongst the poor as well as the educated middle classes who pride themselves on casting their vote on rational and logical bases but often whose own conclusions are no less instinctive and emotional.

A few of those gathered admitted that PML-N's Saad Rafique had helped build the streets around their area but that they still did not want to vote for him since he hadn't 'shown his face' to them in the past five years. As Saira spoke about the need for universal education a man piped up to say that the young lad standing next to him had completed his BA but could not find a job anywhere. The quagmire of degrees but no jobs, streets but no exit from grinding poverty, suddenly seemed too overwhelming and complex to navigate and I couldn't escape the oppressive feeling that to change anything fundamental for these people is a nigh impossible task.

Poorly thought through as it may be, the candidature of someone like Saira Dar is demonstrative of the impetus PTI's emergence as a viable force has given to individuals from normally apathetic, educated urban middle class backgrounds. Suddenly in Pakistan, politics is no longer a dirty word associated with feudals and industrialists alone, independents like Jibran Nasir in Karachi and Saira Dar in Lahore are placing their faith in a system that so far those of their background had considered too broken to even attempt to fix. And there is some hope in just that fact.

Though, in an unguarded moment while talking to me, Dar told me had she felt a sense of empowerment and genuine respect in teaching she might not have taken the political route, a sad reflection on how far we still need to go for the emergence of a genuinely naya Pakistan, one that will emerge from an attitudinal change within ourselves, not just a cosmetic change of leadership.

Published in The Friday Times May 10-16, 2013

Bahaar Aaee

On the day the Christians of Badami Bagh were brutally punished by their Lahori neighbors for yet another cooked-up blasphemy, a gloomy Sabahat Zakariya went to hear Tahira Syed sing Faiz's poems at the Alhamra Arts Center. She was pleasantly surprised 

I was under the impression that Lahoris don't appreciate serious music, that's why I've always performed in Karachi, but this audience has really surprised me."

The 500-strong crowd at the Alhamra Arts Center could have taken offense at this declaration of Tahira Syed's. Or they could have accepted the backhanded compliment for what it was. They chose the latter, bursting into self-congratulatory applause at their role in this timely revision of the songbird's take on their city.

It was a day when outside endorsement of Lahore's benign spirit was bound to be lapped up hungrily. Just a few hours before the concert, a poisonous mix of self-righteousness and discontent had unleashed itself on a hapless Christian neighborhood of Lahore, leaving in its wake more than a hundred burnt houses and hundreds more permanently charred lives. Under those circumstances, Adeel Hashmi's delicate interweaving of Faiz's letters and poetry with Asad Anees's grand piano made the Alhamra hall seem worlds removed from the pyromania of Badaami Bagh. This being a Faiz event, there was every reason to suppose that troubles other than love would be brought up, and so they were by Adeel Hashmi, who began the show with a moving speech addressing the pall that had descended on the city since morning. Sitting in the audience and looking around, I couldn't escape the depressing feeling that much like English-language writing in Pakistan, liberal rhetoric at a ticketed cultural event is permanently stuck in a vicious cycle of preaching to the converted. Several couples -presumably parents of the Lahore Grammar School students who had presented the opening act of the night - got up and left even before Hashmi had time to finish his speech and launch into his recitation. I couldn't decide if it was their apathy that defined my city's spirit or the enthusiasm of the four hundred-odd people who enjoyed a Saturday night of music until the end.

Like English-language writing in Pakistan, liberal rhetoric at a ticketed cultural event is stuck in a vicious cycle

Adeel Hashmi, with his ability to smoothly transition between comedy and serious matter, and then to combine the two where necessary, is a valuable Faiz Ghar asset, reminiscent of his uncle Shoaib Hashmi in this as well as matters of stage presence and crowd handling. Both are fortunate in having evaded the comic actor's affliction of not being taken seriously once they make the switch, what with Faiz's grandson handling his poetry with an earnestness that adds merit to what might seem a nepotistic selection. The only thing that jars at the now frequent Faiz Ghar events is their insistence on promoting Faiz and Faiz alone. His legacy as a poet is now extremely well-established. Surely Faiz Ghar can afford to branch out into the exploration of other members of Urdu's beleaguered creative fraternity in ways as attractive as the marketing of Faiz, an endeavour that would also be very much in line with the giving spirit of Faiz the man, one who openly ranked Hafeez Jalandhari among the greatest poets of his time, despite the latter's varied and vicious personal attacks on Faiz's character. The recently held Daastaan-Goi, Shyam Benegal Festival and Motley Theatre events suggest that Faiz Ghar will branch out into supporting the creative arts in general and not just stick with Faiz alone, which is a heartening development. This new direction, however, was not visible at this particular concert, which seemed to have straitjacketed Tahira Syed into singing Faiz and Malika Pukhraj alone, marring the spontaneous flow of an otherwise excellent evening. Why it needed to drag in Alys Faiz as an alibi for the concert never became clear to me, especially considering that a tribute to Alys Faiz had been performed a couple of weeks before on the same stage and Faiz's birthday had also been celebrated a week before with the traditional Tina Sani evening. The inclusion of Malika Pukhraj seemed suspiciously like a condition of Tahira Syed's for appearing on the Faiz Ghar platform, and the addition of Alys Faiz an attempt at offsetting the focus on Syed and Pukhraj.

Not only does Tahira Syed look as fresh as ever, her voice is just as perky as it was many years ago

I was expecting to enjoy the Malika Pukhraj section, since so many of her songs are part of the collective consciousness of Pakistan's PTV generations. And I was not disappointed. Not only does Tahira Syed look as fresh as ever, her voice is just as perky and strong as it was many years ago. Lo Phir Basant Aaee proved an excellent choice for the first song, evoking both the joy of spring on a balmy March evening and the pang of Lahore's severance from its centuries-old past with the banning of the Basant Festival. Syed also peppered her chatter between songs with some well-placed humour. moving into Riaz Khairabaadai's ghazal Hum bhee piyayn tumhayn bhee pilaaeeN tamaam raat with this quip: 'Of course, prohibition mayN tau yeh mumkin naheeN hae. Magar yeh pehlay ki gaaee huee hae', shifting immediately afterwards into the pahaari folk tune Allah Bailuva Ho, leaving me marveling at this seamless celebration of God and booze in our poetic traditions.

The Faiz section, which I was a bit apprehensive about, having never heard Tahira Syed sing him before, turned out to be quite a joy, especially since it contained three "new" compositions by Arshad Mehmood who was also in attendance. Go sab ko baham saaghar-o-baada tau naheen tha, yeh shehr udaas itna zyaada tau naheen tha, a ghazal I am familiar with through a home recording of Arshad Mehmood singing it himself was my only disappointment. Mehmood's own voice is much more suited to the tune as well as the pathos of the poetry, so I couldn't stop comparing it unfavourably to the original version. Add to that Syed constantly pronouncing 'zyaada' as 'zaada', and it made for something like a low point in the evening.

At the very end, one audience request which was neither from the Pukhraj nor the Faiz canons was accommodated after special permission was granted by Muneeza Hashmi upon Tahira Syed's coaxing. A rousing 'Jhaanjhar Phabdi Na' ended an overall fantastic evening that I couldn't yet again help but feel grateful to the Faiz Foundation Trust for.

Published in The Friday Times of March 15-21, 2013

Litfest Day 2: For the love of literature

Lahoris thronged Hall II at 9:30 on a Sunday morning to hear Mohammed Hanif speak about The Baloch Who is Not Missing and Others Who Are. The crowd’s enthusiasm was presumably not shared by the session moderator Rashed Rehman however, who failed to show up, prompting the organizers to hastily replace him with HRCP Director I.A Rehman whose self-deprecating sense of humour proved to be the only bit of relief in a session fraught with guilt-by-association for the Punjabis in attendance. A visibly affected Hanif set aside his one-liners for this one and dwelt at length upon the plight of the missing persons in Balochistan whose families’ continuous protests outside the Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad press clubs have been met with a stony silence by the media. That Hanif himself couldn’t risk discussing the political reasons behind the kidnappers’ motives remained an inescapable irony, however, forcing him to talk about the issue purely in terms of the personal toll it takes upon families. The establishment’s brutal crackdown on what is essentially a separatist movement remained the elephant in the room everybody tiptoed around though there was no shying away from criticism of the army in general, made especially scathing by an Urdu/Punjabi poem penned and recited by Hanif that sought to burst the myth of the ‘Punjabi army’, replacing it with the idea of the institution as a monolith that serves the sole interest of the institution itself. Despite its refusal to mention the Balochistan separatist movement one couldn’t help feeling that just the holding of this session was a bold move on the part of all involved.

Hall II emptied out the moment star attraction Mohammed Hanif exited the stage leaving a handful of people who stuck around for the ‘Narratives in Urdu Fiction’ session with Khalid Toor, Ali Akbar Naatiq and Musharraf Ali Farooqui. A good choice for moderator for this one, Ali Madeeh Hashmi comfortably straddled the Urdu/English divide, enabling him to reach out to the more ‘burger’ members of the audience without alienating those who actually knew something about the subject at hand. Khalid Toor’s reading of his story about a couple of villagers on a buffalo cart attempting to seek shelter from a strong wind proved a superb introduction to his work. The aandhi , not a full blown tornado nor just merely a strong wind, is so indigenous a phenomenon and Toor’s capturing of the rural idiom in a young boy’s voice so authentic that one couldn’t help but rue the possibility of a complete disappearance of such narratives because of the marginalization of local languages. Both Toor and Natiq laughed off such fears, however. Toor refused to ghettoize himself on the basis of the language he chooses to express himself in calling all literature the literature of the world, regardless of language or place, whereas Naatiq felt that the Urdu language is in a more healthy state than ever before thanks to the news and drama boom in the country. The festival, organized for and by the elite, with its inordinate stress on the English language bothered neither author as much as it did the 60-70 people in the audience.

Next session on another Urdu writer, but one who has been embraced by the English-speaking elite in droves, filled all of Hall I. Simply titled ‘Manto’, Ayesha Jalal’s session on her celebrated uncle also served as a vehicle for introducing her upcoming book ‘The Pity of Partition’. In a rather bizarre twist, Jalal’s defense of the idea of Pakistan riled up certain members of the liberal audience who attacked her vociferously for defending the Pakistani ideology.  Even the usually abrasive Jalal had to take a few steps back to try and parry the blows. Ali Sethi, the moderator, stepped in at this point to defuse the tension with his characteristic humour and the eventful session came to an end.

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Published in The Friday Times here

Sufi Music Festival at Peeru's

To say that Lahore seems to be slowly recovering from the terrorist attacks that ground all its cultural activity to a halt a few years ago would be to tempt fate, and if there is one thing I have learnt as a Pakistani, it is to keep optimistic hopes for the future to a minimum. Luckily for us, the people at the Rafi-Peer group have always held a less pessimistic view of things, remaining constantly involved in carving a livable present for the people of Lahore.

After the initial shock of cracker bomb blasts at the World Performing Arts Festival at Alhamra Cultural Complex that brutally ended a decade of vibrant International and local performances, the Rafi Peer people took most of their work to their outlying café, Peeru’s, which  is where their latest Mystic Sufi Music Festival was held. Peeru’s is a long trek for most Lahoris, so we got out early on the second day of the festival and reached well before time to a now fortressed Peeru’s. Last time I had been it was a charming, open space on the outskirts of the city. Now it is sealed on all sides with high, concrete walls and huge metal doors. Hazards of making a living through art in the ‘cultural capital’ of the city.

I was glad to find that once inside, the open grounds, wrought iron chairs and macabre puppet décor still retained their allure. Walking past shops selling quirky folk trinkets we arrived at the clearing for the festival itself, the stage swathed with bales of cloth in Alif Laila fashion, topped with a small dome. Opting for the farshi nashist in front and watching people trickle in slowly, we were assured by the organizers that the evening would start on time regardless. Exactly at eight, the first qawwals, whose names were unfortunately left unannounced, began proceedings. Particularly unfortunate since they were better than many of the advertised acts that figured on the festival brochures. Their one qawwali, a mashup of a Ni Mayn Jogi De Naal and the ever popular Akhiyaan Udeekdiyaan, proved an impressive beginning to the show.

The last strains of their harmonium mingled with Usman Peerzaada’s voice welcoming the crowd to The Mystic Sufi Music Festival, the synonymous sufi and mystic probably cobbled together to provide dual protection against the satanic influences of just plain old folk music, and to make the festival palatable to diverse audiences. This cynicism was frequently upended by the four days of music itself that provided a robust blend of spirituality, romance, heretcism and playfulness in a potent subcontinental mix honed over centuries. While the organizers may have felt the need to speak the rhetoric of Islam to appease the ghosts of potential terrorists lurking in the shadows, the crowd responded equally enthusiastically to both ‘Allah Hoo’ and ‘Sharaabi Mayn Sharaabi’.

The charming Bushra Marvi from Sind, dressed in a psychedelic, Shazia Khushkesque traditional ghagra, was the second act that night. Her voice, however, could not quite live up to the expectations raised by her striking appearance, though in choosing the familiar ‘Maahi yaar di gharoli’ she managed to elicit some response from the half -capacity crowd. Zarsaanga, the KPK stalwart also seemed lacklustre, partially because the rock concert speakers often overpowered her melody. They sound system seemed particularly excessive on a day the venue wasn’t full to capacity.

Shaukat Dholya from Chiniot performed next with his drumming partner. What a delicious name that, encompassing his passion, profession and identity, a living embodiment of the sufi concept of oneness: Ranjha Ranjha karday ni mayn aapay ranjha hoee. It is impossible to imagine a similar union of music and being in the western musical tradition, where a rockstar by the name of David Singer or John Drummer sounds like an absurdity.  Usually percussion alone leaves me a bit cold, especially if unaccompanied by a more melodious instrument, but the peaks and troughs of Shaukat’s beats created an elaborate, transporting rhythm that echoed boundlessly without being monotonous. The two dholiyaas came together on the stage, foreheads nearly meeting, beating their drums each to each in a perfectly synergetic visual and stylistic crescendo. As if this wasn’t enough, Shaukat added another layer of spectacle to an already spectacular performance, swiveling his drum around his neck like a hula-hoop, then adding his partner’s in a magnificent conjuring feat that combined spinning himself, his drums and his beat in flawless harmony.

The only international participant of the festival, the Syrian Ahmed Altir from Aleppo joined the two drummers next with a graceful dance reminiscent of Turkish whirling dervishes. Ahmed’s romantic foreignness and more elegant, but no less skillful whirling, made for an engrossing contrast with the earthy dhamaal dancers of sub-continental shrines, but his biggest draw was a light-bulb dress with components that could be taken off to twirl umbrella-like above his head in varying degrees of difficulty. Ahmed got warm response from the crowd and he was the only artist to perform on all four days of the festival.

Saturday and Sunday saw the place buzz with a more festive feel as visibly greater numbers turned up over the weekend. Despite that, it was hard to shake off the feeling that deprived of the grand cultural stage of the Alhamra, the festival had been robbed of a lot of its magic and reach. Nonetheless, a group of first time festival attendees sat on my left and giggled away, hushing each other from time to time in a suitable display of coltishness and reverence. A girl with gorgeous long curls banged her head to Mithu and Goonga Saaein’s drums and in the grand old tradition of Pakistani parenting 4-year-olds frolicked around the lawns at midnight on a Sunday. More than the somewhat insipid performance turned in by Pappu Saeen on the third day, Goonga and Mithu Saaeen captivated the audience on the last day, exciting the audience into clapping and smiling and creating a communion of strangers that is becoming increasingly difficult to experience in this city of confined spaces and suspicious insularity.

Of my favourite acts of the next two days, one was the saarangi player, Israr Nabi Bukhsh.  Saarangi is considered a difficult instrument and is on the verge of extinction due to a lack of patronage. The festival brochure stated this fact but despite that the sarangi player was only given one song to play. He chose the popular tune Dama Dam Mast Qalandar but a bias against instrumentals by a strongly lyrical populace meant the performance was perceived as merely an instrumental filler which people used as an opportunity to catch up with their smart phones. A pity, but an expected response in an age where folk music needs to be served with healthy dozes of fusion and glasses of Coke in order to be noticed.

Saaein Zahoor, a crowd puller, was captivating with his Toomba but a bit overshadowed by some of the other spectacular performances in the festival. Also perhaps because the more commercially successful sufi singers have been commercialized by Coke Studio but the likes of The Shajo Rag Faqirs who have been performing at the shrine of Shah Abdul Latif Bhitai in the traditional manner that was created by the Shah himself 400 years ago and which they consider a sacrilege to tamper with, retain a more ‘exotic’ charm.

Surrayya Khanum was another easily recognizable face who delivered a surprisingly soulful rendition of Maae Ni Mayn Kinnu Aakhaan followed by Bulleh Shah’s poetry that never fails to be relevant to our current situations:

Haaji loak Makkay val jaanday, saaday dil vich nau sau Makka

Vichay Haaji, vichay gaaji, vicha chor uchakka

(Haajis go to Mecca but I have Mecca within my heart

Haji, sinner, thief, pickpocket all reside within me)

The heavily decked, sinewy Krishan lal Bheel from the deserts of Sind and the light, feminine sounds of the Bazm-e-Liqa troupe from Hunza, Chitral and Gilgit showcased two opposite spectrums of our land’s diversity. While PTV had for years tried to foster this kind of unity through provincial dance tableaus, the organic performers of this festival did a lot more to bring home to me the vastness of Pakistani cultures. Akhtar Chinaar Zehri’s Balochi, Bazme-e-Liqa’s Burushuski and all manners of strange languages, cultures, dresses and music all a part of Pakistan that from Lahore seems like a homogenized country solely obsessed with politics and revolutions. That is what the Rafi-Peer people have always done remarkably, opened my eyes to a world beyond my own, from a time when they brought artists from all over the world to perform theatre in Lahore tonow that they have been restricted to showcasing only local talent. A lot has been said about their alleged financial fraud due to which they have lost all sponsorship and had to curtail the list of performances from abroad;  all I know is they are one of the few who have kept Lahore’s cultural identity alive over the decades, and for that alone I am indebted to them.

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Published in The Friday Times here 

The LLF City

Fears of a Lahori elite schmoozefest coupled with the counterintuitive idea of a festival about reading, essentially a solitary activity for solitary people, had me sceptical about the first ever Lahore Literary Festival. However, the two days of the event ended up charming me for several reasons, chief among them the festivity they returned to the Lahori spring.

Watching my bevy of students, who had recently been assigned Mohammed Hanif’s ‘A Case of Exploding Mangoes’ as extra reading, brave the pouring rain to get their pirated copies of his book signed at all costs must also have gone some way towards the softening of my stance. A sea of black LLF-logo umbrellas bobbed from Alhamra’s Hall I to II, from the grounds to the food stalls, helping stave off the downpour while keeping the determined spirits of culture-seekers and people-watchers alive. Nothing less than this level of organisation was required to smoothly pull off a festival of this magnitude, attended by 30,000 people over two days.

The evening before, the festival was declared open by the Chief Minister of Punjab who, in an attempt to distance himself from the legacy of General Zia, rued the disappearance of strolling couples on The Mall Road, the Parsis who once formed part of the Lahori landscape and the lost cultural vibrancy of the city and gave his support to this attempt at the revival of Lahore’s cultural landscape.

Tariq Ali’s well-attended keynote speech threw the festival open to the public on the morning of March 23 and in a subsequent session the famous left-leaning intellectual declared his intent to vote for the PTI, an announcement that was apparently met by a hallful of cheering Lahoris. Far from the madding political crowd, however, I attended a session with barely thirty people in attendance, that of Sri Lankan writer Shehan Karunatilaka on his DSC Prize winning first book, ‘Chinaman — The Legend of Pradeep Mathew’. Moderated by Owen-Bennett-Jones this was an excellent session to attend. Shehan turned out to be just as disarmingly charming as his book and Jones asked him all the right questions, a circumstance that made the pedantic audience’s ‘questions’ even more painful to bear.

The first man who got up did not allow any qualms about clearly never having heard of the book to hinder him from announcing his credentials as Assistant Professor of English at a local college and a member of its Literary Society, no less, in a loud, authoritative tone before asking Shehan something unintelligible. Nonplussed by this attack, the sprightly student volunteers quickly handed over the mike to a middle-aged woman who turned out to be a member of the same cult and pressed on even more urgently about the aforementioned literary society whose mere membership seemed to confer a sense of accomplishment upon its members.

Meanwhile Shehan looked on bemusedly. If there was any residual doubt left in my mind for the need for such a festival, it was cleared up by this practical demonstration of the service such platforms render in updating foggy old professors beyond Hardy and Frost.

Speaking of old, the Lahore in Literature session was marred by an excess of very old and frail panellists (Bapsi Sidhwa, Intizar Hussain and Pran Neville) who should have been balanced out by a few younger faces. Sidhwa, whose work I have a healthy regard for, suffered from a lack of preparation for the session, launching into a never-ending excerpt that did not seem to have any direct bearing upon either Lahore or its Literature.

Rafay Alam the moderator, being young and polite, failed to take the proceedings into his hands as the droning panelists refused to acknowledge the need to connect with the audience. This is where the conflict between the written and spoken word reared its head, writers aren’t meant to be performers and they cannot be judged on the basis of their ability to read their works in a manner as engaging as their writing.

Sometimes though, this is reversed. Moni Mohsin’s accented inflections while reading from her ‘Diary of a Social Butterfly’ enhanced the flavour of her writing brilliantly. The satire session in which she read her work, in fact, turned out to be the best session of the day. The crowd roared at the banter between Mohammed Hanif, Shehan Karunatilaka and Shazaf Fatima Haider facilitated by the irrepressible William Dalrymple. Each of the writers read out a humorous piece from their writings, some bawdy, some satirical which made for a light but thought-provoking session.

‘The Literature of Resistance’ session saw a video message from Arundhati Roy being played on the screen. For me its star attraction was Palestinian writer Selma Dabbagh who spoke with great clarity and grace about the problems of being a writer attempting to explain a conflicting situation to the outside world. BBC’s Lyce Doucet was also a star attraction on this panel who spoke about her experiences reporting the Arab spring and her views on Lahore and Pakistan.

If there is one thing the festival did for me, it was to dispel the myth of the writer as unattractive nerd slaving away in a corner on his laptop, unwilling and unable to communicate with a world beyond his words. Most of the authors I listened to, with the exception of the very old ones, were savvy crowd-workers with ready wits and charming personalities, often quite different from what one might have imagined from just reading their works.

Daniyal Mueenuddin, for instance, with his gora looks and accent made for an odd contrast with his subject matter, i.e. the lives of ordinary villagers in rural Punjab. William Dalrymple whose works I haven’t read I had always slotted in my mind as a historian (the word conjures up very dry associations), so his affable charm came as quite a surprise. Writers like Mohammed Hanif and Musharraf Ali Farooqui dispelled my notion of authors as self-obsessed narcissists unwilling to engage with the less accomplished.

On the second day of the festival three back to back sessions left me with little energy to do much else post-lunch so I decided to sit out the rest of the afternoon on the Alhamra steps reading, people-watching and soaking the sun’s rays after a long week of rain and dreariness.

That my city allowed me to do that, for once, without any prying eyes or groping hands was cause enough for celebration, add to that people listening to authors, buying books and engaging with ideas without a bomb blast in sight and I was a happy trooper.

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Published in The News on Sunday here 

Legends -- Personal and Traditional

Legend has it that Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was so impressed with an aerobics display by school students in Korea that he came back and ordered it to be replicated in Pakistan. This show was successfully staged in Islamabad on 14^th August, 1976 which motivated Bhutto to ask Punjab’s Education Secretary to hold a similar affair in the provincial capital. The whopping estimate of 3 crore for the Lahore event, to be staged on 23^rd March, 1977 involving 20,000 school children put the Punjab Education Ministry in a unique quandary since it did not have the legal right to spend more than a crore on an event of this nature. The Secretary’s consternation trickled down to his staff, one of whom –Dr. Kibriya, Chairman Punjab Text Book Board – assured him that 3 crores was an exorbitant amount and entrusted with the task he could do it within 50 lakhs. The Secretary looked skeptical and the subject was dropped. A few weeks later, however, he handed the Chairman a cheque of Rs. 1 crore from the Chief Minister’s Office along with a letter making him in-charge of the event. Dr. Kibriya reiterated his pledge of working within 50 lakhs upon which the Secretary transferred 59 lakhs of the total amount to the Chairman’s personal account. The show was staged impeccably on Pakistan Day as promised at a total cost of 34 lakhs. The burden of a surplus 25 lakhs of taxpayers’ money in his account weighed heavily on my taaya, Dr. Kibriya’s conscience. He wrote a letter to the Secretariat requesting them to return this money to the national exchequer but his letter was taken as a joke and dismissed. Soon the Education Secretary got transferred and a new one took his place. Dr. Kibriya kept sending reminders to every subsequent Secretary till such time as he retired from his post with the amount still lying in his National Bank account at the Secretariat. Finally one Secretary who knew him personally paid heed to his queries and relieved him by taking the money off his hands.

These and other such legends were told with great relish on occasions my father’s family got together. My father and uncles— the first daastaan-go I heard growing up—delighted in the stories they weaved of their lives, planting themselves unabashedly in the center as swashbuckling slayers of authority, deadly-honest romantic ideologues and achievers against all odds, who prided themselves not on their proximity with the rich and powerful but in taking them on. These central narratives collided with my father’s own fight as a young man against his eldest brother’s disdain for the humanities as a suitable career for a boy born in poverty, complicating the overarching central daastaan of my family, immediate and extended.

A wish to rediscover these oral narratives (having passed from my life since my taaya’s death and due to a lifestyle revolving increasingly around the keyboard) took me to the aptly titled ‘Daastaan Goi—The Lost Art of Urdu Storytelling’ on two consecutive days last weekend. Following closely on the heels of Naseeruddin Shah’s packed ‘Ismat Apa Ke Naam’, the country’s ‘cultural capital’ seemed to be suffering from theatre-goers’ fatigue, or maybe bragging rights of attendance at the Rahat Fateh Ali concert at Lahore Gymkhana trumped these relative unknowns from Delhi. Whatever the case may be I walked into a half-full Hall II presenting a stark contrast to the capacity crowds Shah and co had attracted at double the ticket price just a week ago. Interestingly, Daastaan Goi’s ethos turned out to be quite similar to Shah’s Motley Theatre group – same sparse set, similar focus on theatrics of the spoken word and a comparable fervour for bringing Urdu’s dying heritage to a larger audience.

The invitation cards stated that daastaan-gos Mahmood Farooqui and Danish Husain would present Daastaan-e-Ameer Hamza and Daastaan-e-Chouboli that evening. The debonair Mahmood Farooqi walked on to the stage in regular attire beforehand, however, to clarify that they would only recite the Rajasthani Daastaan-e-Chouboli that evening, a tale that he promised would fill us with nostalgia for the land it had sprung from. Before going offstage to change into his performing gear Farooqui instructed the audience on the adaab of the mehfil—the audience were to express appreciation only with waah waahs. Clapping would be considered the equivalent of tomato throwing in certain other traditions. This marked out the evening as magical and distinctly Eastern even before it started.  A short while later, now dressed in white kurta pyjama with a traditional white cap and a similarly attired Daanish Husain by his side, Mahmood Farooqui unfurled Daastaan-e-Chouboli.

Instead of evoking any special feel for Rajasthan the daastaan seemed to be set in an Eastern Neverland of cheerful polygamy that could be situated anywhere from Baghdad to Delhi to the fervent sexual fantasies of male story tellers who must have helped hone this daastaan over the ages. Despite this, Thakur, the male figure who sets the tale in motion becomes progressively marginal as the story moves forward, almost ending up as the fool, while increasingly the women surrounding him arouse sympathy, awe and romantic desire. In the grand tradition of heroines who escape the limitations of their fate through male disguise, the female protagonist of Daastaan-e-Chouboli dresses up as a fresh, appealing young man who endeavours to make the stubborn but beautiful princess Chouboli speak four times in one night to win her hand in marriage. Twenty four virile young men have tried before her but none has had the wherewithal to crack Chouboli’s cool emotional exterior with the weapon of storytelling. Enter our protagonist, combining Rosalind’s heart and Scheherzade’s wit to reaffirm within the daastaan the importance of being able to tell a gripping daastaan. She narrates such fascinating tales with endings so contentious that Chouboli cannot help but speak up to set the narrative straight.

This emphasis on stories as the most effective weapon in the armory of the romancer reminded me of a paragraph from Tarun Tejpal’s The Alchemy of Desire. I came back home and looked it up to find that it reflected exactly the spirit of both Daastaan-e-Chouboli and the art of Daastaan-Goi:

“Passionate love has nothing to do with any obvious attributes of the lover – class, intellect, looks, character. It has everything to do with the stories the lover can tell. When the stories are stirring, complex, profound – like great fiction they need never be crudely true – then so is the love.

The stories lovers tell each other are tales about themselves, their past, their future, their uniqueness, their inevitability, their invincibility. Stories about their dreams, fantasies, the nooks and crannies of their fears and perversions. Those who can tell their stories with power create powerful love. Those who can’t never know the emotion.”

In this both Farooqui and Hussain succeeded marvelously. The waah waahs in the hall flowed freely at each bit of verbal trickery, every plot twist; egged on, I suspected, not just by the beauty of the story and its masterful rendition but with a certain self-aware delight at giving daad in a manner so archaic, so sophisticatedly unpunjabi; the spectators tickled by their own role-play as audiences from a different time and space.

***

Tales that my father and uncles told never touched on love and romance, topics too debauched to be dwelt on in front of children. The details of their youthful exuberance emerged only amongst whispers and nudges from the more gossip-oriented retellings of the female members of the family. No grand personal narratives were ever heard from the mouths of the women, cementing the daastaan in my mind as strictly a male affair. Daastaan-e-Chouboli’s greatest personal gift to me was to turn that framework on its head.

***

The next evening at The Avari was a very different affair, not just because the daastaan narrated that day was a modern-day one but also because the expensive charity event catered to a crowd different in its eliteness from the one at Alhamra, the financial elite as opposed to merely an intellectual one. The irony of attending Mantoiyat (a collation of Manto’s life from different sources) within the luxurious entrails of a five-star hotel seemed lost on most of its fashionable attendees. The need to relate to the artist’s personal life, however, has never been a pre-requisite for enjoying great works of art, thus most who attended seemed to enjoy this break from whatever they otherwise do at such dos. Manto’s three daughters were also in the audience for this recital, clearly something the daastaan-gos themselves considered an honour.

Mantoiyat, literally and figuratively, did not have the magic of Chouboli. A friend was disappointed in it as merely an oral retelling of all he had already read in print, but for people like me, (who, I imagine were in the majority) familiar only with Manto’s major works and some sketchy details of his life, Mantoiyat was a literary treat. It placed the legend within his context, casting astonishing light on his life’s achievements amidst formidable difficulty. For me personally, Mantoiyat’s greatest strength lay in bringing to life a supporting cast of literary satellites who often get overshadowed by the giant fame of Manto and Chughtai.

For those with intellectual pretensions Manto and Faiz are Pakistan’s Che Guevaras, icons whose mere names symbolize rebellion and romance. Their fame in Pakistan rests on precisely the opposite reasons to officially patronized authors like Iqbal. While conservatives pick and choose from Allama’s poetry to perpetuate his holier-than-thou image, Manto is romanticized by liberals as the perpetually colourful sympathizer of prostitutes, fighter of obscenity trials, despiser of boundaries and speaker of truth to power. In these distilled portrayals the three-dimensional man is often dismissed as an inconvenience, never allowed to be less than larger than life. The daastaan technique, however, allowed Mahmood Farooqui and Daanish Hussain the freedom to dwell on the domestic Manto, with his concerns for his wife and daughters and his in-depth pregnancy advice to Ismat Chughtai, delightful little details literary criticism and political ideology have little room and taste for.

The daastaan was concluded by Majeed Amjad’s poem on Manto, the man whose verses my father never manages to recite without being overwhelmed with emotion, who is inextricably associated in my mind with my father’s lifelong efforts to bring him to the limelight. I’ll leave you with this poem in Sarmad Sehbai’s English translation:

 Tossing the empty bottle he shouts,                                                          

‘Oh world! Your beauty is your ugliness.’                                                  

The world stares back at him                                                                  

Their bloodshot eyes rattle with the question                                          

‘Who nabs the pillar of time                                                                        

By the noose of his drunken breath?                                                      

Who dares to break into dim corridors                                                        

Of twisted conscience?                                                                            

Who intrudes upon poisonous dens                                                            

Of demonised souls?                                                                        

Through icy glasses his rude glance                                                                    

Chases us like a footfall                                                                            

Foul monster!’                                                                                        

Bang! Bang! 
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A version of this was published here in The Friday Times

Ismat Apa ke Naam

Naseeruddin Shah received a standing ovation from the capacity Lahore crowd at The Alhamra Art Centre on Saturday. This was before he started performing. Those pouring into Alhamra’s Hall No. 2 since 5 pm to watch the ‘Naseeruddin Shah plays’  knew little more than that they were dramatizations of the great Urdu writer Ismat ChughtaI’s short stories and that Naseeruddin Shah was performing in them. The latter was enough for most.

A documentary on Faiz Ghar began the evening exactly at 6, as stated on the invitation card, after which the Bollywood star strode on to the Alhamra stage to great applause, cutting a charismatic figure. White-haired and elegant, Shah’s crisp Urdu diction (peppered with only an occasional smattering of Hindi) distinguished itself immediately in a country officially the flag-bearer of Urdu in the sub-continent but with an urban population increasingly indifferent to the language. Heeba Shah, the first of the performers walked on to the stage, coffee mug in hand to begin narrating ‘Chhui Mui’, the tale of an upper middle class shareefzaadi ‘s protected upbringing that renders her nature so delicate she is incapable of taking her pregnancies to full term and providing her in-laws with a much-desired heir. Bhabhijaan, as she is called by the young but precocious narrator, is juxtaposed with a wretched harlot who gives birth to her child in a train compartment with an ease and unabashed pride that horrifies the shareef khaandaan looking on. Bhabhijaan is so affected by the spectacle that she miscarries once again. The performance and the writing blended so seamlessly it was difficult to say you hadn’t just witnessed a play with an ensemble cast instead of a short story recited by a single person. This sense of the stage peopled with a variety of characters and not just a single narrator only grew with subsequent performances.

Ratna Pathak’s narration of ‘Gori Bi and Kaley Mian’ turned out to be a virtuoso performance, restrained and mellow. Pathak allowed Chughtai’s words to take centre stage, letting them weave a web of their own without permitting imposed theatrical compulsions to interfere with the narrative flow. The injured pride of a dark man married to a fair woman finds release in a refusal to consummate the marriage unless the bride lifts her marital veil herself, an unheard-of travesty in the strictly mannered mughal setting of the story. Chughtai’s sharp pen reveals the psychological wounds society inflicts not just upon women but also men who do not fit into prescribed norms of beauty, and the fallout of such societal attitudes on individual lives.

In the last and longest performance of the evening, Nasseruddin Shah starred as a lonely, middle-aged nawaab fighting hopelessly against the charms of Laajo, a generous and promiscuous young woman who comes to work at his house. Shah took the crowd along on a raucous jaunt of irreverence and lasciviousness with obvious personal delight in the portrayal of the nawab’s sexual yearnings, kept from degenerating into bawdiness by Chughtai’s refined, literary Urdu. Marriage sounds the death knell to romance in this story; the nawaab and Laajo’s state of romantic Eden destroyed by the shackles of an institution for which Laajo is singularly unsuited. Once the unhappy interlude of marriage is gotten over with, however, and the nawaab divorces Laajo, they return to their happy state of coupledom without many qualms.

The largely upper-middle class, English-educated audience that shows up for such events reveled for two evenings in the dexterity of the Urdu language. I felt a pride I rarely feel these days about anything indigenous. For two days The Faiz Foundation made Lahore feel pre-9/11, pre-Sri Lankan cricket team attack, pre-Rafi Peer Theatre Festival closure, and within the confines of the theatre, perhaps even pre-1947. 

London via Lahore

I didn’t heart London. Not immediately at least. Quite a betrayal of the expectations that decades of literary Anglophilia and jetsetting friends had raised. In my nebulous imaginings London had figured as the quaint antidote to the impersonal Big-City ala New York; a big city, of course, but with a small-town feel and a traditional heart. The six weeks of summer I spent in the living, breathing London both undermined and reinforced these distant stereotypes of the land of my romantic imaginings.

The first three weeks I spent attending a course called Shakespeare in London and the next three soaking up the rain in 'the cultural capital of the world'.

London lacks one grand all-encompassing view that could define the city for outsiders, something akin to the New York skyline that you can take in in one sweeping gaze from across the Hudson. The muddy Thames, a glorified BRB canal to my Lahori eyes, flows in a long stream instead, cut across at regular intervals by bridges that allow views of the city in pockets. The fairytale architecture of Tower Bridge, the colossal St. Paul’s Cathedral dominating a mass of ugly office towers sprouting cranes, and the spectacular contiguity of the Parliament Buildings and Big Ben calling out time to this most historic yet modern of cities. Ugly 20th Century structures built post WWII jostle against intricate Victorian arches, while recent contributions like the phallic Gherkin and the towering Qatari-built Shard weave the 21st Century into this city’s ever-evolving fabric. However soul sucking its fast-shut glass ‘windows’ and its anxious Dubaian obsession with height, there is a certain fascination in beholding the Shard rent London’s clouds asunder, like a triumphant reverse cultural strike into the heart of colonialism. All this combines to make London a dreamlike mish-mash of architectural influences not immediately aesthetic or congruous, but stimulating in their diversity.

And that is a good metaphor for London in general. To one used to the monochromatic culture of Lahore the sheer scale of London’s diversity is staggering. Mixed race and mixed orientation couples on the tube, punks in Camden, dhoti-clad Hindu priests in Leicester Square chanting and drumming in a circle, and bearded group of men called ‘Team Islam’ sloganeering in the middle of Bond Street, all make London. 

Yet for such a diverse city there is something remarkably subdued in its make-up. People are famously polite but not friendly; culture thrives but there is little spontaneous show of it. There is so much going on simultaneously that it is impossible to catch it all; even then there is a curious surface sterility that clings to the clouds that perpetually overhang London’s air. Excitement and enthusiasm rarely spill over to its streets, remaining confined within pubs, bars, clubs and theatres, occasionally managing to break free with the help of weekend alcohol. This inability to have fun without being inebriated struck my middle class Lahori sensibilities as particularly odd, raised as I have been on unfettered dancing and singing at weddings, fuelled only by months and years of unchannelized sexual energy more potent than tequila shots.  

The London authorities’ compulsive need to contain culture within designated boxes means that street musicians have officially been consigned to busking spots like tube stations, and coves underneath bridges, lending a very British regimentation to a spontaneous and romantic European activity. Musicians play as commuters rush past them, with the more benevolent checking their pace to drop a coin along the way. Spaces where you can sit and enjoy music, like West End theatres and concert halls, are prohibitively expensive, although I did attend a marvelous collaboration between The London Symphony Orchestra and the Beijing Philharmonic Orchestra at The Royal Festival Hall at a fairly cheap price. The most enthralling aspect of London’s music scene is the classical music recitals at prominent churches; the delicious thrill of experiencing a place of worship come alive with the sound of secular music. While high art is readily and freely accessible in the city’s magnificent art galleries and museums, screevers (pavement artists) captured so vividly in Mary Poppins and George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London have disappeared completely. Their place has been taken by high profile graffiti artists like the subversive Banksy and the dubious Mr. Brainwash whose glamorous mural of The Beatles currently graces a corner of Holborn. Next to it is a giant graffiti portrait of the queen carrying a paintbrush and pot. The paint from the paintbrush reads: God Save the People. Ye olde British irony lives on.

Less flags, more medal tables, please

The scale of London’s subcultures, neighbourhoods and commercialism make it impossible to collect the city under one banner, even if that banner is as big as The Olympics. Perhaps why being in the city during the event wasn’t half as exciting or glamorous as many on the outside may have imagined it. Walking around Central London I was often hard pressed to tell that the world’s biggest sporting event was taking place in the same city. Pubs and bars had dedicated screens relaying the Olympics and they were often full with people catching the day’s action; newspapers and television channels devoted a great chunk of space to the games, but outside on the streets London went on as usual, hardly any different from before. There were no big screens in central squares relaying major events live—the two there were anxiously tucked away from all sight, one somewhere within the sprawling belly of Hyde Park, the other on a nondescript patch of grass next to Tower Bridge, possibly hidden away in fearful anticipation of Olympic scrooges who might accuse the government of letting the event interfere with their daily lives. Not an altogether unexpected reaction in a city where the word ‘tourist’ is used as a pejorative. No central square carried electronic or manual boards updating medal tallies, or anything really to alert the casual passerby to the monumental presence of London2012. It was impossible not to compare it to the drumbeats, music, dancing and Mall-road celebrations accompanying even live screenings of cricket matches in Lahore.

But then again, it is also impossible not to compare the sexual harassment my friends and I have always experienced at the Gaddafi Stadium to the polite indifference of London streets. On my second day in the city I spent a night all alone amongst a sea of tents in Wimbledon. Camping overnight is the modus operandi for scoring tickets to the world’s premier tennis event, if you are not royalty or particularly well connected, that is. Lying alone under the clouds in a strange city I spent a chilly night contemplating the difficulties of being able to feel so free in my own country. Another day on Westminster Bridge, balancing my bag and maps as I paused to consider where I wanted to go next, I suddenly caught myself marveling at the ease with which I stood there, just stood there as waves of men and women passed me by without a word or wink in my direction.

This state of marvelous non-intrusiveness, however, cannot be achieved without sacrificing warmth at the altar of privacy, creating a catch-22 of sorts— a lack of opportunity to strike spontaneous friendships even as it provides safe passage to the single woman exploring the city alone. There’s a whiff of 18^th Century hierarchical propriety about social interaction that dictates maintaining a distance from anyone you haven’t been properly introduced to; as opposed to the random-person-on-the-street-is-equal-to-uncle-aunty culture I’ve grown up around. There’s nothing like a safe distance from your own culture to develop quite the romantic feeling for it. Some days on the tube, frustrated by the sight of yet another person plugged into earphones staring into the middle distance, my Punjabiness would goad me into thigh-slapping the nearest and asking her salary, husband, number of children or reasons for lack thereof.

Vicky, the amazing tour guide 

If an opportunity does arise to communicate with any of the locals in a ‘propah’ setting, the wonderfully understated British sense of humour can liven up the dreariest of English days. On a trip to Oxford and Windsor our very British tour guide, a middle-aged, kindly looking lady regaled a busload of students with a wicked stream of hilariously irreverent commentary on the history of England, shocking my Pak-Studies/Islamyat nurtured sensibilities to the core. Whether it took a self deprecatory, humorous turn or an academically researched one in museum exhibits I often encountered a willingness to acknowledge England’s historical atrocities, an awe inspiring experience for citizens from a country that has yet to to grasp this form of patriotism. I recall coming upon several admissions of the English persecution of Catholics at the British Museum’s Shakespeare Exhibition and The British Library’s Writing Britain exhibit. I read the following in the Merchant of Venice portion of the Shakespeare exhibition:

‘Venice fascinated the English as a fashionable city, and an open society with a multicultural population. It was also open to criticism, and by defining what was foreign, the English began to know themselves.’

Aah, the exhibitions. The only thing in London that made me feel like I was from a third world backwaters were the museum exhibitions I attended. Nothing else made me feel so completely at loss for a corresponding home-grown experience. Not Shakespeare at The Globe for I had seen Omair Rana’s world class Hamlet in Lahore; not the rousing rendition of Ode to Joy that almost made me do bhangra in the aisles at The Royal Festival Hall, for in Lahore I had seen the sun rise to the strains of the sitar at The All Pakistan Music Conference. London’s parks have no match but at least the picturesque Lawrence Gardens provided a point of reference. The decade of international fringe theatre the Rafi Peer Theatre Festival had exposed me to, the Mamma Mia I spurned because I had already seen a production back home. The human prop I spotted in Midsummer Night’s Dream at Regent’s Park because I had already seen that trick in Shah Sharahbeel’s Phantom of the Opera. I held an earphone to my ear at The British library to hear a professional actor recite The Prologue to The Canterbury Tales in exactly the same Middle-English accent that my university teacher, Sir Khalid Masood Siddiqui had so assiduously acquired and recited to enthralled students from urban and rural Punjab at the Punjab University. But when it came to the British Design exhibit at Victoria & Albert Museum or Writing Britain at The British Library, all attempts at drawing a Pakistani parallel came up empty handed. All of my grand cultural experiences in Lahore, I realized, were results of tremendous personal efforts, unlike London, where governmental patronage and interest gives museums unprecedented scale and resources.

Shakespeare exhibition at The British Museum

I went to The Shakespeare Exhibit at The British Museum as a sort of pedagogical duty. I came out many hours later, senses abuzz, to collapse on the front steps of the museum, staggered by the scale and depth of all I had just seen. This was no dull academic lecture or a redundant book of literary criticism, this was literary history as it ought to be, made to sing through a skillful amalgam of technology, art, history, design and human interest stories. At The British Library exhibit, themed around British landscapes over the centuries, I strolled through a who’s who of great British writing celebrated in manuscripts ranging from T.S Eliot, R.L Stevenson and William Blake to John Lennon, Hanif Kureshi and J.K Rowling, while at the Victoria & Albert Museum’s British Design exhibit a sequined David Bowie jumpsuit winked at me next to a mash-up of iconic British videos and pop art. 

Wherever I went, I carried Lahore around with me. Why is the Lahore Museum as decayed as its artefacts, I wondered. Why hasn’t anyone at the Quaid-e-Azam Library thought of fusing manuscripts with recitations and graphics to showcase the shifting landscapes of Lahore? Where is our Museum of Culture that dynamically chronicles our musical heritage from Noor Jehan to Junoon? In a country beset with poverty and terrorism these might seem like disingenuous questions, but surely warrant greater thought than futile Guinness records that restrict identity to jingoism alone. The Empire is nearly 70 years in the past now, leaving behind a debris of easy, feel-good nationalism that requires no hard work, no research, no spirit of intellectual inquiry to arrive at a secure, confident identity.

London made me rue what Lahore could have, should have been. I didn’t want to stay there forever; I just experienced a subtler, more helpless desire to transpose all I loved about it back home.

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A version of this was published in The Friday Times on 26th October 2012