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AS WE landed at Allama Iqbal International, we saw a reporter of a Lahore-based regional television channel, City42, waiting for our arrival. The cameraman who was standing with the reporter, Nabeel Malik, was holding a list of all our names. The chivalrous Mobaidur Rahman, as leader of the group, spoke about what he personally felt he should visit in Lahore. The next day when we were having our dinner in a restaurant called Tabak, we came to know about us being covered in a news bulletin. The waiter told us about that.
Lahore was hotter than Karachi. Coming out of the airport we got into a car headed for the Ambassador Hotel on Davis Road. We had a team of four policemen in a car going before ours. In the two days, they became friendly with us as we talked about their firearms, uniform, their station house, which was Wahdat Colony, and their career as policemen.
After check-in formalities, we hurried — because we needed to keep the schedule as we left Karachi more than an hour and a half late for a trouble at Lahore airport — for Badshahi Mosque, where about a hundred thousand people can say prayers at a time. Emperor Aurangzeb Alamgir started building it in 1671 and the job was completed in 1673. The mosque has the trace of Hinduism, Buddhism and Christianity in the decoration of its main structure.
It was about 50 degrees Celsius and there were pairs of shoes, made of leather-cloth, for us at the gate because a walk barefooted from one to the other end through the yard would cause blisters. I heard that they charge ordinary visitors some money for the shoes. To a corner of the mosque structure, there stands a Sikh temple called Gurdwara Dera Sahib; the guide gave us an example of all religions coexisting and said that the Sikh ruler of Lahore Ranjit Singh had built the temple but did not give the reason that Ranjit Singh built the temple in honour of the fifth guru of Sikhism, Arjun Dev Ji, who was drowned in the River Ravi while fighting with Emperor Jahangir’s men. The mosque had been under Sikh occupation for about 50 years since 1799 and the yard was used as the stable of the Sikh ruler, who also fired shell into the sprawling Lahore Fort, or Shahi Qila, that stands opposite the mosque. British rulers later renovated the part of the fort that was damaged in the shelling.
It was in the Lahore Fort, with the Walled City to one side and Old City to the other, that I met the second most wittiest man, by far wide a margin, in the trip — the guide, who also teaches English in an institution, with a genuine interest in history and quite entertaining. It reminded me of the ready wit of Old Town of Dhaka. He walked us around from one to the other corner. Far from the fort to a side, there stands Minar-e-Pakistan, or the Tower of Pakistan, built in the 1960s in the place where on March 23, 1040 the Lahore Resolution was passed, setting out the partition of India that was effected in 1947.
As we were pressed for time, we hurried to the Lahore Museum, or Ajaib Ghar (wonder house) as they call it in Urdu, where Rudyard Kipling’s father John Lockwood Kipling was once a curator. The fabled gun Zamzamah, or Kim’s gun, which begins Rudyard Kipling’s novel Kim (He sat, in defiance of municipal orders, astride the gun Zam Zamah on her brick platform opposite the old Ajaib-Gher…), is placed on a raised brick platform. The museum, now at Mall Road, was then located in the Tollinton Market, named after a government of Punjab officer. The most important things about the museum are its collection of relics of the Buddha, especially from the Gandhara period, and Mughal miniature portraits on ivory tusks.
It was soon lunch time and we headed for a restaurant in a big road crossing. In a short while, we would be driving up to the Wahga Border, where the Pakistan and the Indian flag are hoisted in the morning and lowered in the evening with a ceremonial salute between the Pakistan Rangers and the Border Security Force of India. But when we were about to finish our meal in the restaurant, our group leader resolved that he would not go to the border and would rather we so did. He was game for Shalamar Bagh, or garden, which we were not supposed to visit. He then again resolved that he would not keep with us and eat with us. He was packed back to the hotel in a car.
When we reached the border, the ceremony had already begun. But still the best thing the hosts did for us was to keep enough seats almost reserved for us in the front row of the VIP gallery. It was time for beating the retreat with high goose-stepping, amid aggressive postures and the shouting of Jiye jiye Pakistan one this side and Bharat mata ki jai on the Indian side. The whole episode was spectacular but appeared to be means for creating or invoking the sense of nationalism among the several thousand people attending on both sides of the border. Shortly before I thought this to be a futile exercise, suddenly I could feel the pangs of the partition, families being halved by the line drawn by Radcliffe.
Pakistani rulers try to instil a sense of opposition against India in ordinary people even after they were continuing with exchanges with India. Many of the government officials, like many ordinary people, also think that India was a superior military power which they cannot fight and need to sit across the table with India.
Back into the town, we went straight to the Food Street at Anarkali. After a round of tea, almost all jumped into shopping. We were so spent, especially after such a hectic day in the hot and humid weather, no one was willing to have a meal. We had fruit juice instead, fading into shopping again till midnight when we got back to the hotel for a sound sleep.
On Wednesday morning, we started for Lahore University of Management Sciences, an institution offering higher education of world standards, which even provides many poor students with full scholarship. We had a session with the vice-chancellor. It was a holiday and we could see a handful of students, girls in Western dresses, entering and going out of the rooms. But in all it seemed that it was a place for the elite and a place to breed elitism, which seemed to be a big problem with the functioning of the state.
The National College of Arts on Shahrah-e-Quaid-e-Azam proved to be a big relief after this. Quite a spacious campus sparse with statues and fountains under the green of large trees, the college seemed to have been drawing us. Laila Rahman, who gave an introduction to the college with the screening of two short documentaries, said, with a smile apparently looking forward to an approval for a mischief, that she would like to think that Zainul Abedin was also their man. Zainul Abedin had an exhibition of his work in Lahore in 1953 that is believed to be starting point for a series of exhibitions aimed at promoting contemporary Pakistani art.
After a ziyafat, lunch, that the Lahore press information hosted at a Chinese restaurant, we were off to Shaukat Khanum Memorial Cancer Hospital and Research Centre. This could be an example of what a man like Imran Khan, with supports from others, can do. We walked around the whole of the hospital and headed back to the hotel. After a round of tea in the lounge, the protocol officer, Ehsan Ullah Shahzad, who had read all our curricula vitae meticulously before we reached here, said that his official engagement with us was over and it was ‘over to Islamabad’ the next morning.
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Akkas, Abu Jar M (2013 Oct. 9). Miles Apart, poles apart. New Age. 9
Rev.: vi·vi·mmxxiii