A Love Affair with Lahore

The City of Luv

One of the few monuments I remember from a trip to Lahore as a child was the famed “Kim’s Gun”, immortalized by Rudyard Kipling in his novel Kim. In the middle of a very busy Lahori roundabout, the air black with soot, cars and buses competing with donkey carts and tongas, pedestrians and cattle, was a gleaming black cannon, a testament to British rule. A family friend married an American man who was so enraptured by the romance of this landmark and the story behind it that he named his son Kim in its honour.

Perhaps this is the word that best captures the city of Lahore: romance. It is no coincidence that Lahore was founded, according to the Deshwa Bhaga, by a man called “Luv”, the son of Raja Ram Chandar, sometimes in the second century AD. Romance floats in the very air of Lahore, between the molecules of pollution and the aroma of food cooking at every street corner.

Those who know Lahore intimately can feel its romance as they gaze across the rooftops of the walled city, and glimpse the spires of its colonial-era buildings – the King Edward Medical College, the Aitchison, or Chief’s College, the Punjab Library – through the haze and fog of a typical chilly Lahore morning, as the sun struggles manfully to shine through. The very climate of Lahore is passionate, whether it’s the thunder and rain of a monsoon downpour, the scorching heat of a summer afternoon, or the angry red sky of an approaching dust storm.

Lahoris also experience this romance when they recall the haunts of their childhood. Their memories are laced with sensuality, and not just of the carnal kind. They recall the feel of the grass of the Race Course Park when they ran barefoot across its lawns; the taste of the jamun and mangoes they picked from tress planted at their grandparents’ houses; or the heavy fragrance of motia. Rather less fondly, they recall walking along the street and stepping into a pile of horse dung.

Their memories of home are colored with the remembrance of delicious food, lovingly cooked and forcefully administered to them by nanis and nanas and khalas and phupas and relatives of every gender and age (more about food later). Long naps during stifling summer afternoons, the excitement of the arrival of the monsoon, and the shopping trips to the bazaars of Lahore, are all part of this memory bank. Years later, long after they have left those places far behind, the mere mention of those names – Anarkali, Lakshmi Chowk, Liberty Market – pull at their heartstrings. Lahoris are indeed a very sentimental people.

A Kaleidescopic Culture

The culture of Lahore is not just about its history, although you can find the Mughal influence everywhere you look – in the names of streets, in the monuments and other landmarks – the Shalimar Gardens, the magnificent Badshahi Masjid, the Lahore Fort. Lahori culture is ultimately about being in love with everything around you: “the gandaa-naala and the long canal, the rishtas and family feuds, the concerts, plays and festivals, the shadis, the dholaks, and the mendhis, the chooriyaa, rose petals and khussas, the lunatic buses and frightening policemen.” This quote from Shanzeh Haque, a regular interactor on Chowk, demonstrates the all-inclusive nature of the admiration that Lahoris feel for their city, even for those aspects of it that may seem ugly to a less besotted outsider.

The magic that is Lahore is encapsulated in a story told by another interactor on Chowk, who describes an evening in the lawn in front of the Badshahi Masjid. “ people were busy talking, telling tall tales and reciting poetry. Then suddenly, the azaan was heard, and everyone stopped their ‘baint-baazi’ and turn to the evening prayers.” It seems that life in Lahore is made up of moments like these.

Some fear, however, that in recent years a trend towards commercialization is ruining the character of old Lahore. The arrival of flashy restaurants such as Freddy’s Café, Chicago Grill, Pizzeria Uno, Café Zouk (which has since been turned into the Crow-Eaters Gallery, but remains synonymous with the Lahore social scene), the Avari and Pearl Continental luxury hotels, and multinational fast food joints like Pizza Hut and KFC, threaten the status of the Lahore Fort, the old bazaars, ‘the streetside vendors selling kulfis, faloodas, Kashmiri chai and halwa puri’, as Shanzeh puts it. Similarly, they worry about a modernization of the city that involves old, historical buildings being torn down to make way for slick class structures; and movie hoardings depicting “buxom Pakistani heroines” cavorting with heroes with burgeoning mustaches being replaced by advertising billboards for mobile telephones and electronic appliances.

But others welcome the modernization and believe that it’s part of an inevitable transition. There’s a new generation growing up in the city that is not content with pleasures such as shopping for ancient books at the Urdu bazaar or drinking apple sheeshas at St. Mary’s Park, or listening to the hypnotic drumbeats of Pappu Saeen’s Sufi musicians. They need places where they can see and be seen in the designer where, oh real and follow, where they can flex their muscles and stimulate their hormones by listening to the pulsing beat. of the latest club music, played by DJs flown in from Europe for high energy, high profile raves. Perhaps muscle-flexing and hormone-stimulating as always been a part of Lahore culture; it’s just the venues that are changing.