Lahore is Bombay

I am back in Lahore. I am living, as I did 5 years ago, with Ifti
and Munni (my uncle and aunt). They have moved on in the Lahori world, thanks to Munni's boutique, and now live in Defence (yes,
there is also an upper upper middle class enclave by the same name in
Karachi). Defence is littered with flat roofed, distended, ugly pillared monster houses. That's not new. What is new are the monsters sitting on the backs of those
monsters. "Dishes" upon dish antennae on every rooftop.

Star, Zee, EL, BBC-- some kind of Bombay is in every Lahori living
room, bedroom and restaurant (these three types of rooms account for every Lahori indoor space).

Channel flicks move me between Dilip Kumar, Raj & Shammi
Kapoor making the sweetest doe eyes to the likes of Madhubhala and Nargis,and Oprah interviewing Whitney Houston, to the NBA and Michael Jordan, and
cricket and cricket, glorious inglorious IndoPak cricket, to Bombay video jockeys who speak an American stilted Hinglish, or a born-in-Britain English, who are
gorgeous like the music videos they introduce. And the music videos: you see songs from Barsaat, Chaudhvein ka Chand, Howrah Bridge and Mr. and Mrs. 55
introduced by some vee-jay who gives you nuggets on Sahir Ludhianvi and Guru Dutt, and can impersonate all of them, and ad lib the songs, and
breaks out into a public school joke that is half English and half
Urdu/Hindi and perfectly contemporary.

The songs from present day Bombay films are done on an MTV format, an MTV visual 'beat' that consists of a three minute song, very expensive costume and
choreography. A fantastic
melange of Bollywood funhouse images (Delhi havelis and Jaipur palaces)form the backdrops. And the talk shows: the game and talk shows have guests like
Naseeruddin Shah and Anupam Kher and Shabana Azmi, cinema icons I have never seen appear on screen as 'themselves,' to Zee T.V news, and
Newstrack(Madhu Treihan's hard-hitting expose style camera-&-question-in-your-face-journalism). These highs of pop gratification have Lahoris breathless these
days.



Lahore is still Lahore. In Defence there is sparse public
transportation. Everybody "from" Defence has a car, and everybody who they know has a car, and nobody else lives or visits Defence. But what these monster
homes are squatting on were formerly farmers' fields, and Defence is expanding into more of them. So if you sit on the lawns of one of these houses, or on the
verandahs at the back, where the clothes lines are strung around faux GrecoRoman pillars, and close your eyes, you can hear the birds in the trees-- you won't in
Karachi-- a carpenter's hammering next door will sound like the ubiquitous pump at the well of a Punjabi village. You may even hear a rooster crowing, and you will
smell the rich, lusty smell of
Punjabi soil. Lahore is Lahore.