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Tucked away in the frenzy of Lahore’s traffic-congested Mozang Chungi, a framer’s shop, narrow, dark, and dusty, bears on its back wall a minor conceit from history. A slight, which made the freshly formed impressions of a newcomer, even a tough customer like me, obsolete. At least it does in my memory, an old and faded letter dated some time in the late nineteenth century and attesting to the fine quality of the shop’s work, signed John Lockwood Kipling. Curator of the Lahore Museum and Principal of the Mayo School of Arts. Perhaps it’s all gone now, what with newer buildings encroaching that old downtown area—I don’t know. It used to be there when I was there way back in the Eighties. “Le’ go! Le’ go!” I hear his voice. Tonight, as usual, a smattering of tiny twinkling mirrors wink and cover me, cautioning that the past is for the willing but it seems the only way to divine sleep.
The letter always caught my eye and was framed behind the tea-and-grime stained cloth-covered counter. Must have been around the same time as when his young son was in Lahore working as an assistant editor at the Civil and Military Gazette.
Such a long time ago I was there, visiting routinely the emaciated and chain-smoking septuagenarian owner of a framer’s shop, as delivery dates on orders placed were rescheduled over and over again. The shop’s dark interior, open to the street, smelled of everyday ordinariness: Car fumes tinged with the fragrance of chameli flowers that lay on the shop counter, strung in garlands; their scent folded into the smell of a mosquito repellant coil and the stale smoke of cigarette butts and an incense stick; all of them mingled with the smell of the antiseptic floor-wash, phenyl. Ordinary, normal, comforting. We would make our way there, my son and I, after I had picked him up from school. We’d stop at the dry cleaner’s or the shoemaker’s or tend to some other need of mine, to pick up seemingly endless additions to my treasured and admittedly flamboyant wardrobe. A pair of shoes here, a shirt there, a belt I could not resist. Inevitably, at every stop, I’d run into someone I knew. One knew, it seemed, everyone, and of course immediately a ritual would ensue: of exchanges, of perceived slights and complaints, disappointments, letdowns, and clarifications of a phone call not returned, an invitation not honored or reciprocated, a rebuke, a rebuttal followed by mutual admirations of haircuts and various other personal effects and, of course, always the weight gain or weight loss of each other duly noted.
“Great shirt! Egyptian cotton?”
“No, pure khadi, a new supplier down in Shalmi!”
“Very nice. Putting on a bit of weight, eh?”
“Am I? No! I don’t think so! Do I seem to have?”
“Don’t see you around the courts much anymore!”
“No, it’s far too hot for me now! We’ll see after the rains.”
An encounter was incomplete without an opening salvo or a parting shot aimed at weight. All this time, from the corner of my eye, I could see my restive son’s rising frustration as I kept delaying our final destination. On one such occasion, chewing through clenched teeth the plastic straw in his empty fruit juice pack, Sher had shouted at me, “Le’ go! Please, le’ go!”
“Le’ go?” I had inquired in his direction, winking indulgently at my chance encounter acquaintance of the moment.
“Yes! Le’ go, now!”
“I’m not holding on to you!”
“I said, ‘Let’s go!’” Sher had roared back at me.
“Oh!” I said, thoroughly amused, “that’s better, beta, enunciate, enunciate!”
Off we went, finally. Even as we moved through the traffic, I’d constantly nod or wave to someone or the other. It seemed everyone knew us and we knew everyone. In such a manner we would make it to the framer’s. For Sher such visits were always full of promise, first the expectation of delivery, to see his creation framed, then the frustration of a promise not kept, followed by the framer’s apologies and excuses in between his hacking cough, and finally his plying of consolation in the form of a cup of karak chai or a lassi. Sher always chose the lassi, grasping the glass eagerly with his small hands as I looked on in consternation, anxious about the possibility of his contracting jaundice from drinking lassi in the bazaar. But I never stopped him; it was good for him, it helped create antibodies, made a man out of him. I always accepted the cup of tea.
To the framer’s shop we had brought a piece of embroidery. It was a large piece, one square yard of red damask with tiny mirrors worked in with yellow thread. It had been completed by Sher in home economics class, perhaps the largest in his portfolio, of which he was very proud, for it included his entire repertoire of stitches ranging from chain to cross to mirror work. Twenty years later the piece travels with me: red, mirror worked, covered in swirls of needlepoint. Back then I had thought it quite hideous, but it was rendered by my son and deemed by Mrs. Moinuddin, Sher’s teacher, fit for framing. I agreed wholeheartedly. Mrs. Moinuddin was a great source of solace and joy for Sher, each Friday afternoon in her classroom located in the basement of the school building, accessed through what seemed like a secret stairway. Here, taught by her, in her comfortable, narrow, elongated, parlor-like room, my son reclaimed through needlework his sense of poise and grace, which had recently been lost to the dance teacher, a great maestro of classical dance.
Sher had appeared at the audition for the dance class dripping with sweat, right after soccer practice in soccer cleats and shorts. Attempting to strap on to his bare ankles a heavy pair of ghungroos, the wide leather swatches covered with tiny metal bells, he had giggled at the maestro’s head and eye movements. With this, Sher had sealed his fate and that of several others who had been inclined to giggle along with him. “Your deportment has all the beauty of a flat-footed elephant!” judged the great, but affronted, maestro.
“An elephant!” an indignant Sher had protested.
“Yes, an elephant,” the great maestro elaborated serenely and with graceful employment of eye, neck, and hand movements, “an elephant listlessly wandering down the Mall toward Kim’s gun, after having escaped from the Lahore Zoo on a late afternoon in the month of June.”
My son had been inconsolable that afternoon when he plunked himself on the seat next to me in the car on the way back home. “An elephant, a lazy bum! That’s what he thinks!” Sher had complained quite brokenheartedly that the great maestro of dance had not even left him wiggle room for redemption, by at least caricaturing him as an energetic or enthusiastic elephant. And so Sher was not to be found charging toward Kim’s gun, down the tree-canopied, shaded, and gracious Mall road; no, he was just wandering like an elephant. And a listless one at that. There was to be no consolation commentary, as in the school report card, where the failed Maths grade was offset with the comment, “Displays tremendous esprit de corps.” Sher had always displayed plenty of esprit de corps. I had considered having a word with the dance teacher but thought better of it. Life’s knocks; not all a bowl of cherries, y’know; can’t always have it your way; good with the bad; good for the boy, makes a man of him.
I had always been overly protective and keenly felt my child’s bewilderment at the slightest of rebukes. The framed embroidery with dozens of twinkling mirrors, with yellow chain stitches laboriously worked by Sher hunched over it for hours, tongue sticking out in concentration, had in some measure restored his pride. But watching his peers twirling across the stage in a blur of turquoise, mustard, and fuchsia, peshwazes and saris, while he sat in the darkened audience, plainly awestruck, had naturally left my Sher subdued and grumpy. Neither Kathak, nor Bharat Natyam, nor the Dhamal were to be performed by jungli brutes like him, as the maestro seemed to have implied. And I could do nothing to make up for it, except to frame his embroideries.
On rainy afternoons when the weather was fine and the monsoon was at its height, I’d take Sher to the outskirts of the city, to the dense mango grove at Niaz Baig, it was our special hidden place. We’d drink steaming cups of thick, heavily sugared, milky tea at a truck stall, then make our way into the thicket to sit by the canal and watch the r
ain come down. Submerged this way in every shade of green, the grass alongside the canal, the mango trees, the surrounding fields of rice, koels and wild parrots fluttering through the foliage overhead, we’d sniff till intoxicated the smell of sweet wet mud. Sher had discovered a water well with an inscription inside dated 1898. It read “prem kuwan,” well of love. I hadn’t understood it then, when I visited the framer’s shop almost a century apart from that curator of long ago, this sense of belonging, because it was mine to be had in such abundance.
Tonight there is no more of that—but more to blame for the state I’m in, there is for one, the breeze. It carries a train’s whoa-whoa cautioning over to where I am about to fall asleep, transporting me back. Back to a house on Upper Mall where, around about the same hour, every night, perhaps at midnight, a passenger train, the Tez Gam or the Shalimar Express or perhaps another with a different name and purpose—cargo, perhaps—would go rattling by, trundling onward through the sprawl of the dead and the living crammed up against each other. Mian Mir, a human and concrete tapestry, just beyond the high walls of the serene compound where I lived. A densely packed graveyard competed with squatters’ settlements of multi-layered, illegal, overnight constructions housing refugees: those fleeing riots at Partition; then war-ravaged border villages during ’65 and ’71; and more recently from the deprivation of the countryside. The graveyard’s existence was assured, having been there for centuries; it had history on its side while the squatters did not enjoy this luxury of permanence, newly arrived in comparison and without leases to the land.
Tonight for me, it’s the shores of the Aegean Sea, at a hotel called Kismet where, on the wall in the lobby, there are dozens of photographs. I peer at the one with two sun-tanned young people wearing white holiday gear who lean into each other as they pose with their backs against the balustrade on the terrace of the hotel. The caption tells me that they are the King and Queen of Denmark on their honeymoon back in 1966, having stayed in rooms 201 and 202. “Not separate rooms, surely,” I muse out loud. “Presumably a suite, but then who knows what arrangements lead to a marriage.” The bellboy is unsure of my joke but laughs anyway. He stands beside me and gives me his unhurried attention since there are only a handful of guests in the hotel this evening. He knows his job well: He is there to please. I look at him. He must be my Sher’s age. Just shy of thirty? My eyes may have lingered too long on his face. I note self-consciously that he moves closer to me as he points out another photograph. There is something about my manner that always brings on such unsolicited attention. I am at a loss to figure out what it is.
Two other testimonies to the hotel’s excellence and as a choice of destination catch my attention: a photograph of the Nizam of Hyderabad, and another of a lady called Kenize Mourad, Princess of Kutwara. I remember her from a copy of a society magazine I read not too long ago. The story of a woman, an Indian princess by birth, born in Paris to a Turkish mother on the eve of World War II and the Nazi invasion, born to a mother who escaped from an unhappy marriage into wealth in Kutwara. I imagine marigolds, ittar, rubies, diamonds, peacocks, and elephants. Listless elephants from which escape was sought. Turbulent times those, of war and uncertainty, of high romance and history.
The bellboy, having shown me to my room and placed my bags on the table, throws open the doors leading to the balcony and steps out. I follow. The fragrance of lemon blossoms just below in the garden mingles with the sea air. He points out the view of the open sea, the Greek island on the horizon and the nightclubs along the shore, then he turns and looks into my eyes. Perhaps you would like to visit one tonight? I realize, half-dismayed, half-flattered, that he senses an old and lonely soul in me, perhaps after my earlier comment on the nuptial attitudes of Danish royals and the far too long gaze upon his face. Or perhaps there is the less complex economic explanation, tipping me off to tip generously. The tourist season, it seems, will be slow this year. And the horn of a cruise liner in the distance, just as I am falling asleep, disorients me completely as she glides into the night. I have my piece of red embroidery with its winking and smiling mirrors spread out as a cover over the light wool hotel blanket that covers me inadequately. Outside, above the lemonaided breeze, as a crescent moon rents open with its light, a sliver in the indigo sky, and rises steadily over the sea, it seems to whisper a rebuke to me. It’s the first of Muharram and I’ve postponed a trip back home to Lahore yet again. Would it not have been the occasion to return? To watch the Zuljana make its way to Karbala Gamey Shah; watch the procession in Shalmi, enter the Lal Haveli inner courtyard from a latticed balcony for the maatam on the night of the ninth? To listen to the beating of hands against chests keeping time with the dirges of the believers, the powerful, frightening rhythm of sweet sorrow. To weep for atonement, to merge sorrow into an eternity of grief. And I am forever postponing return because too many things, too many places, always seem to get in the way. “It’s nice to have you stay but go away, moon,” I mumble in a traveler’s weary whisper, “stop chasing me relentlessly with the same refrain wherever I venture.” It’s Ephesus this time. Revisiting history instead of mourning it. And yet, there it is, I am back. With you. A sardonic grin; a swagger in my walk, a khais memorably slung over one boski-swathed shoulder. Eyes that impossible shade of home brew. Wearing an expression hard to decipher, just a little bemused, a little amused, a little tired. I lean my body against the wall, cross those polo-playing, horse-riding legs of mine and shoot you that look, like I’m firing. I don’t get it. That look. I-couldn’t-give-a-shit look. A little bit like, “Fuck it, let’s blow this joint” look. And you’re thrilled. I’ve thrown you that look, you’re the chosen one tonight for that fuck-it look. We were the very best, weren’t we? The best kind that can ever be, deciding to live our lives together. So simple, that decision, between you and me. You and me. You, beloved, my perfect accomplice, my escape hatch, my haven from a match made by parents. We had saved each other it seemed.
“Well, why not?” you had said of her, that very lovely pick of the crop chosen by everyone for me. Everyone, but me.
“She’s beautiful!” you had said.
“She’s stupid-dull. What more do you want me to say?”
“C’mon! She’s gorgeous!” you said.
“So is the cover of a girlie magazine. Only thing is, I could use a magazine to light a fire to keep me warm or as shade from the sun. She, on the other hand, is a total waste of space.”
“God, you are mean. You do have a point though, she is rather chilly,” you giggled.
“Tundra-atic! She just has to come into a room and the temperature drops by at least ten degrees. She could be Lahore’s answer to load shedding as a substitute for air conditioning.”
“Ouch!”
“What?” I protested. “It’s true. And boring as hell!”
“She is pretty!” you teased.
“Stop going on like a jammed CD. She is pretty, there’s no doubt about that, but beyond that there’s not much else. I mean she’s gorgeous, I want to be her, I mean I want to be her body, I don’t want it!”
“She’s a beauty! Look at her eyes—gorgeous!” you persisted.
“Sure, nice shape, but where’s the light in ’em, where’s the cheer? I tell you, if it weren’t for those rocks, those huge two-point-five-carat diamond studs punctuating either side of her face, she’d be lacking any redeeming sparkle.”
“Ouch!” you laughed.
“And her conversation, oh my gawd!” I continued, “Her conversation is mainly to refute any of my ideas or concepts with her standard, ‘That is not the way it should be!’”
“Listen, don’t you think it would be a good idea to let your parents know that you’re not interested in getting married, at least not to a woman?” you suggested.
“Are you crazy?” I screeched.
“They are your parents. How long do you expect to continue lying to them?”
“Forever, just like they have to each other.” I was firm.
&
nbsp; “What?”
“No one needs to know about what really goes on in one’s head,” I said impatiently.
“Would you consider marrying me?” you had suggested softly.
“You don’t want that!” I was floored.
“I’d like to have a baby!” You were so matter-of-fact, simple.
“Right. Let’s get hitched.” I was simple too.
“Thanks. Love you.”
“Love you.”
But we got fucked, didn’t we? We made a mess of it. I blame them all for it, for our child. The entire city. How can it be that no one stopped? For godssake, a car accident, a child lying on the side of the road, a busy street at the busiest hour, and no one stopped. At the corner of Zafar Ali Road and Upper Mall, and no one stopped. How could they not have stopped? Because it wasn’t one of them? Not one of theirs? They didn’t think it could be Sher? Everyone knew us. Everyone! It’s my fault. How could I have let him go in a rickshaw with the ayah to school that morning. I was in a hurry, had to get to work, needed the car to pick up clients on the way to the Kutchery, the High Court. How could I have done that? And when I finally got to the hospital you were there, leaning against the wall. You wouldn’t look at me. Sher was gone. That was it. You wouldn’t look at me.
And life went on. If Sher had been in our car instead of a rickshaw would they have stopped to help? How many of them were our friends who passed by that day, without a second look at a child bleeding to death as a frantic woman tried to stop a car, any car, for help? It took her an hour before someone stopped. An hour! How did that happen? But you look away, not from all of them, only from me. My best friend, the keeper of my being. The one who ran to me for all things to be escaped from, the one I escaped with. I ran. Because this was not about you, this was not about me. This was about all the goodness we could ever be. An impossible shade of home brew, that I could not safekeep. That look away from me said all this to me. How could I have let this happen? My needs were the sole reason for Sher to be in a rickshaw that morning. Life goes on and I spend it, rescuing each day and running as far away as possible from the look that you will not look at me.
And the World Changed Page 23