In search of lost times
The scorching heat of summer lying dormant for some months awakes from its slumber quite early in Lahore. Much to the disappointment of citizens, the arrival is always immediate and intense. It burns down everything under its spell as the summer progresses. However, as life never ceases to amaze with its peculiar charm of wonders, things had been otherwise that year of 2020. It is through these vicissitudes that strange workings of Providence and the realities of life are unfolded. A plague, like an unbidden partner, had crept through the doors of the city, slowly and furtively. With the near blanket restriction on movement and stony silence ruling the aisles and alleys, the summer arrived gradually carrying no ferocious manner of the past. Life appeared unusual and out of the groove. Destiny works under such unheralded influence of some strange alchemy — sweetly melancholic and terribly bitter at times.
Among other things grievously impacted and left limbless by the plague, the life of Ghulam Rasool, a sturdy man in his late-fifties who owned a stall of old books in Anarkali Bazar, bordered on the verge of similar uncertainty. As life slumped unawares in the dreadful abyss, which turned darker still more with news of deaths, he was confined to his room. A dismal air of menacing silence and dread, to which the bustling life of Lahore is far removed, ruled with unmatched magnitude. The sudden departure from the usual course of life, inconceivable as it was, had left him in sharp distress over his flagging fortunes. But the pangs of separation from the place with all its romantic charm breathing invariably in a strange hurly-burly of voices and to which he had given all his life, pained Ghulam Rasool the most. To be deprived of things you treasure the most, ah, what an indescribable pain! The cords of impatience bordering on anxiety had stretched to the point of breaking and consequently snapped. He gave in to his impatience and ventured one Sunday to leave his house, whereupon treading towards his Mecca of dreams. A mysterious pull drove him through the lanes like an estranged lover darting everywhere, searching everything in quest of his lost beloved.
The Lahore where Rasool breathed in for the past thirty years had crumbled under the burgeoning influence of modernity with its ceaseless growth of residential schemes and clumsy infrastructure. A Lahore reeking with a disturbing stink in the absence of ethereal shadows of trees. The cradle of centuries of romance and art had fallen. The cultural arteries had clogged with the onrush of lime and tar. Two gargantuan buildings and others still, encroaching massive lands the whole of which rendered the total mass of land occupied by all libraries in the city shameful. Residential schemes, a bane with no antidote to check their growth, outshined the libraries in size and scale. It was an unequal Lahore; an exclusive world forming and stretching exceedingly on boundaries and the old romantic Lahore left at the mercy of fate.
In search of lost times, an indistinct voice in him often stimulated the urge to revisit the old associations. But it was not to be. Being true to his culturalist values and fearing disappointment, he recoiled and receded in his carefully formed shell. What an inexplicable pain to rekindle the lost memories and refresh the wounds! And what a painful thing still more to pine for an unattainable dream! To have once possessed something, relished it to the point of tears, mingled and merged with its essence and then to let it go, let it slip through the hands like grains of sand, helplessly and with no hope of ever reverting to it again, what a terrible thing! Such is life and such is destiny — sweetly melancholic and terribly bitter at times.
The only place which emerged unscathed with some trace of bygone glory was a plain little patch of land where Rasool sold his old dusty volumes. A mysterious hand of Providence shadowed the place. Simple yet sublime. In the heart of Anarkali, in front of Pak Tea House juxtaposed mysteriously with the Mall, it compounded of all that was noble and profound in life. Prince or pauper, it treated everybody with the same fashion. This is where he found refuge, and this is where he felt life.
One may struggle to conceive such intimate association with the place, on the mere thought of which he revelled in boundlessly, but it an unmistakable truth that some places like some people leave an everlasting impression in the deepest recesses of our hearts. The phantasmagoria of present and the unforeseen passages of future staring ahead, however optimistic or oppressed, are incapable of straining the celestial flower of heart to emit tears of dewdrops in the memory of a lost place, a person or the days long gone by. But now like the pain of unrequited love, after which one strains every nerve to get along and acquaint oneself with charms of novelty, only occasionally revisiting past delights, the rush of life had done something similar to Rasool. Only after being confined to his room for two months, did he realize the enchanting influence of the place on his life and its calming impact on Lahore’s disturbing equilibrium.
A nagging desire drove him magnetically through the passages. As always with upheavals of life, the days of plague never escaped without certain strange forebodings about everything Rasool loved and cared about. Such fears went with him as he strode along the Mall. In front of him, a young man elegantly dressed puffed on a cigarette as he paced in a gilded manner. He headed towards Old Anarkali with Rasool walking behind with an ominous sense of impending disaster. With his heart racing feverishly, he rushed forward leaving the young man behind. Just as his eyes glanced at the view that he longed to visit so impatiently, the ground seemed to be crumbling under his feet. Rasool stood there ashen and dazed. Far away, the little patch of land in front of Pak Tea House stood engulfed in huge wreaths of smoke. At a loss to discern what was happening, he struggled with his feet. The mist covered everything pell-mell. A blazing fire, instinct told Rasool, had burned the Mecca of his dreams. His soul writhed in terrible agony. Everything was held on a knife-edge. The slender thread that had held the little patch of old glory and romance over the darkening abyss, now burned in front of Rasool. All perished! He struggled to get over the top of all that was staged before his eyes. In a feeble and barely audible voice, he babbled “Rescue my home….Save La…Lah-hore……the tr-e-ees.. trees.. Fire…” before felling to the ground. He fainted.
For all the feebleness of voice and the obfuscation therein, the cry of appeal reached the elegant young man without much exertion. A sneering smile betrayed the face of the young man. Had Rasool turned the road a minute earlier he would have seen the authorities carrying out huge wreaths of disinfectant spray to fight the plague. He laughed inwardly over Rasool’s simplicity. An old man excited to such fervent pronouncements over his mistaken estimation of events left the dandy man in a mingled state of amusement and perplexity. Ah, the profanation of the old man’s despair! It was not only the possibility of a fire that left the old man fainted but the pain of an irretrievable loss, and to be deprived of the sole remnant of past associations that drained all his strength. Such simplicity of demeanour and passionate attachment to one’s land was now unfounded in Lahore. But so long as souls such as Rasool fail to cave in, the stir of old charm will continue to enchant Lahore. That place must be something to him, reflected the young man, unable further to understand the reference to Lahore in the heartfelt cry. He could never tell because he had never experienced Lahore that way. He could never see, through the superior eye of the mind, the imperceptible and thinly marked traces of sadness written all over the old man’s face. Only a sleepwalker, a dreamer could have uttered such a passionate and mindless call for help, he mused. After all, even if there had been a fire, who would have bothered over that weathered patch of land and few trees, his train of thought now failing to struggle further on the subject. In the year of 2020, during that Sunday amidst the horrors of plague when silence descended all over Lahore, a dim cry of pain echoed in no uncertain manner the presence of life in all its magnificence. Of such mysteries is Lahore compounded.
