Multan is an abomination that I can never cease to love and yearn for. It is home, and that has its redemptions, but the city itself can become a stifling exercise in escapism where activity is not synonymous with meaning, while a sort of asbestos is wrapped around the domed ceiling of the sky and the famed walls and gates of old.

Multan used to be a town perched at the corner of a desert. It was a humble yet important fort, a centre of power in past days and a forgotten backwater in more recent ones. It was the kind of place where saints and sufis preached and folklore was mired with the stuff of miracles. The shrines scattered all over the city still tell their tales, obviously embellished now with commercial patronages and profitable survival.

But even when the city is rapidly becoming a commercial tumour, there’s some redemption in that you can still catch glimpses of the old culture here and there. The streets of the Old City still have gems tucked away under the hem of age. There’s the clock at Ghanta Ghar, some sort of British whimsy clanging through the decades despite multiple repairs.

And then there are the bazaars, with their narrow streets smelling damply of spice and sweets, an aroma that wafts through the throngs. Dupattas of all colours, bright and bleached, hang in the shop panes, bags of clove and masalas open on the fronts like tempting invitations, salesmen on the street beckoning you to this shop and that. Once in a while, you will come across a stall with crowded masses devouring whatever is being offered. These are typically stalls run by the same family since decades, the hallmark of quality and taste in this wonderland. It is cheap, served fresh and you will find yourself asking for a second helping when you are finished.

The flyover-model of development has fast changed the cityscape of Multan; Salman Latif laments how historical tradition and values have been buried under the debris of ‘progress’

The streets grow narrower still, and you find yourself trying to slip around another person in a space that will barely pass two at a time. The shops are a bit wider but barely. They are stacked like long drawers, each crowded with an infinity of wares. This is the profitable, lucrative commercial heart of the city which has managed to retain a bit of history in all the bustle of shopping and food and general stores.

Ghanta Ghar Multan. — Photo by the writer

On the fringes of this city, on all sides, is a burgeoning mass of housing colonies of all sizes and qualities. The peripheries have risen rapidly in land prices since. The pace of change is unmerciful.

Multan is the hidden riddle in the middle of what is historically a hinterland. It has long remained just that but now it is growing and beginning to cross the line that kept it rural. Sizable malls are springing up all over town, a desecration of the sacred tradition of low buildings, close to the ground and humble. The city is finally changing, shifting, gnawing at the dreams of a hundred thousand immigrants from all over southern Punjab and responding to their pleas. It is no longer a solitary entity.

Today, Multan is a multitude that is barely recognisable as compared to my childhood, when the city was calm in summer afternoons, and when we bicycled through the streets, played in deserted playgrounds and felt that freedom which comes with physical space. That freedom is gone, so is that space, with the playground near my house taken over illegally and constructed upon by a right-wing group.

My village at the bare edge of the town is ebbing away as well, dissolving under the slow tread of time. The mud-baked walls have been replaced with brick-and-mortar and once-hospitable people are vicious thugs now. Many are dead and the crop yield is greater than before, but the scent of roasted cotton twigs in milk tea is gone.

The haveli appears smaller now, sun-wrecked and cold-bitten, abandoned for the most part and propped up with ramshackle constructions here and there. All of it will be consumed by time, sucked into a black hole which is devouring its own flesh to sustain itself. Someday, the fields will be sold out for new housing colonies, the trees cut down for cheap profits and the walls of the haveli turned to rubble. They will raze the old beams and oaken doors and the woodwork in the rooms. It will all be dust and ashes, and some snobbish kid blundering by the ruins will find a shiny toy and brag about his find.

A particularly colourful bazaar in Androon City. — Photo by the writer

But that’s just my end of Multan, my edge of the city. At the other edge of Multan is its modern downtown, wound around the army cantonment.

There are lights and wide open bazaars and malls filled with people all day who flit across floors in slick lifts. New and international franchises have sprung up all along the Gol Bagh Road. People can now order pizzas at every half a kilometre of every main road. You can now buy a shawarma at every half-populated corner of the city, (with) soup stalls in the poorest of places and absurdly-named culinary establishments at the remotest of corners. There are jeans stores, tie and cufflink showrooms, giant LCDs in (Samsung branches) and banks branches.

In fact, banks are now all over the city; in the old city’s crowded, uncertain streets, on all the peripheries of the town, in the market by my home, at all major cantonment roads. They don’t come alone. One of them creeps in one night and the next morning, there is a tangible stir in that part of the city. People start to act strange, money becomes abundant and cheap, and everyone feels that ecstatic urge to splurge it when withdrawing crisp notes in the air-conditioned ATM stalls. There is a new dimension to life and it promises freedom, prosperity and the fulfilment of dreams.

Then another bank opens in the opposite lane. And then another. Until there are half a dozen of them, stacked against each other with colourful logos, brightly lit in the evenings, posh interiors and air-conditioned scams. They come in a fleet, determined and successful. Sometimes I feel that they are taking over this city and one day, we may find little of anything else under the sheer mass of banks and food joints. We’ll withdraw money from the ATM, go to a pizza joint, eat and go back to the ATM, withdraw, eat and go on and go on. And they will continue to fund more and more cars for the roads, jamming up the boulevards and piling up flyovers with tinfoil and carbon. And then, on the ruins of the multi-storey dereliction, of humans and buildings, will be built a new city, one also started with noble ambitions and succumbing to the inevitable stride of progress and mankind’s desires.

Multan once fitted a loose definition of being a muddy backwater: where home-fronts were huge and cosy, and one could anticipate the sound of evening quiet on weekend afternoons; where one could go back and rest and think things over and be at home, the traveller reaching the safe shelter on a strange, tumultuous road that is life. But in the last few years, I suspect that the storm has chased us down. There is noise all over the city, a thin racket of mindless voices that congeals on the top of the city and floats towards the morning sun when it rises, every single day. The storm has reached us and there is no consolation.

While the dust is still settling, a lot has been lost. The Old Games, for instance, which included Theekri Lakoun, Pilli Loon, Kokla Chapaki and so on. I call them the Old Games because they died away with my generation. We were the final sentries standing guard and we were distracted from our posts by the sweeping tide of promising prospects. One day we still had our pebbles on our palms under the cool shade of the Neem tree and the next, the colourful noises of the city found us and we walked away, stupefied by the enchanting Pied Piper.

The next generation doesn’t care. They have abandoned this history in favour of touchscreens and Xboxes. They don’t even know about the old games, and probably never will. They will be tossed aside and forgotten like one of those countless cultural and historical icons which do not register on the radar of any archival science and fade away without any trace. They are unimportant to the historians and the hip-nostalgic crowd doesn’t deal in this stuff.

The old folk at the countryside will tell you how summers brought week-long torrents, or the season of ‘Sawan’ when roads turned into swamps and all life came to a standstill for days on end. Then the earth groaned and turned, and the angles shifted and the weather turned hot, bringing with it unbearably stifling air and a cruel sun.

Multan’s heat has also been a part of its legend, mentioned in the tales of notable saints. In one story, for instance, a famous saint held out a piece of meat, begging people to lend him wood or a fire to cook the meat. But people banished him, what with his crazed outlook. When the last house had refused him and he had no other place to turn to, he reportedly turned his face to the skies and asked God to bring the sun closer so he could cook his meat. And thus, the sun dipped lower and roasted the chunk of meat which he probably devoured with a vengeful relish later.

In this timeless sense of history and legend, Multan is this plume of dust which is the phantasmagoria of a million stories. Someday, who knows, the riverbeds may croak with emptiness and the desert regains the upper hand, burying everything under brown debris. Then those who find the archaeological ruins of our era will seek us under neon lights and will try to breathe life back into us by the sheer passion of their inquiry. But we will lay still, motionless like the steady rock, infinite like the sand. And who knows, maybe someday another saint will come along and erect the foundations of a new city atop all that’s past.

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, November 16th, 2014