Seventeen years ago I had sat in the little make-shift studio crammed into a corner of the servant’s quarters at the back of my townhouse. It was built into the family compound in the comfortable suburb of Lahore’s cantonment.

Patiently, and always with avid enthusiasm, I sifted through hours and hours of footage captured on my first digital video camera, bought after selling the (already defunct) VCR and a much-needed fridge. I had some savings from the very first film I had made for the United Nations on training counsellors working on the rehabilitation of drug abusers. With that cash and the proceeds of the sales of sundry household appliances, I had embarked on my second feature film, fortified with a belief in the process, the journey, in the weaving together of light, life, and form into a fabric which would clothe my story.

My story. It wasn’t really mine; indeed, none of the stories I tell are mine. They come from many different voices, from spaces inhabited by those I may never meet again, having met once, fleetingly, in some deep recess of the city I have lived in, or in the open expanse of wasteland where no birds sing but where the wind is an instrument playing its own song. I have no idea where the urge to tell stories comes from. Perhaps a childhood as a loner, playing with imagined creatures living in the forest that comprised the shrubbery and hedges in our sprawling colonial bungalow built just before the 1857 War of Independence. More likely a life lived largely alone as an adult, a woman in a society which has become frighteningly more misogynistic, where conversation has become the pause we take between breathlessness. Could it be that the words and images I create are the refuge I seek in a world I no longer feel I am a part of?

This was not so all those many years ago — that was a time when I still believed in the power of words and images to arouse curiosity if nothing else. I had started writing for this very newspaper at the age of 23, fresh out of university, married to man with whom I imagined I shared a goal of a just and enabling society. I was enchanted with so much then; the landscape, which unfolded everyday in the city I had made my own, captivating me with its shades of grey and green, emerging and then disappearing in the afternoon’s dusty gusts of wind.

But what happened in all these years between now and then? The dreams I dreamt fled, other dreams carved a path before me. I continued to write and to make films, working with those who became my family, who I believed shared the same goal of the pursuit of making meaning in a world rapidly spiralling out of control. It was the year before the celebration of the 50th year of our country’s birth which saw my last feature film go on location in Lahore’s Red Light area, a place where dreams are dreamt during the day and songs of sadness sung in darkness. Equipped with home-made tracks to enable the camera’s movement through the narrow alleys of Tibbi Gali, and supported by a cast and crew made up of professional actors as well as those we befriended on the way, we undertook a journey few would have dared to.

We had no Oscars in mind, we did not want to do the rounds of international film festivals, we could not hope box-office success, knowing that, clearly, the story we were telling was not for sale. For how could I sell the lives of the women and men and children who lived in unfathomable poverty, neglect twisting their limbs, dimming their eyes and yet not extinguishing the profound desire to survive despite all odds? How could I put a price on the last work of Madame Anna Auzurie, the Grand Old Dame of Bombay Cinema who danced and choreographed and acted with Ashok Kumar and Meena Kumari? How could I preen myself and appear on-stage, muttering inanities about the “process and the product” while playing to a gallery of viewers who would never know the generosity of those who live on the edge?

That was not what I had sought when I took my camera into the narrow lanes of Tibbi Gali. As I sit in another room, watching footage shot almost two decades ago, I know that I have kept my promise to those whose stories I tell, not to betray or exploit them, not to sell their lives to the highest bidder, but to honour them, simply telling their stories, for I am just the reed through which their voices pass, making music, filtering through the light of the pale sun of autumn.