“Kya hae jo mumkinaat mein nahin....thumey huwey waqt kay jazeerey bhi tu mumkin hein...,” (What’s not within the realm of possibilities ....Islands of still time are also quite possible...) says novelist Mustansar Hussain Tarar in his novel Raakh, through a character.

Though he has written extensively about the places he has been to and people he met in his fiction and travelogues, in Raakh he takes the reader on a voyage to these ‘islands of still time’ that he explored in the historical city of Lahore that seems to be his ‘love interest’ as a writer.

With an acute sense of history – recent and remote –Tarar visits various phases the city passed through before being reduced to this ‘provincial metropolitan’ whose architectural, social and cultural foundations are crumbling.

Though one of his characters nonchalantly says, “Kisi basti se ulfat rukhney kay liye kisi jawaz ki zaroorat nahi hoti,” (you don’t need a reason to love a dwelling) the writer in the preceding lines emphasises the worth of the city, in one of its phases, by making the protagonist quote a historian that once the city could boast of having the greatest orator of the country Attaullah Shah Bukhari, the greatest poet of the east Iqbal, and the world’s greatest wrestler Gama Pehlwan as its residents.

Then through a jeep ride beginning from the canal bridge on The Mall to the receding and polluted waters of the Ravi, off leafy and breezy Sharqpur Road, Raakh’s three main characters witness a city that is relatively recent but not without touching the ‘islands of still time’ scattered along this colonial relic.

This drive on a sunny December day brings alive to the reader the buzurg (elderly) peepal and jaman trees the Inter-Continental Hotel (to which he returns from the perspective of an eyewitness to the hectic and heady day when a grave and contemplative Zulfikar Ali Bhutto comes out of a lift into a crowd of ‘who was who’ leading his party top brass with eyes turned reddish by lack of sleep, immediately before delivering a thunderous speech to a massive crowd waiting for their beloved leader on the ‘crossroads of history’ at Minar-i-Pakistan to refuse to sending his party members to Dhaka to attend a crucial National Assembly session).

At the Regal Chowk another ‘island’ awaits them –Lakshmi Mansion–later Islamised by being renamed as Ahmad Mansion, behind the corner that joins the crowded Hall Road and Beadon Road.

While describing life inside the Lakshmi Mansion, from the perspective of a child and then an adolescent, the writer brings forth a detailed picture that tells the tale of a city now lost forever. The most noticeable aspect of that life was pluralistic character of the ‘Mansion’ inhabited by Christians, Parsis, Hindus and the Muslims alike, but without any streak of intolerance or desire to change anybody’s way of life. He describes through a colourful ‘mansion crowd’ comprising children of those who resided in the building around a small park, a way of life that epitomises the secular ethos of Lahore. Most prominent of the residents were Urdu short story icon Manto Sahib and his doting wife Safia Apa, actress Khurshid Shahid and GM Asar. In a passing reference, Tarar laments demolition of the Lakshmi Mansion decades later to make space for a jewellery market by hiding the sinister move behind a large hoarding facing The Mall.

While narrating the life inside the mansion, Tarar relates an episode which, according to him, deeply impacted the city in a very interesting way. It was the arrival of a film crew from Hollywood to shoot some scenes of Bhowani Junction, 1956 movie starring silver screen goddess Ava Gardner and the white-whiskered Stewart Granger. The excitement of spotting the literally blue-eyed, long-legged actress on The Mall and taking autographs from her and the male lead was immense for the lads who were already living imaginary lives of cowboys they had been enamoured with after watching them on the screens of nearby cinemas. He also narrates how ‘Bhowani Junction’ was painted on the railway station’s building instead of the actual ‘Lahore’ for shooting the film that showed locals clad in white dhotis and Nehru caps, shouting Inqilab Zindabad slogans. They were local extras doing it for a few rupees, he tells the reader.

The crew finally returned to Hollywood and it took the city long to recover from the shock, Tarar writes to show what influence the Hollywood exercised over the local population in those days. Then he jumps cut to a very painful phase Lahore went through during the days leading to the Partition and its aftermath. He describes cruelty of those times through the consciousness of a child who sees a man lying murdered in the middle of the Regal Chowk with a knife still buried in his chest, on his way back from school, and also through the poignant tale of Bundo Ram, the tongawalla who would laugh away the innocent but stark queries of the children who would pull his ‘bodi’ (the lock of hair) and ask why did he not move to Hindustan as he was a Hindu. One afternoon while the protagonist was roaming about near Ayaz’s grave in the Rang Mahal area, he found Bundo Ram murdered in front of his burnt house. There is the episode he describes as ‘Shah Alami ki azeem aag’ (the great fire of Shah Alami) that kept the Lahore night skies alight with a reddish glow for days, leaving behind mountains of debris from where rose the ashes that would ‘smear people’s faces’ in a symbolic way. The area from Rang Mahal Chowk to Shah Alam Chowk that comprised old residences, havelis, temples and shops, owned mostly by Hindus, was set ablaze by the zealots who were encouraged to do so and even supported by an on-duty police officer who was honoured like a ‘saint’ by bigots.

Besides history, Tarar Sahib has also a keen eye for the culture and architecture, especially buried inside the Walled City. He skillfully weaves into the plot the decaying Laal Haveli in Lohari Mandi Bazaar that was built by Maharaja of Kashmir for his favourite dancer, Daro. However, the haveli he describes to the reader had lost its lustre to ravages of time and emerges like a magnificent old painting with its broken colourful windowpanes, narrow staircases, dimly-lit rooms and small-size bricks peeping out through eroded plaster on its walls. Most of these residences were later taken over by shoemakers, who set up their workshops there, replacing the scent of women with pinching odour of ‘suresh’ (locally made glue).

Besides the loss of values and culture the city suffered over the decades, the writer also mentions, in a subtle way, the damage done to the environment.

‘Ravi kay paani kum ho rahey hein,” says the protagonist of Raakh when he notices the bricks of Kamran’s Baradari which had earlier been under the water. Then a frightening thought flashes by his mind, ‘what if the river seizes to flow’… ‘Lahore kay khandar’ he just throws an alarming hint. Another loss Tarar makes his readers realize indirectly is of Lahore’s favourite sport – kite flying. Almost every time he mentions Lahore’s skies, he sees colorful kites flying there, further emphasising its present emptiness.

In another of his novels, Khas-o-Khashak Zamaney, Tarar Sahib returns to his beloved city, this time with the perspective of an ‘outsider’ who migrates to Lahore from a rural area, leaving his forefathers’ profession of agriculture to join those who were toiling in the city, benefiting from the numerous economic opportunities it offered.

As his protagonist, Ameer Bakhsh, crosses the dilapidated bridge over the Ravi, he gets enchanted by the minarets and domes (of the fort and Badshahi Masjid) lining the hazy skyline of the city inhabited by a large number of the Hindus who could be easily identified by their dhotis which they tied in a different way from how the Muslims tied it, revealing their thin calves and their bodis and tilaks.

The first thing that strikes a newcomer would be the colourful kites gliding in the city’s skies. In Magh (a month in Punjabi calendar) on occasion of Basant panchami, when the winters would be giving way to early spring, the roofs in the city would be teeming with girls (and the boys) and looked like mustard fields. The city would celebrate advent of spring by wearing yellow and flying kites.

While describing the life and culture in Lahore of roughly a decade ahead of the Partition, the writer never forgets to mention the anxiety and uncertainty caused by political turmoil in those heady times. His characters are worried whether Lahore would be part of the new country or ‘Hindustan’. One of them fails to understand how the city that was already in ‘Hindustan’ would seize to be a part of it.

But, despite all that uncertainty, there was also enthusiasm which Tarar narrates through his characters who prepare to attend a public meeting to be held in the ground of the Islamia College, Railway Road, where ‘Baba Jinnah’ was to deliver a speech. Their eagerness to listen to what the ‘Baba’ would say, despite knowing that the speech would be in English, reflects the political environment of the times.

(The writer is a staff member).