“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.