Travels by Day and by Night

We have travelled a lot in Lahore this month: we turn right outside, pass a few houses, turn left out of our cul-de-sac, take another right, walk past more houses, then all the way down to the park…nearly everyday! And when all of life is lived on the streets, it takes a lifetime to walk down them.

Our daughter greets each one of the thriving community of cats who live among us. She observes what they have found in bins. We are a chicken-eating neighbourhood: they are well-fed. We talk about how one of them lost its ear, the other its leg. Next, we heartily salaam one of the two vegetable sellers, ‘alu-gobhi man’ (because that’s what he shouts), the one who pushes a cart and we buy something for tea. The other shouts nothing and drives a three-wheeler. Two fruit sellers pass us, one with a donkey, one without. And here comes the man with a goat which mows people’s lawns: another well-fed animal. Well-dressed, too, with a jacket over his front legs and another over his back, an inverted pantomime pony. We laugh and tell the owner how much we love the outfit. ‘Because it’s cold,’ he replies, without wit.

Oh, and there are deep holes with mysterious fluids beneath, there are piles of cement to play in and workmen carrying it on trays on their heads, there are vehicles conveying children and their huge bags of books from school, being either greeted or cuffed by mothers and aunties. Later some of the boys zip around the lanes on too-big motorbikes. We get to the corner shop and need to buy boxes of fruit juice, so drained are we by our journey and experiences. And they say this is a quiet neighbourhood.

I watch my children stop and stare. They are riveted, but I’m not always sure by what. ‘Come on,’ I plead, ‘let’s keep moving,’ but things in their mind are moving too, and they need a moment. They are learning many new Urdu words, but of new images, there must be millions. And just as those workmen we watch construct a new house, they are constructing their new world out of these sights.

Beyond these residential streets it is a circus. We watch one baker - lion-tamer and fire-eater - put his head into the mouth of a flaming oven. Others are performing pure percussion, one clapping the dough with flamenco flourishes – Olé! - another clicking his tongs together in jazz rhythms to flip the bread over in the tandoor. We only popped out for some bread. Next door the confectioner sits like a life-guard rescuing jalebis from burning in less a pan, but more a pool, of sizzling oil. There’s a knife dance at the barbecue café and on the road, dodgem cars and a symphony of horns. I try to steer the children past the dangers: ‘mind your head by that vat, watch out for the cars, keep your eyes on the path.’ But I cannot stop them from being dazzled.

I like it best by dark, when wonders are illuminated by a single bulb then framed by blessed darkness. A lamp on a cart makes a polished and precisely arranged pile of apples glisten. They move forward into the night as if by magic. A tailor bows over his work alone in a blue room surrounded by his suits like silent friends. A shopkeeper sits in his portrait, bordered by the articles that make his life and that make him useful in the world: tiny packets of biscuits; matches; cigarettes. Above him, sachets festoon him: shampoo; tea; detergent. A wedding-band drummer looks out from a tube-lit balcony. ‘Won’t someone get married,’ he hopes, ‘won’t someone choose me?’ Now, as my eyes turn back into the night, I can hope for him and wonder about his life beyond this balcony in the darkness that contains him and surrounds me.