Lahore in a Time of Corona

Lahore is a great city. Shalimar Bagh lies just north of the Grand Trunk Road, a vast garden whose perfect proportions are said to mirror those of paradise. Beyond the River Ravi stand the domed tombs of two Mughal lovers, now sadly separated by train tracks. Heading south is the labyrinthine old city, fronted by the Imperial Fort and Mosque. One day when, I am old, I will have explored it all. The Mall leads south to the suburbs and sprawl. To travel down it makes me feel I am significant simply because I am here: here in the centre of all that is important in a city. I raise my head to look like I belong, like I am political, journalistic or bureaucratic. More often I am actually just visiting Chaman for an ice cream. The suburbs, meanwhile, boast huge enclosed leisure and shopping centres; great gleaming storeys linked by ever higher escalators bearing us up to shinier shops. I love it all.

And now I have become the ideal housewife, going nowhere and covering my face. I had always tried to be good before, adjusting my dupatta to hide my hair, lowering my eyes, not drawing attention to myself and home before dark. But now I am her who paces her balcony, wondering about the wider world and other people’s lives. I know the trees in my cul-de-sac and quietly admire neighbours’ flowers. I have become that nervous mother who instructs her children not to go out; ‘if you do, the many horned Corona will catch you.’ So, like me, they peer through the gate at the street. Fruit and vegetables are brought to us on trolleys from markets I have no concept of. The smell of the carrots and mud on the potatoes are all that tell me that somewhere there are farms, there is countryside, there is earth.

I choose books about ocean journeys to read to the children: The Snail and the Whale (“How I long to sail,”/ said the tiny snail.); Treasure Island; Jack and Nancy, about a brother and sister whose umbrella, caught by a storm, carries them over the sea. From our terrace, I look out at things that are free: alley cats; clouds; most birds. Other birds are, like us, on the rooftops, enjoying the sun, sky and gentle breezes, but caged. The top storey of many houses is an aviary, a bid to own a little sky by people who don’t have much space.

Ever since “Kim sat…astride the great gun Zam-zammah” (still there on the Mall, opposite his father’s Ajaib Ghar: The House of Wonders to which we also cannot go) Municipal Orders have been defied in Lahore.* I also defy them every so often and make my bid for a little freedom. I walk. It is not enough now to cover our heads, our faces must be covered too, and so my hands are busy tugging at head-scarf, mask and glasses, making sure I am not too bad a housewife. Is it wrong, I wonder, to remove the mask to sometimes smell the flowers?

I have turned corners and suddenly discovered that vast swathes of the population are in defiance of Municipal Orders: so this is where everyone is hanging out. I had been wondering where Lahore went. I have stumbled on alleys where children still crowd round a samosa-vendor and put their greasy hands all over his trolley, where friends embrace or share a motor-bike, or a coke, where teenagers play cricket and hang out on street corners. At first the instinct of my heart is to leap: this is the party I was looking for. Then I remember the news. My sense of hygiene is affronted. I tighten my mask and become a soldier in hostile territory. I accomplish the task I came for, the procurement of a loaf of bread or packet of spice, and leave the vicinity, frightened for them. I try not to view the little lad in green silky shalwar kameez who licks a bright orange ice-lolly as a walking pathogen holding his uncle’s hand.

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By night, when everything else is still, my attention turns to the one who is living in its very little place inside of me. He or she wakes up and wriggles and kicks, tries to stretch and claim more space. The protests are silent. “You have a long wait yet, little one,” I speak to it, also silently. Then it turns over and rests again, in the knowledge, I hope, that it is held in love.

*The opening line of Kim by Rudyard Kipling