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Amritsari kudi in LAHORE
Just before leaving Chandigarh for the Wagah border, we were informed that the immigration papers had not yet reached the border post. To add anxiety to exhaustion, two of the actors had been denied Pakistani visas. Finally all done: rituals at the immigration counter gone through, we bustled across the border with our theatre properties of trolleys and trunks, looking suspiciously like one of our own colourful tragic-comic stereotype. At the border, cricket fans crossing into India greeted us with joyousness as newfound expectation ricocheted through the serpentine queue. Crowds on both sides waved tiny flags of their country and spontaneously burst into a rendition of the national anthem. A sense of excitement hung in the air as questions were tossed around regarding shops, restaurants, cinemas and hotels in Chandigarh and Lahore. I felt an irresistible urge to photograph this moment —it was extremely emotional, very moving. Memories of staging Kitchen Katha at the same venue last year came flooding back. There was a springtime energy within us as we crossed the border. It was as if we were traversing through an emotional narrative. Fusing history, embracing a fractured past. To perform a Punjabi play in the heartland of Punjabi language and culture, to an ostensibly foreign audience was an exciting proposition. It was a ‘foreign’ audience that spoke your own language, sometimes even your own dialect. There is no feeling of alienation when you drive through Lahore. Familiar sights, sounds, smells greet you and for a moment you feel a trifle disoriented, because everything is so painfully similar. The truck that had been organised by Ajoka to carry our stage props was imaginatively painted with a burst of evocative images giving the impression of a mobile art gallery. The actors, never ones to let go a photo-op, started clicking the truck from every angle. Looking askance the truck driver remarked, Aghar ena hee pasand hai, tha larhai band karva deyo, teh meh eh truck thwade ghar pochha deyan ga. (If you like it so much then stop the fighting and I will drive the truck to your house). The opening show on March 7, had the Governor of Punjab, Lt Gen Khalid Maqbool, as the chief guest. The big evening arrived, the play started and excitement reigned. The audience and the newspapers were unanimous in their praise and gave the play outstanding reviews. The quintessential Pakistani hospitality was in evidence at a sumptuous lunch hosted by the Governor for the actors at his home. The grandeur of the dining hall with its panelled walls and stunning Aubusson carpets took one’s breath away. Just before we said our goodbyes, the Governor presented an embroidered pashmina shawl to Ramanjit, the main protagonist of the play. It was more than a polite gesture; it was an endorsement of the ability of the arts to transcend all man-made barriers and belong to the true family of the world. The eateries of Lahore are a genre by themselves. The name of the dishes on the menu card reads like a poem, Sumandri Sugat to Man Pasand—proclaims it as a city of the senses. It respects the stimulus of the palate and celebrates it through cuisine. When I told my host that I was a vegetarian, I felt I had committed an unpardonable blasphemy — as my dietary proclivity made me not only an anomaly but also a nuisance. Food in Lahore is serious business and gastronomic aesthetics is alive at every street-corner. Dinner at Cooco’s, in Heera Mandi , the street of legendary tawaifs of Lahore, was a unforgettable experience. This place is run by Iqbal Hussain, a painter, given the soubriquet, ‘Toulouse Lautrec of Lahore’ by Time magazine. Born into a family of dancing women, he roamed these infamous streets, painting the dissolute and sad lives of the people who lived there. The house is a four-storied narrow column- like structure, with a winding staircase that led you to the roof where dinner is organised alfresco. The décor ranged from the bizarre to the classical. Purple walls aflame with temple lamps from Kerala, a church gong hung over a marble Madonna, a dancing Ganesh embedded inside a wall, a Persian carpet with a design of Mecca-Medina, celebrated an eclectic aesthetics that had the cluster of a medieval tavern. A gong announced the food, and a tasli on a pulley brought the food up. Sitting on the wooden balcony of the restaurant, I could see the kothas of the dancing women of Heera Mandi, women celebrated in story, history, films, conversations and poetry. The women must have been in their late thirties and had startlingly white faces, dusted with silica, with crimson smudges on their cheeks. The eyebrows were drawn with a thick black pencil giving them a hard mask-like look. Even though I was at a distance, I could see their lithe and supple bodies dancing to the beat of popular Hindi film songs. Their gauzy angharkas swirled and sounds of "wah wah" were fairly insistent. On the other side there was the illuminated Jama Masjid. It wasn’t difficult to feel suspended between the temporal and the spiritual; the entire atmosphere was of too heightened a quality for one to remain aloof to even the slightest suggestion of—shall we say—drama? Every shop we visited,
shopkeepers gave us discounts. There was no apparent hostility in
their demeanour. This was certainly no counterfeit swagger
manufactured or programmed for political consumption but a genuine
urge of the people on the streets. Framed information sometimes belies
actual experience. How many of us have felt this, held it close to our
hearts, as though it should some day provide us succour at a time of
despair.
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