What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish?
You cannot say or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter...

It has been a season of storms this time, unexpected rain leading to a summer of burgeoning grief. I stand, drenched in a spring shower, on the edge of the bridge recently constructed to accompany the new underpass which carries Lahore along its much-abused canal. Besides me kneels a donkey which I have rescued from beneath the cart it was pulling, several tons of scrap metal weighing it down until the cart collapsed on top of the animal.

The donkey, the cart it was pulling, and the men who sat on top of it, steering it into oncoming traffic, were going up the bridge on the wrong side of the road. I had stopped my car in a side lane and had walked to the middle of the bridge, stopping the cart from proceeding further. It was already too late to save the donkey from being crushed beneath the weight of the metal it was carrying. But it was not too late to alert oncoming motorcyclists of the imminent danger posed by the unending lengths of metal protruding from the collapsed cart.

This is, after all, a city, where young children have died in the arms of their distraught fathers whose motorbikes happened to drive into the path of glass or chemical-coated kite string. This is a city where children are crushed beneath the wheels of runaway tractors and speeding buses, where abuse has become a way of life, where highway bandits have hijacked its arteries, clogged its roadways, polluted its streets, choked its air and waterways. This is a city which has withstood abuse for too long. And this is a city which needs to fight back, with every heart it nestles in its bosom, with every mind it has nurtured, with every bit of will needed to combat the marauders who are amongst us, comfortable in their unholy alliance with powerful mafias which have destroyed so much that we knew as our beloved Lahore.

The bridge I stood on was built over the deadened roots of several massive Sumbul trees which flowered in the spring and gave forth a bounty of its silky fibre which floated in the air like promises of good things to come. For twelve years, as a student of the Lahore American School, I passed by this corner frequently, then just beginning to ask questions which still have not found adequate answers.

Captain of our soccer team, I would lead the girls on a jog along the canal, up The Mall, and then down alongside Aitcheson College, up again along the bridge adjacent to the railway tracks, and then back to the school housed in the graceful art-deco era premises of Al-Riaz. The canal was then not a repository of plastic bottles and bags, nor of the effluence discharged into it by the many unregulated settlements alongside. It was lined with weeping willows along the banks, and with stately trees on the other side providing shade to pedestrians and cyclists who still had a right to exist before the advent of the mafias which now rule us, speeding past in their cavalcades of mega-vehicles, four-wheeled antidotes to deep-rooted insecurities born, for the most part, of illegitimacy and corruption.

In the summer, my brother and I would stand beneath the peepal tree on the corner of Aitcheson College to wait for the public bus to take us home to the Cantonment, where another magnificent peepal would welcome us on the corner of Elgin Street and the road which led to the old airport. At that time the entire length of the road leading to the airport was lined with massive peepal trees, wantonly destroyed to make way for projected increases in traffic flowing towards the airport. That the airport was shifted within two years from its location at the end of Abid Majeed Road did not figure in the plans of the wizards overseeing this massacre. Today this wide avenue is deserted, the rustle of dry leaves a grim reminder of countless, priceless murdered trees.

At that time it was absolutely acceptable for the children of the privileged to ride along with ordinary citizens on a government-provided bus service which charged the royal sum of ten paisas from a student. This was before the rampant destruction of our values began, before the rot set in, before reason was overtaken by confabulations of ill-informed minds. Keen to implement policy designed by the near-sighted and the feeble in spirit, entirely new vocabularies have been coined, entirely new paradigms of development have been formulated, predicated on this and that version of what some state functionary saw in Dubai or Malaysia on their latest state-sponsored jaunt.

What these men and women of exceptionally myopic vision fail to see is the pallor on the faces of the children crammed into a tiny quarter in a squatter settlement just outside one of the new “lakeside” and “alpine” colonies mushrooming all over the landscape like pinnacles of glory perched on the corpse of a long dead soul. What these lofty office holders refuse to see are the overflowing gutters and the heaps of garbage piled up in streets just behind the wide thoroughfares which provide them access to their homes and their places of work. What these powerful rulers cannot see are the polluted waterways and the lack of adequate medical staff in hospitals choked with young and old suffering from water-borne diseases.

What they fail to see are the crumbling roofs of public schools, the lack of toilet facilities for children who have no chairs to sit on, no books to read, no light to read by. Most significantly, what they fail to see is the moat in their own eyes. Obscured by greed and an insatiable quest for power and grandeur, the vision of our rulers serves only themselves and others like them - all those who have paid obeisance to a ‘god of false things’.

Taking over our parks and our greenbelts, our trees and our air, our hopes and our dreams, these ‘merchants of death’ are taking away what is ours to claim, what has been here before us, what shall remain only if we fight for it - our beloved city, Lahore.

Unreal city, I had not thought death had undone so many. Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled, and each man fixed his eyes before his feet. — T S Eliot, The Wasteland