LAHORE: Perhaps the most heartbreakingly story that Pran Nevile tells is of meeting his childhood friend Saeed Ahmed Khan after 50 years.

It is the very same story that a Google advertisement recently portrayed.

The men carried their childhood friendship forward by simply writing to each other until their grandchildren browsed and traced them secretly and arranged a meeting in Lahore. The two men broke down hugging each other.

Saeed and Nevile had been together till 1947, until the two were separated. Three years ago, Nevile’s friend passed away.

The partition of Punjab has perhaps been the most painful, it is said. Families within miles of each other were torn apart and friends disconnected for life. Neville, too, has been through this, and though currently living in Delhi, the only city his heart craves for is Lahore.

A stately 92 years old, Neville sits with his hands folded, and seeps humour black and white, equally streaked with seriousness. This blend arises when he speaks about Lahore and compares its past to the present.

“Every place changes,” he says. “I don’t give importance to change because it is bound to come by. But what really pleased me is the sight of so many young people who have come to the Lahore Literature Festival. It was such an impressive sight and I was also very impressed by the festival organisers to carry on with such an event at such a political time.”

But the conversations in this city once replete with arts and culture, may now have taken a morbid turn.

“If they used to talk about arts back then, today they are mainly talking about terrorism,” says Pran, a corner of his mouth drooping slightly to show his disapproval.

“I do feel that more and more events should give space to performing arts. There should be more concerts, more live music, more theatre, and more dance performances.”

Coming from a man who organises several concerts a year in Delhi, not counting the KL Saigal Memorial Club that he has founded, this sounds important. He has paid tribute by writing about Subcontinent greats such as Noor Jehan and Malika Pukhraj, has organised homage concerts for Saigal, Iqbal Bano, Reshman and Faiz Ahmed Faiz.

“Lahore’s real pride has always been its art heritage,” he goes on. “But over the past 20 years since I’ve been coming here, I’ve seen it deflate in front of my eyes,” he laments. “The reasons are ostensibly socio-political.”

Nevile was brought up in the city’s hub, its dynamic Walled City. Of course compared to older times, today the Walled City has become dirtier, more littered with houses crumbling down. Still, he knows the city like the back of his hand, and even takes locals to a guided tour when he is in the town.

He has seen his houses, the one in Walled City, and the other on Nisbat Road (35 Nisbat Road to be exact). But those houses have now been restructured and changed, and carry only a few ghosts of his memories.

His plane of memories is rich and full of experiences.

He recounts a time when he almost drowned in the Ravi River (once deeper than it is today). Driven by the heroic ego of a young boy, he dived in, despite not knowing how to swim. His friend also not a swimmer dived in to ‘save him’. Seeing both of them struggling in the water, a group of local kabaddi wrestlers were the ultimate heroes of the day, after they brought the bedraggled wet boys to the bank.

Lahore was also once the core of several excellent Urdu publications, including ‘Zamindaar’, ‘Adab-i-Lateef’, and ‘Humayun’. In his schooldays, Nevile says they spoke Punjabi but read and wrote in Urdu. But he refuses to believe that Punjabi today is an endangered language.

“The text of Gurmukhi is being used after 1966 when (Indian) Punjab became a province. Before that Gurmukhi was just used for Gutka paper or for Sikh Holy Scriptures. All our folk tales, including Heer Ranjha, have been written in other scripts such as Urdu and Hindi,” he said.

But as for the language, he says, it is as dynamic as ever both spoken and written, and if anyone thinks Lahore will lose its native language, they will find that Lahore can never lose an important part of its essence.