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May 12, 2005
Out on a Sunday walk
There’s nothing more fulfilling for a tourist out on a nostalgic leg than a walking tour of old Lahore. There are as many walking trails as there are gates leading into the walled city, which was once a citadel.
Twelve gates and a mori (outlet), where the Hindus used to burn their dead next to the nullah that drained into the Ravi, define the walled city to this day even though many of the gates have long disappeared.
And what better time to do it than on a Sunday afternoon, when the congested city roads and bazaars are not as maddening a proposition to wade your way through as they are on a week day:
The tomb of Sultan Qutbuddin Aibak (AD 1210) in a side street off Anarkali Bazaar. Aibak was the founder of the slave dynasty among the Sultans of Delhi, and the only one to have ruled Delhi from his capital at Lahore. He was fond of the city because it was touted at the time as being the second Ghazni, then a fading citadel of Muslim art and culture.
Lahore under Aibak became home to the largest number of Persian poets and intellectuals ever found in one city. To make up for his absence from Delhi, the Sultan gifted the erstwhile capital the Masjid-i-Quwwatul Islam and the Qutb Minar, both were completed after his death, caused by a fatal accident while playing polo in Lahore. The Hindu temple opposite the Sultan’s tomb is now a cluster of pigeon holes.
Sunday or no Sunday, it’s business as usual in the adjacent Paan Gali of Anarkali, and at the Baansanwala (bamboo) Bazaar not too far off.
The old tonga stand outside Delhi Gate, which is now all but a shadow of its past, the hustle-bustle has long gone owing to increased commuter reliance on motor vehicles; a old man sells grass for the few horses that are still around, making Rs60-80 rupees “on a good day,” he says.
Inside the Delhi Gate, the towering minarets of the Wazir Khan mosque (AD 1646) hark back to the Shah Jahan days when the bazaar down below must not have been more crowded than it is on a warm Sunday afternoon; the kebab vendor ignites his charcoal in the shadow of the Wazir Khan mosque’s western wall at the Old Kotwali Chowk, as the road leads you to the winding streets of Chohatta (literally ‘four shops’) of Mufti Baqar, and inside the Mochi Gate.
Narrow lanes are only fit for two-wheelers and the four-legged; an odd, crumbling katrra (residential commune), possibly dating back to the period of Sher Shah Suri (AD 1545), of the Grand Trunk Road fame, when many Pathan tribes settled in Lahore, can still be spotted in the Mohalla Kakkay Zaiyyaan and other parts of Chohatta.
This in full earnest is the essence of the once glorious haveli-living inside the walled city, where the old and new now stand face to face. Built with thin bricks pasted together with lime plaster, up to three-feet thick walls and several metres high ceilings, these structures were ideal for keeping out the summer heat; the wooden jharoka (balcony) at a dead end in one of the narrow lanes is one of the few still kept in reasonably good shape by the residents.
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