LAHORE: The street looks normal at a glance. Some elderly women squat in front of their small houses, soaking early-winter sun, occasionally admonishing a few barefooted children playing nearby amid dirt and squalor. This facade of normalcy, however, gets shattered as one gets closer and sees the worry-lines deepening into their old faces and the cause.

It is one of the backstreets of Kapurthala House, over-a-century-old enclave in Purani (old) Anarkali, that once belonged to Maharaja of Kapurthala, a princely state in the undivided India, with its bachelor and family flats having wide French windows opening onto broad paved streets and intricate wooden shades on their doors.

The place that has already lost its structural beauty to reckless encroachment, commercialisation and land-grabbing, falls on the route of the Orange Line Metro Train Project and faces demolition threat.

“We can’t say we are happy here, as there are a lot of issues, including sanitation, lack of open space etc but the only consolation is that it is familiar and we belong to it,” says a 70-year-old resident, Siddique, who along with his two brothers and their families lives in a three-and-a-half marla house in the street.

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“My late mother used to tell me I was a toddler when she and I migrated to Pakistan along with my father from Amritsar in Indian Punjab and we started living here in the single-room quarter,” he says, adding: “These houses you see are a product of our toil spanning all these decades. As time passed and our families grew in size, we kept adding to the structures by saving from our meager incomes we would get by doing odd jobs like selling ‘naan chana’, nickle-platting brass utensils and working as labourer etc. It took us some six decades to build these two-storey houses.”

The amount they had paid for their humble abodes and how they managed it years back seems to be part of the community’s collective memory.

“I can’t describe how we manged to pay the Rs3,500, that was a huge sum for poor people like us some 50 years back, to get PTDs (personal transfer deeds) from the government after 16-year litigation with some flat owners who tried to grab the quarters,” adds septuagenarian Hidayatullah, who says he was nine when he migrated, also from Amritsar.

“Our women sold the little jewellery they had and some of us had to even sell our household utensils to pay the amount,” he added.

On being asked about his plans in case of displacement, Hidayatullah paused for a while and said, “I can’t comprehend this, what plans I could have.”

Sardaran Bibi, residing in a two-marla single-room house with her son, daughter-in-law and their children, and earns her living by washing clothes, says, “I can’t sleep since I have heard the government wants to demolish our houses. We don’t even have the money to pay for the shifting, leave aside paying the rent for a house.”

The government’s plan to pay compensation to the residents for the houses to be acquired for the project, along with the displacement cost, is no relief for Sardaran.

“Since husband of my daughter has got wind of the compensation plan, he has told his wife that she should claim her share in the amount. This is another problem for me and I don’t know how to handle it,” she says.

For 65-year-old Ranjha, a milkman living in the enclave since the partition, it is more a matter of losing identity.

“Moving to some new place at this stage of life is not an easy thing. Here we know each other, living together for so many years. When you move to some new place people already living there treat you as you have just dropped from sky. They look at you with suspicion and you have to explain a lot of things to them which looks embarrassing at my age,” he says.

“Despite facing hardships, we have been living here like a family, supporting each other through thick and thin. If some one dies in the street, his or her family need not to worry. Every thing gets arranged in no time because of cooperation of the community,” says Surraiya Bibi, a widow who lives in her three marla-house with her son, his family a widow daughter and her husband’s widowed sister.

She remembers spending better days in her small house with her late husband and even fighting physically for the place against land-grabbers.

“When they (grabbers) arrived to vacate the quarters, we all came out with whatever we could get to fight them. Some of us had clubs. I can still remember I was cooking and on hearing the commotion came out with a blow-pipe used to light fire in the hearth. But we were young then,” says the old woman, reliving her moment of glory.

Surprisingly, nobody seems interested in the compensation amount despite their fragile incomes which range from Rs10,000 and Rs20,000.

“We have grown old, what would we do with the money. But our younger lot too is not interested in getting the amount for leaving the place. As far as I am concerned the only way I would want to leave this place is in a coffin carried by those among whom I lived here for so long,” says Hidayatullah, trying uselessly to absorb the moisture that fills his old eyes.

Published in Dawn, December 4th, 2015