Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [156]
At its worst (which is admittedly much of the time), Lahore high society is all too close to the ‘Diary of a Social Butterfly’, the weekly satirical column by Moni Mohsin in the Friday Times, which she has put together in a book of the same name.6 Though brilliantly funny, this column is in a way quite unnecessary, because the picture of this society which appears on the society pages of the Friday Times and its sister publications is in fact beyond parody.
For the absolute epitome, the non plus ultra of this set (in Karachi as well as Lahore), readers might want to buy a book of portraits of society figures by the society and fashion photographer Tapu Javeri, entitled – in pretentiously lower case - i voyeur: going places with haute noblesse, and decorated with captions to portraits like ‘on the sperm of the moment’. This is the hard-partying world portrayed in Mohsin Ali’s brilliant, grim novel Moth Smoke.
However, at its best, there is also in Lahore a mixture of elegance and intelligence which could make it one of the great cities of the world (if they could only fix the roads, the drains, the public transport, the pollution, the housing of most of the population, the electricity supply, the police ...). The Lahore museum, with its magnificent Buddhist and Mughal works of art, is the only museum in Pakistan of international stature, and casts the rather sad Pakistani National Museum in Karachi into the shade.
This was the ‘Wonder House’ of Kipling’s Kim, which famously begins with Kim perched on the great cannon, Zam Zama, in the road outside the museum, of which Kipling’s father was the curator. Kipling worked for a Lahore newspaper, and some of his finest stories are set in Lahore, as are those of many of Pakistan’s greatest writers and poets. Lahore is a city of the imagination, in a way that bureaucratic Islamabad and dour, impoverished Peshawar cannot be, and Karachi has not yet had the time to become (though writers like Kamila Shamsie are working on it).The Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) is in parts at least the best university not only in Pakistan, but in South Asia.
Most unusually for Pakistan, which as a society exemplifies the principle of ‘private affluence and public squalor’, Lahore, although it contains some fairly awful slums, also has some fine public gardens, though admittedly ones bequeathed by the Mughals in the case of the Shalamar Gardens, and the British in the case of the Lawrence Gardens (now Jinnah Bagh). Strolling through the Jinnah Bagh in September 2008 on my way from breakfast with friends in a stylish and charming café called ‘Coffee Tea and Company’ to visit a modern art gallery, past uniformed schoolchildren, girls in brightly coloured shelwar kameezes like parrots tossing balls to each other, and neatly dressed middle-class couples, I reflected on the idiocy of portraying Pakistan as a ‘failed state’. It was hardly a scene reminiscent of Grozny or Mogadishu.
The contrast was all the greater with Peshawar, which I had just left, and where the sense of threat from the Pakistani Taleban was palpable. Indeed, it was sometimes difficult to remember that Peshawar and Lahore were in the same country. I remember my shock – and then amusement at my shock – on seeing what I first took to be a fattish Pathan boy in a Pathan cap and jeans on the back of a motorcycle in Lahore – only to realize that it was in fact a girl; which in Peshawar would be a truly dangerous combination, and in other Pathan areas a potentially fatal one.
Then again, you could say that my reflections on the success and stability of Lahore were only the result of my becoming lahorized (or perhaps lahorified, to rhyme with glorified), because this is very much