Lahore is Lahore

The risk of having a port-city as your capital is that it is too open to the flow of ideas, goods, and people. Far better to imagine a new city out of nothing, an abstract glass city where none of the old mystifying powers of the land and established hierarchies can take root: the bureaucratic city par excellence, or make some provincial centre the main city, the main bulwark against modernist, dissipating forces. The capital has to be a city of desire and memory...

Lahore , like all closed or land-locked cities, has always existed. There has never been a time when it didn't and so to talk of the establishment of foundations is meaningless. Culturally conservative, she turns her back on the inspiration of the high seas and instead models herself on the slow-moving rhythms of the earth. If there is any regeneration or vigour it always comes from the north, but they too are soon lulled into her deep sleep and afternoon stillness. To live for a day there is to live for a thousand years.

The secret of its longevity is that it has retained all the charcteristics of a large village: the gossip, the landed elites, the bumpkins, the clowns and dreamers, the drunken poets and jilted lovers, ... and the intrigues are always of a small and trivial nature. In it simplicity and crudeness it has retained something of the human-whereas other cities grow by becoming more machine-like and less human.

Of the twelve or so remaining statues only a handful remain in public spaces-the others confined to the dusty backrooms of the museum. And what need would there be for such objects when the each person is a living statue? "Orr?" (And?) is the usual refrain...but what else is there to say but repeat the old stories?

Back when Lahore was a fledgling city a Lahori went for the annual Hajj to Mecca. On his return he was all praise for the holy city. The piety and holiness of the people. But the Lahoris, impatient as ever, wanted to know more: orr?
Well, fantastic food and hospitality.
Orr?
The sense of peace and tranquility, of closeness to God...
Orr?
Sensing their growing frustration he then told them what they had wanted to hear all along.
But Lahore is Lahore.

And since that day Lahore has always been the capital of the world, the only city in the world- beyond which exists only a number of smaller villages. Nothing could change her; immutable, inscrutable old Lahore.

But change she did. Some cities grow in lightness, others in extensity; Lahore doesn't grow either upwards or outwards but only in density, absorbing other people as it does foreign stories that she makes her own.

But soon a crack appeared in her heart; what was once only the wilderness now became the most inhabited part of the city; and what was originally within the confines of the "gates" was now only "the inside city". On the inside there were only decaying buidings, the fading splendour of once regal gardens and a sort of fatalism, resignation hung in the air. As the soul of Lahore drew ever more inward, attached by the thinnest of threads to the ever-growing distant memory of what she once was it was as if she was becoming a dream within a dream. But this in itself was nothing new. Lahore was always the most real of cities because she was the most unreal...