One of these days a visitor comes to Lahore driven by the lure of stories, real and imagined, to see what he can’t see elsewhere. The traveler is not someone like Milton who had the fecund imagination to look at Lahore from the heavens but rather like Claude Levi-Strauss who visited the city twice in the aftermath of the Partition in search of discovering, what he called, it’s intriguing mystery which, he found, was fading fast.

As the visitor drives into the city, his vehicle moves soundlessly. A high quality road paved with asphalt gives him a bump-free ride. Signal-free road whets his appetite for thrill. His high acceleration car moves into overdrive as if attracted by a magnetic force of smooth black surface. There are people along the sides wanting to cross the road but he can’t stop as he is irresistibly swept along by an incessantly threatening vehicular flow. He takes a turn and stops in front of a high-rise, a modern mammoth. It’s interesting to note that the building has no fire escapes. The boulevard has an impressive array of high-rises and tenements but there is something uncannily funny about this architectural ensemble. Glass is all over the place. Why, wonders the visitor, so much use of glass in the buildings in a country where the temperature soars up to 50 Celsius in summer? Do glass windows and glass walls help save the urgently needed megawatts in a country that suffers from a chronic power shortage? No, he thinks, this can’t be the case because glass in no way falls in the category of insulation material. On the contrary, all the buildings look “power guzzlers”. Glass must have some aesthetic purpose though it doesn’t seem so when he looks at the way it has been used.

The visitor, a little disoriented by now, is anxious to park his vehicle. He can’t find a parking lot as there is none. A huge built-up area with no parking space in the age of auto vehicle! He tries to find a place for parking on the kerbside with some trepidation that he may be taken as a kerb-crawler. At long last, he parks his vehicle at a space just vacated by an already parked vehicle. By the time he comes out, he has his bladder bursting. He looks for public toilets and finds none. He, in desperation, enters a restaurant, shouts an order incoherently and rushes to the loo. What if he was a poor woman in such a situation, he tries to imagine. This city is not designed to cater to the needs of ordinary women, he concludes. He comes out and wants to stretch his legs but can’t find a sidewalk. The open space has been taken over by vendors. He feels literally sandwiched between the fast moving traffic and milling crowd. People here have forgotten to walk, he assumes. How can you build a city without sidewalks? How can you keep your limbs intact without the practice of moving them? He has been to the poorest of the cities and yet has seen the sidewalks. Kathmandu, a city apparently poorer than Lahore, has wide footpaths, he remembers. Even Americans who believe “driving” is “walking” have sidewalks in their cities.

The visitor has to buy a few things for his family. The shopping mall where he can buy such stuff is across the road. But how to cross the road that has no zebra crossing? There is no traffic signal as the road is signal free. There is no concept of right of way for pedestrians and walkers here. Overhead bridges are far and few. And they are for those who have strong legs. Going up is not for the weak and the meek. You cross the road at your own risk which, in plain words, means you are likely to be crushed under the wheels in your attempt. Rich flat heads at the steering wheels are not in the habit of stopping for the stupid walkers who are too many and insist on using their feet instead of automobiles. The road to our visitor looks like a deathtrap and crossing it seems a sure recipe for falling into the trap. He loses heart and gives up. He goes back to the place where he, sort of, parked his car. Lo and behold, he finds none and is flabbergasted. Some vendor out of sympathy tells him that his vehicle has been lifted by a traffic warden. He locates the warden who asks him to pay the fine if he wants his car back. The visitor argues that where else he could have parked his car as there was no parking lot in the area. “That’s not my concern. My duty is to lift and fine the vehicles wrongly parked,” the warden says nonchalantly. He pays the fine, gets into the car and takes the best road that can take him out of the city. He comes on to our famed Canal Road that cleaves the city in two. Its once broad greenbelt is now little more than a patch of the green as the widened roads for the comfort of motorists have eaten away at what was not in the distant past, miles and miles of an orchard along the canal. What flows in the canal this wintry weather offers him a wondrously surprising gift: cold slow moving lava. A sluggish current of putrid water is an incredible sight in the winter season when the canal has no or a little water and serves as a drainage channel for the rundown colonies in the northeast which allow their raw sewage to be dumped into it. Our visitor drives away after having experienced the thrills and spills of sightseeing.

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