In February, I had the good fortune to participate in the Faiz Festival in Lahore. I had heard a lot about the famed Pakistani mehmaan nawaazi (hospitality) from friends who had been there. This was what I experienced too. The faces of people on the streets lit up when they found out I was from India.
The Faiz Festival is held annually at the Alhamra Cultural Complex in Lahore. It celebrates the legacy of the great poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz through a mix of performances, book launches, exhibitions and thought-provoking discussions on art, culture, history, literature, gender and social inequality.
The main organiser of the festival is Moneeza Hashmi, who is Faiz’s younger daughter and a trustee of the Faiz Foundation Trust.
Moneeza Hashmi and her elder sister, Salima Hashmi, the chairwoman of the trust, along with the entire festival crew, were the perfect hosts, ensuring that all the Indian delegates were extremely well looked after.
The sisters hosted dinners for us that were full of love, warmth and, of course, wonderful food. Touchingly, Salima Hashmi had travelled to the Wagah border to personally welcome us to Pakistan.
As I crossed over into Pakistan, it was hard for me to control my emotions. My journey to Lahore was a homecoming of sorts. My family’s roots go back not just to Lahore but also to Sialkot, Rawalpindi, Dera Ismail Khan and Hoti Mardan in present-day Pakistan. In Lahore itself, there were plenty of connections.
On my mother’s side, my great-grandfather, Lala Gokal Chand Bhasin, and his brother, Shiv Ram Bhasin, graduated from Lahore’s famous Government College. My grandfather, Gurdial Mullick, studied at Government Law College, while my grandmother, Mohini Mullick, was from Hans Raj Mahila Maha Vidyalaya, which relocated to Jalandhar in India following Partition.
My paternal grandfather, JN Bali, ran a successful photo studio on Mall Road, Lahore. At a panel discussion that I was a part of, there was laughter across the jampacked auditorium when I mentioned family lore of how prized my grandfather’s portraits were for prospective brides and grooms. My relatives maintain that if my grandfather had clicked a snapshot of a man or a woman to be sent to a prospective spouse, the arrangement had a 75% chance of being sealed.
My paternal grandmother, Damayanti Bali, was a gynaecologist – a rarity in her time. She is reputed to have delivered many of the rich and famous born in and around Lahore in the 1930s and 1940s. She also wrote a book for children comprising four-line poems for each letter of the Hindi alphabet. Billo was first published in 1940 by Milaap Press in Lahore.
When I recited the most famous of my grandmother’s poems from the collection, Machhli Jal Ki Hai Rani, the fish is the queen of the water, I could hear murmurs of familiarity coursing through the crowd. Later, many people came up to me and told me the poem was quite popular in Pakistan too.
One unforgettable meeting I had was with Zakia Shahnawaz Khan, a former member of the Provincial Assembly of the Punjab. She said that her mother, Khalida Begum, was good friends with my grandmother Damayanti.
She recalled a visit with her mother to Delhi in the early 1980s, where they met my grandparents. She told me that my grandmother used to say, “Maine adhe Lahore nu janam ditta!” (I have delivered half of Lahore).
Before my visit, I had read a book about my great-grandfather, A Family of Portraits: L Gokal Chand Bhasin and his Children, and had a conversation with my father’s sister, Manmohini Madan. Now over 90, she was a bit imprecise about the location of my grandfather’s father’s photo studio.
“Stand with your back to the Punjab Assembly and face Mall Road,” she said. “Now, move right for about half a mile on Mall Road and then cross the road. That’s roughly where the Bali studio was.”
She recalled that the family lived at 14 Cooper Road, which had been the residence of the Bishop of Lahore before them. Unfortunately, nothing remotely resembling a house existed at 14 Cooper Road.
Instead, a narrow entrance led into a compound in which there were shops making acrylic goods and the like. Here I was at the very place where my family’s past lay, and yet, there was no connection to it today.
Ahead of my visit, I had emailed the vice-chancellor of Government College (now Government College University) for permission to visit my great-grandfather’s alma mater. The registrar, Dr Shaukat Ali, said he would be glad to show me around. Although February 17 was a holiday at the university, Dr Ali drove from his residence 40 km outside Lahore to pick me up just to show me the college.
He took me around the university, familiarising me with its history since it had been founded in 1864. He spoke with great pride of some of its most famous alumni, such as the actors Balraj Sahni and Dev Anand, the Nobel Award-winning scientists Har Gobind Khorana and Dr Abdus Salam, the writer, Imtiaz Ali Taj, and Pakistan’s national poet, Allama Iqbal.
In the university auditorium, students were rehearsing Imtiaz Ali Taj’s iconic play Anarkali. Written in 1922, the play about the doomed romance between Prince Salim (later Emperor Jehangir) and the court dancer Anarkali has inspired numerous screen adaptations in India and Pakistan.
I went to visit Anarkali’s tomb, only to find that it was undergoing renovation and was covered by scaffolding.
In the university’s music room, I asked a young student to sing me a Noor Jehan song. She did a superb rendering of Niyat-e-Shauq.
Noor Jehan, the actor-singer who appeared in Hindi films before Partition and later became a cultural icon in Pakistan, was how I befriended Jamal Akbar, an investment banker from London and an avid collector of memorabilia from the cinemas of India and Pakistan.
Our friendship began online primarily due to our great love for Noor Jehan. Thanks to Jamal, I was invited to record a video podcast at Radio Pakistan.
The interview was filmed in the same recording studio where Noor Jehan had recorded nationalistic songs during the India-Pakistan war of 1965. When I visited Noor Jehan’s old home, where she lived between 1938 and 1942 and which is now a heritage site, I touched the ground by the door, saluting an artist who comes but once in a lifetime.
In the Lahore Fort, I found a further family connection. In the early 1940s, the British imprisoned and tortured freedom fighters there. My grandmother’s brother, Prem Bhasin, was an inmate there in 1941.
Though our visa exempted us from having to report to the police station, the Indian festival guests for security reasons were advised to travel across Lahore in a group or accompanied by a local. If any of us went anywhere on our own, we had to inform the hotel and travel with an escort.
As I was alone for one of my trips, I was assigned a uniformed security guard to be an escort. Mohammed Arif was a gentle soul and extremely helpful. He insisted on taking me around on his motorbike.
He also broke the ice for me with the locals at 14 Cooper Road, informing them that this was where my grandparents had lived before 1947. He took me to Mall Road where, following my aunt’s directions, I wandered to the general vicinity of the Bali and Sons Studio.
When I learnt that another participant in the festival, the well-known food vlogger Ali Rehman, had organised a tour highlighting the food of Androon Lahore (the Walled City or Old City), I knew I had to sign on.
The walk combined history, culture and cuisine through the lanes of the Walled City, which is strongly reminiscent of Old Delhi. We were to sample shaabu halwa puri, jedda lassi, laddu peethi and ghousia chaney. But after gorging on the halwa puri and the jedda lassi, we were too stuffed to try anything more.
At the famed Nadeem Butt restaurant in Lakshmi Chowk, I ate easily the best chicken karahi of my life. The one thing I made sure to get back to India was nankhatai, the shortbread biscuit made with ghee and stuffed with almonds, from the famous Khalifa Bakery in the Walled City.
The walk took us to Gali Surjan Singh, a community-driven preservation project. The houses here are being restored with the help of local residents. Baithaks (living rooms) are being created to reflect the lifestyles of the people living in this area.
Gali Surjan Singh has Lahore’s narrowest gully: only one person can go by at a time. It is said that if a man and a woman were to come face-to-face in this lane, the only way out for them would be a nikah, a wedding.
Towards the end of the walk, we saw Masjid Wazir Khan, perhaps the most beautiful mosque in Lahore.
As we were finishing our walk, I ran into Arif again. He was with another group, but this time, he was not armed. On spotting me, he excitedly went, “Arre, yeh to hamara banda hai!” (Oh, this is my friend).
Arif’s warmth was typical of the love and affection I received from every person I met in Lahore. If more and more people from India visited Pakistan, I’m sure that their perceptions of the country and Pakistanis will change for the better.
“Jinney Lahore nai vekhya,o jameya nahi,” goes the saying in Punjabi. One who hasn't seen Lahore hasn’t yet been born.
Perhaps the process of my birth has just begun.
All photos of Lahore by Karan Bali.
