We Were Artists… Not Gandi
Kanjri

(HOT SEASON : APRIL –JUNE 2000)

Lahore is a wonderful city with rich character and a worn charm. The Mughal Empire has bequeathed some glories to the modern city: the awe-inspiring Badshahi Masjid; the imposing Shahi Quila, or Royal Fort; the pretty Shalamar Gardens; and the now dilapidated tombs of Emperor Jahangir and his empress, Nur Jahan. Grand buildings inherited from the British raj sit in stately, shabby order on the broad, leafy Mall Road running through the center of town. New suburbs have grown—some affluent and some not. The streets and markets bustle and hum with life and the mosques and mausoleums are always busy. Best of all, though, is this ancient place—the Walled City—a quarter of a million people squeezed into a square mile of congested tenements and shops. It is the heart of Lahore and it carries the city's soul.

Old Lahore can't have changed much for centuries. The moat was filled in long ago and the defensive walls have gone, but the residents, constrained by ancient land boundaries and historical memory, continue to build their houses as if the walls still exist: an ageless and invisible presence. The thirteen gates into the city remain too, channeling pedestrians and traffic from the wide roads of contemporary Lahore into the narrow lanes and alleys of the Walled City. Rickshaws, horse-drawn carts called tangas, motorbikes, and small vans compete with pedestrians for space inside the walls. No vehicles of any kind enter the narrowest alleys. Neither does the sun. Only in the wider lanes and the bazaars does the sun shine directly on the ground. Most of the small passages running through the city lie in perpetual, dusty gloom.

Early morning is the best time to see the old city. During the hot season there are a couple of hours before the temperature soars and the lanes become too congested. The city wakes up and life unfolds in much the same way it must have done hundreds of years ago. The shopkeepers are busy: the butchers slice up chickens and goats, the tea shops open and the bakers prepare halva and fry puri for the first meal of the day. The fruit and vegetable sellers arrange their produce in a kaleidoscope of bright colors: plump aubergines, mooli, red carrots, sweet firm tomatoes, bundles of spinach, fresh okra, and leafy bunches of coriander and mint. Donkey carts rattle and creak down the galis, the narrow lanes, delivering goods: large round metal pots carrying milk from the villages; another piled high with sacks of flour and rice. A rickshaw whose only passengers are a dozen frantic hens stops and the goods are thrown, squawking, into the back room of a butcher's shop. In the little workshops men and boys are already at work by seven o'clock, grinding bits of metal, heating syrupy liquids over open fires, sticking unidentified items together. It is gray, dirty, repetitive work and it lasts for most of their waking day.

Heera Mandi—the Diamond Market—is a crumbling ghetto of three- and four-storey buildings tucked into the northern corner of the Walled City, right next to one of the greatest forts of Mughal India and its biggest, most perfectly proportioned mosque. The old women living here say it has been the red-light district for as long as they can remember and it flourished long before the British arrived in the mid–nineteenth century. Heera Mandi, also known as Shahi Mohalla, was important then, and in its heyday it trained courtesans who won the hearts of emperors. The old ladies insist that things used to be different in those times: women like them were respected. They were artists, not gandi kanjri—not dirty prostitutes.

I have a room in the home of Shahi Mohalla's most famous resident, Iqbal Hussain, a professor of fine art who paints portraits of the women of Heera Mandi. When I came to Lahore previously it was Iqbal who taught me most about prostitution in Pakistan and about life in the mohalla. He is an authority on the subject because he lives and breathes it: it's in his blood. He is the son of a courtesan and has spent over half a century in Heera Mandi, growing up in this house that lies in the shadow of the mosque and in the longer shadow of social stigma. His friendship gives me some protection now that I've returned to stay in the mohalla and witness its life first-hand.

Iqbal's house expands, month by month, as he scours the construction sites of the Walled City, collecting windows, doors, statues, and tiles from ancient, demolished havelis—the graceful traditional homes of the rich. He incorporates these fragments into his home, so it has become an eclectic fusion of Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh design. My room, on the third floor of the house, overlooks the biggest courtyard in Heera Mandi. It's the most beautiful room. It has three bay windows, each fitted with tiny panes of colored glass. The furniture and doors are of carved wood and the giant floor cushions, bolsters, and heavy curtains are made of golden and burgundy brocades. This room, like the whole house, has been assembled from pieces and images of old Lahore.

On the ground floor of the house Iqbal runs a restaurant where young couples meet for forbidden romantic liaisons during the afternoon. They sit in the back room and drink bottles of 7-Up in the summer and cups of coffee in the winter. The boys talk a lot and the girls giggle without reason or pause. In the evening most of the visitors are groups of well-heeled, arrogant men. At other times entire families come for an outing bringing Grandma, the babies, and assorted uncles and aunts. They dine at long tables and then traipse up to the roof to look at the Badshahi Masjid and the fort. As they pass my room I hear them puffing and complaining that the climb is steep and that there are a crippling number of steps.

There's something exciting and illicit about coming here, something that makes respectable Pakistani pulses race. They park their air-conditioned cars right outside the restaurant, rush inside, and, after their meal, peep into the courtyard—into the dangerous scandal that is Heera Mandi.

From one side of Iqbal's roof terrace you can see right into the heart of the marble-domed Badshahi mosque. All day and well into the night, straggly lines of barefoot men make their way to prayer across the vast quadrangle. At dusk, a couple of hundred boys and youths play cricket on the field by the mosque and men sit in circles deeply involved in a debate. A group of heroin addicts crouch at the edge of the grass where a copse of trees gives some shelter and privacy.

Lining the opposite horizon are the rooftops of the old city's unplanned and ramshackle houses. Black Shia Muslim flags with red fringes are strung on rusty poles, and metal panja—the mystical hand that is the symbol of Shia Islam—rise high above the buildings. The roofs are a mess of steps, crumbling bricks, powdery cement, and terraces cluttered with all kinds of debris: piles of rugs, blankets, and bits of old furniture. The day's washing is draped over walls and shutters, and here and there, almost lost in the chaos, are carved wooden doors, trellises, and ornate plasterwork—reminders of a more prosperous Heera Mandi when Lahore was still a multi-faith and multicultural city.

Forty years ago Heera Mandi was ornate: the old buildings lining the main roads had exquisitely worked jharoka—finely carved, wooden bay windows—and balconies. Today, very few remain. They have been torn down and replaced by ugly concrete blocks with simple wooden shutters or crude metal grills. The revamped buildings may be more practical to live in, but they have none of the allure of old Lahore.

Men rest on the roofs in the late sun. A few women sit with them, combing through their children's hair in search of lice. Other children lean precariously out of windows and over walls, looking into the courtyard where a couple of fat, elderly women recline on charpoys, sagging, wood-framed rope beds, gossiping and chewing and spitting out their paan. A dozen little boys race around them playing games and fighting over a tricycle. These children live in the houses surrounding the courtyard. Half a century ago some of these buildings must have been grand residences, but today they have been divided and subdivided into one-, two-, or three-room apartments. Other houses that line the narrow alleys must always have been oppressive tenements with little light and no fresh air.

By dusk the rats run and jump in a fast-moving gray stream from one building to the next. The last of the light slips behind the domes of the masjid and the azan, the call to prayer, begins. A woman sings a ghazal in one of the houses opposite, her lovely voice reverberating around the courtyard until she too hears the azan and grows quiet. She sings every day in the shadows of her room, and we catch a glimpse of her beauty when she passes the window. Sometimes she is with her children and sometimes a man comes to visit. It's always the same man, and when he beats her we pretend not to see.

I love this part of the day on Iqbal's roof terrace, four storeys above the street. I sit in the twilight, jotting ideas and images into a big, untidy notebook. There is much to write about, so much to see and understand that I fear I'll only be able to capture glimpses of this forbidden subculture. I've spent the last five years of my professional life as an academic researching prostitution and the trafficking of women in Asia. I've looked at human rights issues, debt bondage, and HIV/AIDS in locations as diverse as the clubs of Tokyo, the pedophile haunts of Phnom Penh, the girly bars of Bangkok and Manila, and the giant brothels of Mumbai, Calcutta, and Bangladesh, so large and heavily populated that they form whole subsectors of the city. Heera Mandi is like these places, and yet it is not. It still retains elements of India's traditional pleasure quarters, but it is changing fast and I have come here to record these changes; a witness to the closing of an era. I'll stay in the mohalla for a month or so, two or three times a year. Visiting for longer will be difficult because I have a job to do at home, teaching in a university, and I have three children: a boy and two pretty girls just the right age for the business. I can't bring them to Heera Mandi to stay in the dubious safety of seclusion, so they'll remain in England with my mother.

On the far side of the courtyard a couple of young women are folding dried bedsheets, laughing and moving playfully in opposite directions so that the sheets twist into a rough plait. I stop writing to watch them. Their younger brothers ignore them, too preoccupied with their kites and the rough skirmish to reach the highest point of the building. When the afternoon and evening weather is fine, dozens—sometimes hundreds—of kites flutter above the old city, tiny specks of color swooping and soaring in a dainty, pretty display. It looks such a gentle, well-mannered hobby, but in reality each kite flier is locked in deadly combat to send their rivals' kites plummeting to earth.

On the roof of a neighboring house children somersault over a bulky roll of ancient bedding. An old lady—their grandmother perhaps—sits in a corner observing the game while patiently picking sticks and tiny stones out of the lentils she's spread on a giant tray. The vision of Heera Mandi you see from the streets is only a partial view of the mohalla. There's another world inside the buildings, the hidden world of the women, and there's activity above the buildings too: the slower but ceaseless life of the inner city's rooftops.

Copyright © 2005 by Louise Brown