Lahore wakes up in spring. Warm breezes roll through Pakistan's proudest, most
cosmopolitan city, and inspire a brief, intense season of weddings and
parties before the massive, deadening heat of summer. And if there is a
symbol of this busying, quickening time of the year, it is the kite. Not
one, but thousands, a mad flock flying above the city.
Don't be confused. The kites of Lahore are not the kites of London, or the
Lake District. They are not plastic or flown in isolation by serious-looking
people in the park, holding onto tough nylon lines and steady, well-made
handles. They are kites flown in the ways of the north Indian, Pakistani or
Afghan: where the aim is not so much a Mary Poppins moment but the peitch,
the cutting of your neighbour's kite out the sky and claiming it.
Kite-flying in Lahore, which culminates in the annual festival of Basant, a
24-hour binge of battling shapes, is a communal, noisy event, where people
climb onto the roofs of their houses, cook, eat, dance and compete with each
other. It is the same sport as described in Khalid Hosseini's 2003 novel The
Kite Runner (to be released as a film in 2007), only more so.
Lahoris claim that the sport is in their blood, a part of who they are. An
otherwise calm psychology professor in the city explained it to me this way: "It's
a unique game. You do not fly the kite, you fly yourself. It is a
sensational game." He went on: "It's mood and spirit has always
been the same: to defeat your competitor and celebrate with a loud voice,
this is the Punjabi way."
I arrived in Lahore earlier this month, a few days before the start of
Basant, which usually opens as darkness falls on a Saturday night in late
February or early March. A walled city that was for centuries a hub of
political and artistic power, Lahore sits on the old Grand Trunk Road that
joins Kabul and New Delhi and used to be known as the Paris of India.
Nowadays it sits on the border of Indian Punjab, 54km from Amritsar, and is
the undisputed cultural capital of Pakistan: the home of its newspapers,
publishing firms, fashion houses and Lollywood, the country's nascent film
industry.
If you can see past Lahore's extraordinary traffic - a kind of perpetual
swerve of motorbikes, donkeys, buses, tiny Japanese cars and, occasionally,
bigger Western ones - you can read the city's history in its streets.
In the north-east corner there is the old city, a tight, brown, spaghetti of
bazaars and crumbling buildings, overseen by the magnificent fort and
Badshahi mosque, built by the Mughal emperors of the seventeenth century.
Spilling out of the walled city is a succession of orderly, British avenues,
which are lined with trees and Lahore's major institutions: its railway
station, post office, courts, provincial assembly and museum, all built in
the striking Mughal-colonial style.
There is a mixture of time standing still and moving decidedly on. The Mall,
its name unchanged, remains the central artery of Lahore and still holds the
Zamzama, the talismanic cannon made famous by Rudyard Kipling's poem of the
same name. But the streets are lined with billboards and news tickers now,
and the platform outside the Punjabi Assembly that used to carry a statue of
Queen Victoria holds a glass-cased Koran and a collection of gifts from the
1974 world Islamic conference.
When I arrived, Lahore's traffic also spoke of the coming of the kites. The
commonest form of transport in the city is the Honda motorbike - normally
emblazoned with a tough-sounding slogan, like "Death Game" or "Fly
Racer" or (my favourite) "Cash Deposit" - and many of these
had been rigged up to protect their riders from kite strings. Motorcyclists
had patched together aerials and strips of piping to make loops from their
handlebars to their exhausts so stray kite strings hanging across the road
wouldn't catch them by the neck.
And this was my discovery over the coming days, that kite-flying in Lahore,
like many hugely popular, competitive sports, had become complicated, lethal
and very controversial.
It comes back to the peitch. The desire to slice through the strings
of all the other kites in the sky has fuelled an unhealthy hunger in Lahore
for ever sharper and even corrosive strings. Known as dur, kite string has
for a long time come in a bewildering range of sizes, lengths and degrees of
edginess. Once you know that length is measured (simultaneously) in "pieces",
"Goths" and yards (three pieces equals seven-and-half Goths equals
2,000 yards), you get the picture.
But in the last few years, dur has evolved to bring new, modern dangers:
threads covered in glass powder, coated in acid or reinforced with metal.
When these strings fall, they entangle in Lahore's electricity supply and
hang, dangerously across Lahore's busy roads. In the weeks leading up to
this year's Basant, seven people, including a three-year-old girl and a
four-year-old boy, both riding as passengers on motorbikes, were killed by
the strings. Last year, 24 people died in similar accidents.
The kites are also seen as responsible for moral dangers. Basant, derived
from the Hindu word Bassand, is a secular, Indian festival in which, as the
legend goes, the kites are supposed to represent the swaying of mustard
flowers and so the coming of spring. As a non-lslamic event that is
associated with loud music, eating and drinking, it has always attracted the
criticism of ascetic Muslims.
In recent years, the increasingly corporate nature of the festival - large
Western and Indian companies tend to hire roofs in the old city to watch the
kite-flying - and the hazards of the newer kite strings have only added to
the unease. Syed Muhammed Abba, a teacher in a Shia madrassa, told me that
the festival was a symptom of Lahore's moral decline.
"I read it in the newspaper the other day, that a man had rented his roof
in the old city for a million rupees for two days," he said. "You
will have all the things not allowed by Islam right there. There will be a
lot of extracurricular activities."
This year, for the first time in Basant's long history, the row culminated in
an official ban on kite-flying. Less than 48 hours before the kites were due
above the city, a copy of The Daily Times pushed under my door at the Pearl
Continental hotel said in clear, unmistakeable letters: "Basant
cancelled due to mullah pressure."
No one could believe it. How would the police enforce a ban? Rumours started
immediately that the Punjabi Assembly was meeting to overturn it. There were
even stories of police roadblocks, searching cars for kites.
As the debates ran on, I went sightseeing. Lahore is full of relatively
tourist-less wonders and any tour of the city should start at the
magnificent complex of the Badshahi mosque and the Lahore Fort, which face
each other around a handsome courtyard on the northernmost edge of the old
city. Look for an official guide (wearing a green cap and with a laminated
ID) and don't pay more than 500 Pakistani Rupees to see them both.
Built by the Mughal Emperor Akhbar in 1566 and then modified by four
centuries of Mughal, Sikh and British rule, Lahore Fort tumbles over 42
acres of gardens and pavilions. It has a beautiful, sad aspect. You walk
among Lahori couples and families amid fading frescoes and chipped Afghan
marble. Although a few areas, including the perfectly ornate Shish Mahal
(Hall of Mirrors) and Moti Masjid (Pearl Mosque) are being renovated, the
overall feel of the place is of a kind of mythic cemetery.
There are gates and staircases for elephants, windows where flower petals
were thrown onto the royal family, courtyards and fountains for the ladies
of the court. One open hall built by Shah Jahan in 1631 to hear the
petitions of his subjects was later converted to a hospital for British
soldiers. If you are feeling bold, look for a locked door on the way down to
the Shah Burj gate and ask your guide whether you can see the basement rooms
where the Mughals spent the hot summers. Inside is a cool, dark series of
rooms where the red and yellow frescoes survive and bolts of light show the
way.
Just opposite the fort is Lahore's most astonishing building, the Badshahi
mosque, finished by Akhbar's great grandson, Emperor Aurangzeb in 1674. Said
to hold 100,000 people, the mosque is a giant of simplicity, its three
bulbous domes bursting over the courtyard. Despite the constant thrum of
passing traffic, its acoustics remain unsettlingly good. Go to the prayer
hall and stand facing a corner and have a friend stand diagonally opposite,
also facing into the wall. You can speak to each other in a normal voice,
the walls doing the talking.
Lahoris are famously proud of their city - the local saying "Lahore is
Lahore" is more self-satisfied than self-deprecating - and each will
have their favourite sight that they insist you see. For me the great treats
were the Wazi Khan Mosque, a fly-blown feast of intricate mosaics built for
Shah Jahan's royal physician, and walking through the teeming Anarkali
Bazaar.
For food, you must eat one evening at Cooco's, a restaurant run by Iqbal
Hussein, Lahore's pre-eminent artist that looks unforgettably over the
Badshahi Mosque. If you are very brave, one morning you should also opt for
the Punjabi breakfast of choice: nehari, a slow stew of lamb with lemons and
coriander, touched off with a plate of brain masala. I recommend the
Mohammedi Nehari restaurant on Mozang Chowk.
Also unmissable is an afternoon on the Indian-Pakistani border at Wagah, where
every day at sunset, elite, courtly soldiers from both armies perform a
ludicrous goose-stepping ceremony to close the gates. Cheered on by stadiums
erected on each side of the border and sustained by patriotic pop music, the
soldiers march with an uncontrollable fervour and disdain and - you suspect
- a bit of good humour.
But where were the kites? As night fell on the Saturday of Basant, it seemed
that the ban was holding. At an event at the Asif Jah Haveli, a beautiful,
redstone palace converted to a girl's school, the sky stood empty over
hundreds of Lahore's bureaucrats and businessmen who had gathered for the
festival. Even more surprisingly, although the streets outside fugged with
traffic and intensity, there was also nothing but quiet in the courtyards of
the Haveli Baroodhkana, the home of Mian Yousef Salahuddin, a businessman
and former old city politician who is the chief promoter of the festival.
Only Imran Khan, the former cricketer and politician, stood talking with a
few western journalists invited to write about the now-grounded kites.
But, in time, the kites flew. Only one or two at first, white shapes,
silently twitching over the old city, which, with its narrow alleys and
endless roofs is the central landscape of Basant. But then there were more,
and the police were taunted to respond and fulfil their impossible task,
looking up from the twisted streets to spot kites in the narrow strips of
night sky above. By the end of the night, there were reports of police using
wooden ladders, some hopelessly short, to clamber up buildings and arrest
more than 100 people for defying the ban.
Saturday, it turned out, was the dress rehearsal. Soon after noon on Sunday,
the first kites, spots of red and yellow and blue, started to bob and fly
above the Mochi Gate, one of old Lahore's twelve gates and the epicentre of
the city's kite-flying obsession.
Two hours later I stood on a roof above the Wazir Khan Mosque, its
multicoloured minarets seemingly touchable, and saw a skyful of movement. I
was assured that this was only a "mini-Basant", a party of
protest, but every rooftop I could see held a clutch of silhouettes, heads
facing upwards, hands awhirr controlling the kites, large, small, patterned
and simple, that jerked in their thousands above. Music tumbled across the
skyline and every few moments, a kite would be cut and shouts would follow,
sometimes unintelligible, sometimes a clear yell of "Bokata!" ("String
is cut!"), the traditional cry of Basant.
From the most exuberant parties came firecrackers and the spitting rattle of
machine guns fired in joy. It was a strange, intoxicating scene. I saw a
butterfly shuffle past. What must it have thought? Because the unseen
strings only made the kites seem more alive, apparently endowed with a
natural sense of having fun, flirting and bickering with each other.
It was only when I tried to fly a kite that I realised the skill beneath the
disorder. Frantically trying to keep the thing in the air as it wafted out
over the neighbourhoods of Lahore, I hauled the string through my hands,
tangling it in my shoes, only for the thread to spring suddenly towards me,
dead, my kite falling in the distance, to be claimed by a happy Lahori and
then restrung and sent up in the sky in more capable hands.
Flights:
London to Lahore on Pakistan International Airlines: £518
Hotel:
Pearl Continental Hotel: 10,000 rupees per night (£95)
Kites:
One Gudda, sturdy, small kite: 12 rupees (11p)
