Brown - The dancing girls of Lahore: selling love and hoarding dreams in Pakistans ancient pleasure district

S ELLING L OVE AND S AVING D REAMS
IN P AKISTAN S A NCIENT
P LEASURE D ISTRICT

For Maha

Five new girls are staying in the thin pimps brothel. The bold ones come to the door, laughing and pulling their veils over their hair as they glance around the courtyard. The others stay in the shadows, edging closer only occasionally to peep around the shutters or lift the bamboo blinds. Like dozens of girls who have passed through this brothel, they will spend most of their day in the damp, windowless interior of the house.

The shrine looks as if it has always been in the corner of the courtyard: as if the devout have lit oil lamps and prayed beneath the Shia banners for centuries; as if the straggly tree and the bushes have always grown there and have always been strung with pretty lights on every religious occasion. Traditions must be swift to take root in Heera Mandi because, five years ago, there was no shrine; it was the place where the pimps relaxed on wood-framed, rope-strung beds when it was too hot and humid to sit inside their den.

Another family has moved into Mahas rooms and a group of Afghans have set up a miniature refugee camp on the roof using bits of rope and ripped blankets that are permanently sodden with the winter rain. Her plants have gone from the balcony and a new collection of washing is drying slowly on the railings. The giant air cooler no longer juts precariously out of the window, threatening to crush the passers-by below. Theres no singing from the second floor of the big yellow house. Mahas voice has stopped echoing round the courtyard as she practices her ghazals, and the musicians have ceased carrying their and harmonium up the narrow spiral staircases to her rooms.

When I first came to the courtyard, things were very different. The cycle of life has spun quickly, occasionally with cruelty, usually with bitter inevitability, and sometimes with such fast-burning beauty and energy that a single moment of brilliance illuminates whole lives in the dark, hidden world of this ancient brothel quarter.

A rickshaw draws alongside me and a hand decorated with gold filigree rings beckons through the fractionally opened door. Inside, one of the passengers lifts her veil. My friends eyes are smiling at me from a girls face: Mahas daughter has blossomed into a stunning young woman.

Louise Auntie, chale, lets go, she requests with all the sweet charm she had as a child. Weve been waiting for you.

(H OT S EASON : A PRIL J UNE 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 ; 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 grownsome 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 placethe Walled Citya 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 citys soul.

Old Lahore cant 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 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 butchers shop. In the little workshops men and boys are already at work by seven oclock, 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 Mandithe Diamond Marketis 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 midnineteenth 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 not dirty prostitutes.

I have a room in the home of Shahi Mohallas 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 He is an authority on the subject because he lives and breathes it: its 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 Ive returned to stay in the mohalla and witness its life first-hand.