Daily Times

The other day I was talking to a frumpy aunty who just kept going on and on about London. Aunty was impressed by Trafalgar Square, by Madame Tussads, and by the British Museum. She knew about the Elgin Marbles, about the Tate Modern, although mercifully she tumbled when it came to naming last year’s winner of the Turner Prize (Tomma Abts).
This aunty is not alone. I have had nice, long conversations with people about the attractions of Washington, DC — the Smithsonian museums — Hadrian’s Wall and The Great Wall of China. I would say we Pakistanis are great travellers abroad.
I count myself among this lot. Like aunty, and like you (unless you are a vegetable) I have had my share of monument-hopping. I even saw Stonehenge, which is quite frankly impossible to see, given its microscopic size. (Like all things British, Stonehenge failed to live up to the hype.)
One spring, I took a cheap flight to Greece where I luxuriated in the hot sun, saw the Parthenon, and spent countless hours analysing the monuments. I had studied Greek art in college, so the trip was manna. Like many geeks, I carry slivers of information in my head.
My favourite titbit is, of course, very geeky. Did you know that so many of these monuments were actually garishly painted? Imagine the Parthenon with a layer of blue-green gold paint, and you get a totally different monument — you get a living, breathing culture.
I had a similar experience when I went to Babylon, where I expected to see redbrick ruins. Instead, I got a beautiful blue edifice with animals painted on the walls; at one level it was jarring; at another, inspiring.
‘This is how they used to live,’ I thought.
It is strange to realise that the white plaster marbles of Greek antiquity were temples, the centres of huge marketplaces, and filled with priests, singers, and soothsayers.
This never hit me until I returned to Pakistan last year, after a seven-year break, and started visiting shrines in Lahore. Today, these shrines — colourful, noisy, and boisterous — are living organisms instead of preserved mummies. In that sense, we are incredibly lucky.
From Lahore’s Data Durbar to Karachi’s shrine of Abdullah Shah Ghazi, we have a participatory culture. Even the shrine of Shah Jamal, off Lahore’s canal, which has become a bit of a tourist trap, is inclusionary; and the shrine is not a museum, but a place with boisterous music on Thursday nights. In a bit of fusion, the drummers at the shrine have partnered with a rock band.
All this is terribly exciting. So imagine my surprise when I learned that very few Pakistanis I know, from the upper-income bracket, have actually been to these places, even to Shah Jamal.
Here again, I count myself among the guilty. Before leaving for the United States for undergraduate studies, I had been to the Badshahi Mosque once, the Lahore Fort once, Jehangir’s Tomb once and the Lahore Museum once.
I had not even heard of Wazir Khan Mosque, or of Sunehri Masjid. And I grew up in Lahore!
Actually, even after I returned from abroad last year, it took me three months to actually go and see the Badshahi Mosque. Soon I discovered Wazir Khan, and wandering the lanes of old Lahore, I began to understand the nostalgia of so many writers and artists for the city. For me, Lahore Lahore Ai had just been a slogan, an empty jingoistic chant that made no sense in the boring suburbs I was raised in. Living abroad, I thrilled in city living, and returning, it was only after I walked the streets of the old city, of androon Lahore, that I understood the thrall of writers like A Hameed, who writes a weekly column in this paper’s Lahore Pages.
It is perhaps a universal condition, this, of not knowing your culture. I know New Yorkers who do not walk the Brooklyn Bridge — too touristy for them. The same thing stands here. People in Pakistan who are happy to wander abroad have rarely seen their own country. I would not gripe too much, but it gets my goat when I see people travelling to India to see the sights, which are brilliant, but ignoring their own backyard.
See the Taj, sure, but know your own stuff.
I am writing this column from Karachi, which I travelled to by train. Tomorrow, I am going to Quaid’s mausoleum. Hopefully, it will be the start of a summer where I get to see Pakistan, be Pakistani. As for you dear reader, see you at Fairy Meadows this summer.

The writer is a freelance journalist