Walking the streets with the Dahta Lahore’s phosphorescent guts are blurred at night in November but in this night Jomay raat the Dahta walked in green neon and around his marble epitaph a thousand beggars begged in a unity insured by a complete selfishness only Hujwiri walked among them in wide-fingered benevolence; sight was half-played on the retina as of a half-blind man. Incessant petal-drops spectruming an opulent rain that drapes in Shalimar translucent muslins wafting around a lung-seducing musk-incense: the heat-scent of the devout as he gapes in cup-palmed awe and a little love. Some beggars swayed gnarled dying tree-trunks meanly clothed in winter leaves through which dim-glowed the night-lights of bazaar nocturnality; some beggars dressed in tiers of foreign suiting and fat of Lahori ghee rolled one eye to Arabic calligraphy one to Swiss watch; some eyes shone in kahjal darker than the effacing black burkha but the lights danced in their brief pupils. One crawled on fours—up my hairy calf in grotesque impossible contortions of the human mind that still blinked the misplaced sanguine smile—so beautifully irrelevant. The flies had gone for the season the dogs perennially unimpressed and didn’t care anyway soft-nosed they prodded warm smoky dung; they had seen it all before: the dazzling lights then then the dazzling dark all the professional beggars re-acting their roles with first year RADA earnestness the much-moneyed, heavy-vehicled beggars sure of their goodness in this visit to the Dahta who walked among them all palm-humoured and light equating all, elevating all. He wasn’t frown-minding that some were deadly serious it was all in the game of love. Not for him—he know for when he walked in his many-varied neons he also mixed in the minds of his pilgrims and amongst them there were also some like the whore of the red tit of the next door mandi hanging from low garish-painted doorways crepuscular lives so like his own locale but he was contended this evening A happy child urinated with abandon; a lal-bearded villager almost in orgasm of his onanistic religious frenzy; a group-man grown holy was serious as serious as Alamgir at Friday asr in a Ramzan in the Deccan. “Na koi banda raha na koi banda nawaz.” Iqbal should have known better as the cane-waving policeman smiles at me and takes care to reply in his English but the Dahta is unequivocal in his care and perhaps the false beggar returns from him richer. Fires that explode like festive crackers at the pit of my stomach up through me to a Christmas ringing in my ears I sense but do not smell onion and sweat on the tongues of the masses pressing each other through the bazaar’s intestines that creak with indigestion The Badshahi now rose dated splendour in black lumpy papier-mache. Blind tangah horses chilled and blackly farting into the mists; idle men with fierce moustaches idling with one hand into the idleness of their shalwars and static between rising pyramids of salt-white batashas sit active pharaohs in ready expectation of another Moses—who never comes. They were all there: love remains love however crudely exhibited faith turns to love however clumsily expressed love creates faith from whatever quarter coming. I came back that evening levitated on the horns that tossed me acute-feeling the goodness and friendship of the Dahta flowing in the streets of his Nagri and in me where it mattered.