Mound of the Dead 3

                       “He sat, in defiance of municipal orders, astride the gun Zam-Zammah      
                         on her brick platform opposite the old Ajaib-Gher – the Wonder House,
                         as the natives call the Lahore Museum... Who hold Zam-Zammah, that
                         'fire-breathing dragon', hold the Punjab, for the great green-bronze
                         piece is always first of the conqueror's loot.”
                                                                                                      Rudyard Kipling, Kim


Lahore is at least two thousand years old, and has been invaded, at one time or another, by almost everything that moved in middle Asia- the Shahi in the 11th century, the Ghaznavids in the 12th, the Ghurids in the 13th, the Mughals in the 16th, the Sikhs in the 18th, the British in the 19th, and an Australian, Kiwi, and Canadian trio in the 20th. Of all of the occupiers, the most recent were also the most desperate.
The Lahore YMCA was built in 1876, to commemorate the Golden Jubilee of Queen Victoria. We arrived by rickshaw to meet the corpulent Christian custodian, who provided us with three orange sodas, and a wait of as many hours. When it became clear that our room was still not going to be ready for several more hours, he let us into another, for ‘refreshment.’ I used my knife to auger the rust out of the holes in the shower rose. It provided just enough anemic brown water to double bend the legs of the iron tub beneath it, and spill a soapy lake onto the bathroom floor.
Somewhat revived, we emerged for a corrosive curry at the Pak Tea House, a venerable old intellectual café more renown for the Urdu poetry meetings of the literary Halqa-i-Arbab-e-Zouq ‘Circle of the Men of Good Taste’, than anything good tasting. We wrote postcards, and returned to the YMCA. Our room was ready. It took all that time to clean because it was the size of a basketball court. It needed be that big, to let the curry monster out.


                                “Young man, there's no need to feel down.
                                  I said, young man, pick yourself off the ground.
                                  I said, young man, 'cause you're in a new town...
                                  It's fun to stay at the YMCA...”


Fun.
Our first stop next morning was to buy more toilet paper. Rudyard Kipling, in a dispute with his American publisher, handwrote the text of his satire, Putnam, on toilet paper, with chapters on ‘Explosion’ and ‘Exhaust.’ It was going to be a Rudyard Kipling kind of day. His novel, Kim, was set in the vicinity of the Lahore Museum, and Rudyard’s father, John Lockwood Kipling, had been one of the earliest and most famous of its curators.
Inside the Mughal-Gothic building, among the collections of doorways and musical instruments, and jewelry and coins, textiles and pottery, and arms, was a stunning display of Gandharan sculpture, and one in particular that changed my view of Buddism forever. If there ever was a convergence point where East and West actually met, it would have been here, where Alexander the Great conquered this ancient kingdom in the vale of Peshewar, and where his Greek soldiers intermarried into a Buddhist civilization that lasted another fourteen centuries. My previous mental image of Buddha had been the jolly fat cartoon Chinese kitchen Buddha, but here, in the Lahore Museum, was a realistic Bactrian Greek statue of an emaciated bearded Siddhartha.
The blue schist stone Fasting Buddha was an image of extreme asceticism and renunciation. My own asceticism was the direct result of my stomach’s renunciation of corrosive curry, but the pain and suffering in his sunken eyes was not dissimilar to my own. He looked like a starving spider, caught in his own web of bones and sinew and shawl. He was magnificent.
Kipling waited outside the museum as well. The Zamzama was a large bore cannon, now also called ‘Kim’s gun.’ It was cast in 1757, from the copper and brass kitchen utensils requested from the residents of Lahore by Shah Wali Khan, prime minister in the reign of the Aghan King Ahmed Shah Durrani. One of the Persian insciptions calls it ‘a destroyer even of the strongholds of heaven.’ The Zamzama is over fourteen feet long, and it’s name means ‘fire-dispensing dragon,’ a term now borrowed by local men to describe other sorts of prowess.
After fire-dispensing the remnants of the previous day’s corrosive curry monster we took a rickshaw to the old Lahore Fort, over twenty hectares and thirteen gates of Shahi Qilais citadel, dating from before the emperor Akbar. I stood on his Diwan-e-Aam balcony, in front of which a thousand year old gold coin had been unearthed, twenty-five feet below the lawn. The place was that old. Six hundred years after someone dropped the gold coin, Shah Jahan added the Shish Mahal Hall of Mirrors Palace, the Moti Masjid Pearl Mosque, and the Diwan-e-Khas Hall of Special Audience.
But it was his Shalimar Gardens, for which the Express that brought us here was named, with its three terraces of Pleasure, Goodness, and Life, designed to mimic the Islamic paradise of the afterlife described in the Koran, that Lahore remembers him best for. In Persian, Shalimar means ‘Abode of Love.’ What else could it have meant? The Shalimar Gardens in Kashmir, created by his predecessor Jahangir, would soon have more meaning.
When the British arrived at the citadel, they demolished the southern wall, in an attempt to defortify the Fort and the mythology that persisted. Their attempt, as the conductor in Rohri had remonstrated, was ‘incomplete.’
We followed the inlaid courtyard through to the gardens, and the open expanse of the Badshahi Mosque. The Moghul emperor Aurangzeb built it over a two-year period in 1671. You can see it from fifteen kilometers away. Capable of accommodating over 95,000 worshippers, it was still the largest mosque in the world during our visit in 1983. We climbed one of the minarets for the view and the vertigo.
A rickshaw pedaled us back to the ‘Y’, and the smooth soporific cycling lulled us all into a new magnanimity and forgetfulness. We tried a different chicken dish back at the Pak Teahouse.
The night was invaded by the masala monster and, at one time or another, by almost everything that moved in middle Asia. It didn’t matter. The next destination was only twenty miles and two hours away, and we were leaving the next morning. Three years from a field of buttercups, and my first ride, I was heading for the jewel in the crown.
India.



                            “This is a brief life, but in its brevity it offers us some splendid
                              moments, some meaningful adventures.”
                                                                                            Rudyard Kipling, Kim