Andrew Miller Tour Diary: Eid in Lahore

A strange thing happened in Lahore today. The sun shone through the smog and the city remembered to breathe. The shops remained shut, the roads all but emptied, and those few rickshaw-wallahs who remained were all starched and shiny white as they showed off their brand-new shalwar kameezes. Even the goats tethered on the city's traffic islands seemed that little bit happier with life. Today, of course, was Eid.

Eid, for the uninitiated, is like Christmas and Easter all rolled into one. It's the end of the holy month of Ramzan - which means, among other things, no more fasting during the hours of daylight - and consequently it's the excuse for one big party throughout the Muslim world. Officially, this year's celebrations were to be a solemn and muted affair, in recognition of the plight of the Kashmir earthquake victims. But quite understandably, for the majority of Lahoreites, there was no passing up a chance to escape from the daily grind.

Everything stops for Eid, even England training sessions. While nets were given the heave-ho, the players instead took to the golf course to do their bit for the relief fund and compare the lengths of their newly developing moustaches. I, meanwhile, set off in a rickshaw and went to follow the crowds.

My first port of call, for no other reason than it seemed a good place to start, was to be the Lahore Museum, Kipling's Wonder House, carved in salmon-pink brickwork and situated at the top end of Lahore's main throughfare, the Mall. Instead, in the first of many bouts of miscomprehension, I ended up at the zoo. There I located roughly half the populace, the women dressed in their Sunday-best saris and the men chorusing "hellohowareyou?" as I waded towards the ticket-office. Stallholders swarmed around, attempting to sell me five-rupee bags of popcorn to feed to the monkeys, while balloon salesmen looked on ruefully, as they wondered how to pitch a five-foot inflatable giraffe to a 27-year-old white boy.

In the end I decided it was all a little too rammed - the venue for England's warm-up match was virtually next door, so there'd be plenty opportunity to return if I really really wanted to. Instead, it was back in the rickshaw, which had sensed a quick buck and was waiting for me on the off-chance (Eid, I was quickly discovering, severely compromises your prospects of a successful haggle!) and off to the old city, to visit the magnificent Badshahi Mosque.

The mosque is perhaps Pakistan's definitive image. It comprises three marbled domes and four soaring minarets of stunning simplicity but gargantuan scale. The fact that 60,000 worshippers had eased through its gates that morning gave no real clue as to the sheer magnificence of the structure. The domes that appeared so enormous as I climbed the road beneath them seemed twice the size when viewed from the top of the steps, yet such was the length of the courtyard that they still did little more than peep over the eastern wall. And the sandstone that comprised the walls and towers seemed to have a different colour for every hour of the day, from an earthy pink when the sun was at its highest to a deep foreboding crimson at dusk.


The best view of the mosque was to be obtained from the no-less-imposing Lahore Fort directly opposite the main entrance. This sprawling plateau of archeological delights is the highest point of the city, and the former stronghold of the Mughal emperors, who used to drive their elephants through the colossal Alamgir Gate and straight up into their private quarters. From here the whole of Lahore opened up beneath me, including Iqbal Park to the north, where a sprawling funfair had taken residence beneath the concrete column of the Minar-e-Pakistan, the nation's commemorative monument.

The fort was also where many of Pakistan's more active fun-seekers had chosen to spend their holiday, as they clambered up and over and round the ancient ruins, occasionally resting to refuel in the shade of one of a selection of hotpotch cafes. The one thing that did not rest, however, was their rampant curiosity and I spent the best part of two hours frantically dredging up a few ropey shards of Urdu, as an endless succession of wellwishers trotted along beside me.

I must have said "Eid Mubarak" ten thousand times if I said it once, while "Mera Urdu bahut kamzoor hai" ("My Urdu is a bit rubbish," or sentiments of that variety!) seemed a satisfactory response to anything too baffling. One chap, however, outflanked me on all fronts. His volley of questions were too painstakingly constructed to ignore, but too complex to answer clearly, and a cat's cradle of confusion ensued. By the end of it all, he had taken it upon himself to believe I was an expectant father (my mythical son, apparently, is to be christened Freddie Flintoff!) and as a result, I had been whisked away to a nearby stall to meet his friends and drink a celebratory coke!

After performing linguistic hand-stands of that magnitude, it was time to retreat to saner pastures. Such as the fun-fair, where I paid 10 rupees for a "horer" (sic) show, and waited in the dark for ten minutes listening to the sound of a loud argument backstage. Eventually, one man in a monkey suit reluctantly appeared from behind a blacked-out curtain, and started beating the walls with a whopping great stick. After two or three minutes, he stomped off whence he came, and I emerged back into the daylight blinking my incomprehension in all directions. It felt at the time like a metaphor, but then it had been a pretty long day. Even so, the only real fear in Pakistan is the fear of the unknown. Conquer that, and the rest can turn out to be pretty comical.
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some amusing stuff.

one for Alan Brazil to read perhaps ?

Seems like he enjoyed himself, which is what people with open minds would do