No past, no future

JUNE 2000 - The Shalimar Gardens at Lahore, are dead. It is not official yet, but does that matter? The years of official neglect, public indifference and our well-established apathy about our past have all taken toll of these once beautiful gardens. What now remains is a mere shadow of their grandeur, a shell that has no real substance. All Pakistanis should hang their heads in shame, provided they still have heads and shame. Personally I think they have neither, me included.

Last week, at the insistence of two guests from Europe who had heard tales about the legendary gardens, we took them on a visit to the gardens, fearing the worst. We were not disappointed. It was five in the afternoon and as we entered the gardens from the small side gate (the main door is never open to the people for reasons best known to those who are happily eradicating these gardens), we were greeted with the sight of dead fountains. There is nothing sadder than a fountain that’s silent, and Shalimar’s long line of fountains were silent. They were ‘under repair’ which given the official interpretation means that they could be permanently out of commission or quite simply that they can only be switched on when dignitaries are visiting. Why dignitaries should wish a large plot of land with some trees and some broken pathways, is of course beyond me. Walking from one level to the second and the third, all that was visible was decay. The walkways are cracking, the walls are crumbling, the gardens are dry, dusty and forlorn. The trees somehow struggle on, maintaining some little dignity in the death all around. An air of desolation and hopelessness hangs heavily in the summer evening. This is not a living monument.

Our visitors are suitably impressed by the scale and size of the gardens, the majestic sweep of the view, the concept that gave birth to such a splendid creation of form and space, but that is about all. They are too polite to show their disappointment and we are running out of explanations, which is understandable since all we can talk about is the 17th century and what Shalimar looked like then. All we can talk about is the past, the imagination of an emperor who had a dream, who wanted gardens to house one man for a year or thousands for a night, that contained enough fruits and vegetables to feed an army for as long as it wished to stay and yet were intimate enough to play the perfect setting for romance, that as per royal decree the frigid waters of the Himalayas were transported through an underground canal to run the fountains, that every single tile and fresco were part of a symmetry and design that symbolised the painstaking care that created the gardens.

In some growing desperation since what we speak and what we see are two entirely separate things, refer to the creator of these gardens as the same visionary who had the Taj built, but the analogy is ridiculous. The Taj is alive in spite of problems of pollution. The gardens are not even on artificial life support systems. As we reach the middle level making our way past the dead fountains, we are greeted with another sorry sight. The central quadrangle with its dead fountains is one large pond of green, murky and smelly water where dead tadpoles float in a final image of the end of everything. Instead of goldfish we have frogs floating silently, a final insult to our bestiality. There is an appreciable stench that comes when you have filthy water lying around for weeks. A few stragglers (local tourists) hang about, bored, sweaty, vacant-eyed. An old man with a flowing white beard surfaces, introduces himself as a guide and says since he retired and is not getting any pension (!) he makes a small living narrating the history of the gardens. He couldn’t be making an awful amount. Another young man strolls up and asks if we would like the fountains switched on. He drifts away and a little later, they struggle and come to some sort of life. The air suddenly cools down and for a brief moment, a thin vision of what the gardens could be like, comes through. We walk on.

Some years ago, we were involved in planning an elaborate ceremony where about 500 guests were served dinner followed by a Kathak performance. We were given special permission to use the gardens and spent a week cleaning the entire area, fumigating the grounds, repairing the dead fountains, painting the pools and installing lights to showcase the fabulous architecture. At that time we had lit the gardens with floodlights and over 15,000 oil lamps without staining any of the walkways. What we managed to create was a dream. Our guests that night were enchanted. The two of us who had put that majestic show together, are this evening escorting our guests through that dreamland, now a wasteland. We are burdened with our knowledge of that magical night, which is in cruel paradox to what we have now. There is nothing we can say except shrug and mutter platitudes. Some years back, a group of us were part of a desperate mission to raise funds for a film on the Shalimar Gardens that the Smithsonian wished to produce. They had chosen the gardens for what promised to be an epic, but after begging every one for two years, we couldn’t raise a single cent. No one was interested, neither the American multinationals with big budgets, nor the government of Mian Shahbaz Sharif. The agile and slippery Mushahid Hussain promised the moon and delivered zilch. In the end, the Smithsonian simply gave up. I would have a year earlier. The same apathy that has killed the gardens was much in evidence when we went around with our corporate begging bowl. Had we asked for funding for a Meena Bazar, a vacuous Fashion Show, we would have been quite successful, but for such things as the Shalimar, there is nothing. Neither is there a sense of panic that we are losing one of the world’s great monuments.

Any income that comes is largely gobbled up the government. What the Shalimar gets is next to nothing. In the amount of funds it has at its disposal, it could probably run a small vegetable patch, not a public monument built on a grand scale. At the time we had been loaned the gardens, we discovered there was no electricity – it had been cut years ago for non-payment of dues (we brought in generators). There were also no toilets and we had built two overnight, but this time we wisely chose to stay as far away as possible from them. We all know what happens to those who venture too near public toilets. As we trudged away past the beggars and the women force-selling useless trinkets, we were relieved that we could at last stop giving faint explanations. It is useless to suggest what can be done with the gardens, thought I think that to escape the wrath of the Moghuls, we should simply close them down out of respect for their souls. The Shalimar Gardens are a dead monument of a dead nation. As my friend rightly put it leaving the sad Shalimar, ‘if you don’t care about your past, you will have no future.’