Pak Tyre House

NOVEMBER 2000 - What’s the moaning and groaning about the closure of Pak Tea House ? For weeks there has been an unending dirge about the demise of literature’s last bastion. Appeals have been made, bodies have been formed, committees have been created, officialdom has been moved, protests have been organised, plays have been staged, mushairas have been held, reading and recitations have been invoked, sit-ins have been staged, speeches have been made and delegations have travelled hither and yon to move heaven and hell to restore the old tea house back to its former slum status. What’s all the fuss about ? In all the chanting, the owner and family have been pressurised to desist from their crude plans to convert the restaurant into something commercially more productive. No one seems to understand the owner’s point of view or even wish to hear it.

First things first. The Pak Tea House is a dump. It serves bad tea, it has never been known to cook up a storm where eats are concerned, it has tacky furniture, it looks like something you read about in horror books, it suffers from lack of money, vision and style, it has a body of ill kempt waiters and the kitchen is some place you shouldn’t go near unless you are prepared to take in a healthy dose of congo fever. So why is all hell breaking loose ? Just because some old writers used to sit there and drink endless cups of bad tea, smoke endless packets of cheap cigarettes and waste an enormous amount of time producing an equally enormous amount of bad literature does not mean that we have to hang on to a fossil that is way past its bedtime. In any case what is so sacrosanct about the old dump ?

Why is everyone convinced that should it go down, roll over and turn like a pumpkin into a Dunlop tyre, the world of literature will keel over, kick a bucket placed conveniently nearby, let out a big, theatrical sigh and die ? Is it that it represents a place where Pakistan’s greatest literature was produced and therefore must be saved ? Even if this is so, and this is far fetched by all accounts, what relevance does it have for the future ? Or is one to understand that Raffles where Somerset Maugham stopped for tea and sandwiches will automatically inspire two hundred more Maugham clones to sip a cuppa there and churn out The Razor’s Edge ? The linkage is silly as any self respecting ass will tell you. Is it that the demise of the Pak Tea House will mean that budding writers, poets and other layabouts will have no place to waste time in ? This too is superfluous and silly. There are any amount of places where anyone who has five rupees in his pocket, can waste two hours before moving on. All you need is to wander out with five rupees and you will find a hole soon enough.

To many of us, the desire of the owners, who mind you have done more for the promotion of literature than all the arts/farts councils in the country, to convert to a perfectly understandable business makes a lot of sense. Certainly that particular family has not sworn on the constitution of Pakistan to uphold the tea house as the home of literature. Why are they being forced to change their mind ? What is wrong with wanting to sell Dunlop tyres ? They are perfectly good tyres and last longer than most of the poetry that is read out at the tea house by third-rate sham artists passing off as poets, writers and intellectuals. Wearing scruffy clothes and looking like something the cat brought in, is no guarantee that great literature will follow. If there is a unified realisation that yet another Lahore landmark will soon disappear, where were these voices of our national conscience when far bigger things than a smelly restaurant were pulled down and demolished ?

If nothing else, where were they when the Mians of Raiwind uprooted some of Lahore’s greatest trees and in their place, poured concrete and tar, planted imported date palms and screwed up Lahore’s look forever ? The writers, the protest-poets were fast asleep, drunk on forty five cups of perpetually brewed tea served by perpetually ragged bearers. If that tea place is the sum total of our literary experience, it should be converted and converted fast, into a tyre shop. If this means that the writers have no place where they can spend two rupees and sit at a table for twelve hours, that’s their problem. We have ours.

As for those whose hearts haven’t stopped bleeding since the bad news first broke through, why don’t they devote their voices and whatever energies they still have and lobby for another restaurant where those who have nothing better to do after 10 am can converge and shoot the breeze till the waiters drop dead. There is no shortage of watering holes or tea holes. And for those who have been parading up and down the pavement, making our traffic mess, messier and those who have made long and boring speeches invoking the gods to action, what about starting a funding drive to build their own Pak Tea House ? We have killed off Shalimar Gardens (don’t ever go there), Noor Jehan’s tomb (or what’s left of it), vandalised the Lahore Fort, defaced or thrown into the rubbish bin, statues and memorials that were part of our history, shown utter and complete contempt for everything that was part of our past and having done all this, not even belched. Neither have we spent sleepless nights tossing and turning over the destruction of our old buildings by commercial robber barons and scumbags alias smugglers, the ravaging of our city’s beautiful gardens and the conversion of our only canal into a rubbish infested sewer with hideous objects de art that mock our few remaining sensibilities.

We allowed Kamran’s Baradari to be turned into a concrete monstrosity, sodomised the gates of the walled city, vandalised and destroyed places like the Shahi Hamam, turned the classy Mall into a road of cheap and crass plastic commercialism, and gifted Lahore’s year round filthy brown dust coating to the elegant white domes of the Badshahi mosque, yet one over-rated, run down tea shop drives everybody up the wall and threatens civilisation as we know it. The great Shezan Restaurant on The Mall which was far livelier than the PTH, was put to death quite unceremoniously. Except for one or two people, no one even yawned. This lengthy tantrum about the tea house is getting tiring. I personally hope to be there soon and buy a new set of tyres. My cup of tea ? I can think of a dozen better places. As for that tradition BS, give me radial tyres any day. What else matters in Pakistan?