Saffronart's Spring Auction Disappoints

The art market is getting ugly. Saffronart's spring sale, which concluded two days ago, provided proof, if any was needed. Substantial works by M F Husain, S.H. Raza, F.N. Souza, Ram Kumar, Ganesh Pyne, Akbar Padamsee and Prabhakar Barwe among the moderns, and Atul Dodiya, Anju Dodiya, G R Iranna, Shibu Natesan (canvas pictured above) and Justin Ponmany among the contemporaries, failed to find bidders. It was a particularly disastrous auction for Raza, three of whose works were on offer, with high estimates of 20, 35 and 90 lakh rupees respectively. There was no interest anywhere close to those price points, and all three paintings had to be brought in.
Saffronart's December 2008 sale, the first major auction in India after the crash of September-October 2008, was seen as a test for the market. Though that sale didn't do spectacularly, failing to reach the low estimate in total value, there was something like a sigh of relief at the end. The predominant sentiment was it could have been much worse. Well, it is much worse now.
Consider these figures: In September 2006, Saffronart sold paintings and sculptures worth 15,964,190 dollars, or 68,64,60,170 rupees, with a high estimate for the sale pegged at 13,194,578 dollars, and a low estimate at 10,548,317 dollars. That was the biggest figure for a single sale it ever achieved. The market kept growing after that point, but the Bombay based auction house faced strong competition from Christie's and Sotheby's. In June 2008, when signs of a slowdown were visible, Saffronart garnered 9,721,241 dollars, or 38,88,49,620 rupees from its quarterly auction, still comfortably beating the low estimate of 6,759,000 dollars and high estimate of 8,343,125 dollars Three months later, just before the meltdown, the total value came down to 7,155,607 dollars, or 28,62,24,293 rupees, above the low estimate of 4,158,500 and high estimate of 5,298,000 dollars (these figures are not strictly comparable, because the auctions had a varying focus, sometimes concentrating on the moderns, at other times on a younger group of artists, but that's irrelevant to the main thrust of this post).
The figure for the just completed March 2009 sale? A total winning value, inclusive of buyer's premium, of 1,577,375 dollars, 7,88,68,725 rupees. In dollar terms, that's more than 90% below the gross of the September 2006 sale; the rupee total looks a little better, just a little, because the dollar is currently trading at historically high levels against the Indian currency.
On the positive side, 69% of lots sold in the March sale, up from 63% three months previously, and not precipitously lower than the 80% achieved in September 2008 just before Lehman Brothers went under. That 69% figure shows Saffronart is realistic about what collectors are willing to pay at the moment, and has modified its estimates and reserve prices accordingly.
The conventional thing to say at this point is that buyers are becoming more selective. I've never believed that sort of thing happens. Yes, a canvas by the late abstractionist V.S. Gaitonde beat its $100,000 high estimate by 30%, and an early Jitish Kallat climbed to its low estimate of 20 lakh rupees (these sale prices include the buyer's premium). But among the few high value lots that convincingly surpassed estimates were a B. Prabha and a Vaikuntam, proving that bad taste knows no recessions.

Dialectics

I've been reading an article by Steve Coll published in the New Yorker, which made news a fortnight ago by revealing that India and Pakistan were close to a deal on the future of Kashmir. I was struck by this relatively unimportant passage: "The Indian troops on occupation duty in Kashmir-- about five hundred thousand soldiers and paramilitaries--rarely speak the Kashmiri dialect. Locals resent them, and they return the attitude".
The New Yorker, world renowned for its obsessive fact checking, failed to recognise that Kashmiri is a language, not a dialect. The confusion between the two terms was a regular source of annoyance when I lived in England. Some well-meaning professor or fellow student would ask me, as standard small talk, "So which language do you speak at home?"
"English, mainly, though my mother tongue is Marathi".
"Marathi? Is that a dialect of Hindu"?
"Hindu refers to a member of of a religious group. The language is Hindi. But Marathi is a separate language. It has its own literary tradition going back nearly a thousand years. It's as different from Hindi as Portuguese is from French."
"So there are, what, a dozen or so languages spoken in India?"
"No, hundreds".
"Surely you're speaking of dialects."
Resisting the urge to point out that I might know a bit more about these matters since I studied literature while he studied biochemistry, I'd say, merely, "I'm speaking of languages. If you count dialects, the figure would be much higher."At this point, the person would look away, unconvinced, then change the subject.
What was annoying was the racial division always implicit in such conversations. White people spoke languages. Dark people mainly spoke dialects. Just like dark people in white lands were immigrants, white people in dark lands were expatriates. It didn't matter if Arthur C Clarke had settled in Sri Lanka for life; he was always an expat.
Going back to the New Yorker's assertion about security forces in Kashmir: since most of those personnel come from outside the state, it is obvious they won't speak Kashmiri. But referring to Kashmiri as a dialect rather than a language makes it seem like the military men are unwilling rather than unable to speak to Kashmiris in their own tongue.
I'm quibbling, I know. It's been a slow week mentally.

The New Art India

I received in the mail a copy of the latest Art India, the magazine I used to edit a decade ago. It is supposedly a double issue, but no thicker than any normal volume, and is available at the usual price of Rs.150. What gives? Well, Art India has been appearing seriously behind schedule, and this will help it catch up somewhat. If I'm right, the current issue combines the October 2008 and January 2009 editions, which means the publication has only three months to cover now. The double issue is a neat trick except for subscribers who, I suppose, will receive three volumes for the price of four.
The double issue focuses on interviews, a good idea sunk by some ordinary question-and-answer sessions. Part of the problem is, I think, that many of the artists have been featured before in Art India and do not say anything new or revealing. Of those interviewed for the first time, Ranbir Kaleka is asked this opening question by Latika Gupta: "Do you think your paintings and videos have evolved over time?" How is an artist supposed to respond? "No, I think my practise has been static for decades"? Second question in the same interview: "Has the quality of your involvement with video art changed?" Third: "What do you think about the state of video art in India?" Seriously cookie cutter stuff. (Update: Latika has written to clarify matters, please read her two comments on this post).
Where the interviewer asks more probing questions, the length of the articles gets in the way. Most of the pieces are only about a thousand words long. That's just enough to get some basics sorted, stuff any newspaper would ask. The art magazine interview should really start from this point on. The editor Abhay Sardesai's chat with Sudhir Patwardhan works well, despite Patwardhan being a regular on Art India's pages, because it is allowed to proceed for a relatively long duration. I recall reading, in my mid-teens, a book called the Playboy Interview, which blew me away. Each piece was 10,000 words or so in length. Three of these exhaustive interviews I remember well even now: Fidel Castro, Germaine Greer and John Lennon. I hope someday to conduct an interview of that kind of quality.
I found the interviews with artists over 45 much more engaging than those with their younger counterparts, and this is something I've experienced repeatedly. There's a mix of personal experience and interpretation at play in the way Sudhir Patwardhan, Nataraj Sharma and (given a chance) Ranbir Kaleka, speak about their work which gives conversations with them a fine texture. Sharma constructs such marvellously modulated sentences, I'm inclined to believe he wrote rather than spoke his answers. For younger artists, concepts and politics take the place of introspection, and neither the concepts nor the politics are incisively thought through.

All That Is Holi

Holi must be the oldest widely celebrated festival in the world. Indians are fond of tracing everything back to the Vedas, but I suspect the Holi rites were in place long before those texts were composed. Though the Holi bonfire has been connected with Hindu legend through the stories of Kamdeva being burned by Shiva's third eye, and Prahlad being saved from a fire in which the demoness Holika was consumed, these tales do little to explain the ritual as a whole.
It's pointless looking for godly explanations, actually, that's not what Holi is about. People gather round a bonfire under a spring full moon, sing obscene songs, and get drunk. The next morning, they gather to smear each other with pigment powders, get drenched in coloured water, and consume enough bhaang to be stoned for the rest of the day. What can be found of spiritual worth in any these activities?
What Holi needs for it to be enjoyable is a community. As soon as strangers come into the picture, the festival threatens to become predatory rather than participatory. That, unfortunately, is how it is in most cities. I foresee a time when there will be large-scale Holi celebrations conducted the way Navratri dances are organised now. I'm surprised nobody's taken the lead yet, I'm sure there's a substantial market out there.

The Times They Are a-Changin', Again

Just saw Revolutionary Road, a tale about the boredom of suburban life in 1950s America. The director, Sam Mendes, has also made a film about the boredom of suburban life in 1990s America, but I want to stick with the 1950s for now.
Through that decade, and into the mid '60s, the highest selling albums of the year in the United States were soundtracks or cast recordings of musicals. My Fair Lady, The Sound of Music, West Side Story, Camelot and Hello Dolly all achieved the top spot, but the run ended after 1965's Mary Poppins. By the end of the 1960s, a very different sound had grabbed possession of the charts. The best-selling record of 1968 was Are you Experienced? by the Jimi Hendrix Experience. The following year, the psychedelic rock of Iron Butterfly won with In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida. The only musical to head the annual charts in the next thirty years was 1971's Jesus Christ Superstar, banned in more than one country for its supposed irreligiosity and unusual take on Judas and Mary Magdalene.
How could Mary Poppins give way in just three years to Jimi Hendrix, musically and politically a world apart? The move from one to the other reveals, as effectively as any other bit of data, the cultural fracture that attended the coming of age of the baby boom generation.
Demographic / cultural changes in the US since then have been less drastic, but the results of a survey published yesterday show a clear shift in the nature of Americans' religious belief in the course of one generation. Identification with a single religious denomination, such as Baptist or Catholic, has dropped substantially; the number of non-denominational Christians has risen; and the percentage of people identifying themselves as non-religious has doubled in 18 years, to 15. New England is looking more like old England: an incredible 34% of Vermont residents now classify themselves as non-religious, and Boston's Catholic numbers are haemorrhaging.
The success of novels like The DaVinci Code obviously owes a lot to the movement in religious attitudes. Dan Brown offered more than a criticism of the Catholic church in that book: he proposed a multicultural, gender-sensitive spiritualism, which was bound to find a receptive readership in a nation in which 2.8 million citizens now identify themselves as pagan, Wiccan or Spiritualist
We've already witnessed the political impact of the change in religious habits with the election of Barack Obama to the presidency. In his inaugural speech, Obama acknowledged the demographic roots of his victory by mentioning a number of different faiths, as also agnostics / atheists. In a sense, the 2008 election represents a victory for the counterculture of the 1960s. The immediate political impact of that counterculture was to create a backlash among conservatives that gave right-wingers a virtual stranglehold on the Presidency. Ronald Reagan's vision of militarily assertiveness, socially conservatism and low taxation resonated strongly among working-class white Christians. Now the bedrock of the Reagan coalition has splintered, thanks to the incessant pressure of those 1960s cultural values, and not a moment too soon for the world.

Flight of the Lama

Fifty years ago an uprising in Tibet challenged Chinese rule. It was crushed and the head of the region's erstwhile theocracy, the Dalai Lama, fled across the Himalayas. What few realise is the consequences this had for India. Jawaharlal Nehru, being the perfect liberal, gave the Dalai Lama asylum above the protests of the Chinese. It was the first link in a chain of misunderstandings. The Chinese misread Nehru's gesture as an aggressive move against their political interests. Believing that India was bent on encouraging secession in China, the Chinese became more assertive about negotiating an end to a border dispute that had been left unresolved for a decade. After manoeuvres and counter manoeuvres in the region over the next three years, the People's Liberation Army invaded territory it believed was rightfully China's, defeated the Indian army, and then withdrew without annexing much of the land it had conquered, an act for which it gets no credit in India.
General Ayub Khan of Pakistan took India's loss as a sign that Pakistan's forces would be able to roll over those of its larger neighbour. Even as India strengthened its defense forces after the 1962 debacle, Ayub inititiated an aggressive policy of infiltration and confrontation in Kashmir. This led to the 1965 war which ended in a draw with India in a slightly favourable position.
So two wars were fought at least partly as a result of the flight into exile of a peace-loving man and the decision of a pacifist to offer him shelter.

Orhan Pamuk and Istanbul Scams

Orhan Pamuk is not one of my favourite authors, so I was in two minds about attending his reading and discussion at the British Council yesterday. I'm very glad I decided to go, because he read exceptionally well in English and spoke with candour, clarity and wit. His pragmatic views on writing, publication, translation and cultural influence were a refreshing change from the romantic platitudes one usually hears in India (The market is an enemy; self-expression is corrupted by thinking of readership; there's a conspiracy to value only those works which pander to western prejudice, and so on). Prodded by a questioner from the audience, he disclaimed sufficient knowledge to speak about issues related to Indians writing in English, but what he did offer went to the heart of the issue. He was glad, he said, to write in the same language which he spoke with his grandmother and the grocer, but its limitation was that the world at large knew nothing about it.
After being translated into 55 languages, the second of these is no longer a problem.
The passage Pamuk read reminded me of an incident from my visit to Turkey back in 2005. Before, I recount the incident, here's the relevant text, from the historical detective novel My Name Is Red. It is a version of assignments all of us wrote in school with titles like, 'Autobiography of a Rupee Coin'. The speaker is a counterfeit Ottoman gold coin minted in Venice and shipped to Istanbul:
"We were loaded into iron chests, hauled onto ships and pitching to and fro traveled from Venice to Istanbul. I found myself in a money changer’s shop, in the garlicky mouth of its proprietor. We waited for a while, and a simpleminded peasant entered, hoping to exchange some gold. The master money changer, who was a genuine trickster, declared that he needed to bite the gold piece to see if it was counterfeit. So he took the peasant’s coin and tossed it into his mouth. When we met inside his mouth, I realized that the peasant’s coin was a genuine Ottoman Sultani. He saw me within that stench of garlic and said, “You’re nothing but a counterfeit.” He was right, but his arrogant manner offended my pride and I lied to him: “Actually, my brother, you’re the one who’s counterfeit.” Meanwhile, the peasant was proudly insisting, “How could my gold coin possibly be counterfeit? I buried it in the ground twenty years ago, did a vice like counterfeiting exist back then?” I was wondering what the outcome would be when the money changer took me out of his mouth instead of the peasant’s gold coin. “Take your gold coin, I don’t want any vile Venetian infidel’s fake money,” he said, “have you no shame?” The peasant responded with some biting words of his own, then took me with him out the door. After hearing the same pronouncement from other money changers, the peasant’s spirit broke and he exchanged me as a debased coin for only ninety silver pieces. This is how my seven-year saga of endless wandering from hand to hand began."

As our taxi parked at Istanbul airport, I pulled out a 20 million lira note from my wallet and handed it to the driver. He gave it right back, signalling it wasn't the correct amount. It was a 250,000 lira note, the same colour as a 20 million, but smaller. All those zeroes were confusing, but how could I have mistaken the two? I looked in my wallet and found no Turkish money there, though I'd made sure I retained enough for the cab. I offered the driver Euros, he quoted an absurd rate. Better to find an ATM, but the closest one was in the arrivals hall, which was pretty far off. Who'd want to draw Turkish currency on the way out of the country? Since we were barely on time for our flight to Athens, I hurriedly changed some Euros in the departures terminal, paying the high commission always charged in such places, and ran back to give the driver his dues. I was completely bewildered through the five minute process, but something in his expression as he took the notes from me, a half-smirk, made an alarm go off in my head. He hit the accelerator as soon as he started his car, and, as he sped off, I realised I'd been duped. He'd had the smaller denomination note in his hand and pulled off a quick change before my eyes. It wasn't a huge amount of money we lost, about 1000 rupees in all, including the exchange commission, but it took the gloss off what had been a marvellous two weeks in Turkey.

Listening to Pamuk, I wondered if the swindle was a hoary tradition in his hometown, or if it had grown common off late, and he'd projected it back four centuries. But of course, these tricks are employed everywhere. I've been told that taxi drivers in Bombay do the switch when given 500 rupee notes by tipsy passengers at night. Two years ago, a local cab man tried to pull a fast one in broad daylight, handing me back a ten rupee note after I gave him a hundred. I realised what he was up to, and briefly thought of taking the matter further by baiting him into claiming I'd given him the wrong denomination. In the end, I merely said, "the fare is 70 rupees, you owe me twenty more." The anger in my voice, fuelled by an incident in a far off land he could know nothing about, made him reach into his pocket hastily and pull out two more ten rupee notes.

The Indian Express Shoots Its Mouth Off

There's no distinction at all between news and editorials these days. The Reserve Bank cut interest rates last evening, and it made the top of the front page in this morning's Indian Express. The headline read, 'Alarm Bells Wake Up RBI, Rates Cut'. The implication being that the central bank was asleep all this time. The first sentence of the article expanded on the same idea: "It took a dramatic slide in growth to 5.3 per cent, inflation to 3.3 per cent, four consecutive months of deceleration in exports, a 2 per cent contraction in industrial output and finally a serious drop in non-food credit growth rate for the Reserve Bank of India to cut key policy rates — the repo and the reverse repo — by 50 points."
The chart published by the Express on its business page paints a rather different picture, and a more accurate one. It shows that the Reserve Bank has cut the Repo rate, the rate at which it lends to banks, five times in the past four months. On three of these occasions the cut was a full percentage point.



Maybe the 'economic bureau' of the Express, the chaps credited with the report, won't be satisfied until the nation's top central bankers emerge from their offices with sacks of money and throw about fistfuls of currency notes, shouting, "here, grab this, it's free".

Girish Karnad's Flowers

Last evening we were at Prithvi for the opening of a six-day festival of plays produced by RAGE, a theatre group that currently comprises Rahul da Cunha, Rajit Kapoor and Shernaz Patel. The festival kicked off with Girish Karnad's Flowers, directed by Roysten Abel and featuring a virtuoso solo performance by Rajit Kapur.
Flowers follows a kind of formula established by Karnad, which involves taking an Indian folk tale or myth, and marrying it with acute psychological realism. This merger allows his kings, priests and courtesans to appear relevant and contemporary without any allegorical intrusion. Because nobody else employs this method, and because Karnad chooses tales judiciously and fleshes them out convincingly, his oeuvre is original and significant.
His welding of forms, however, has a major drawback. The disparate narrative traditions being blended tend to produce very different sorts of endings when left to themselves. Karnad has rarely, to my mind, dovetailed or fused the two in a satisfactory final scene. There are plays, like The Fire and the Rain, in which he finds some kind of equilibrium, but all too often the end seems like a cop-out, and Flowers is no exception. The play is the story of a priest obsessed with decorating the linga in his temple (spoilers ahead). He becomes equally obsessed with a local courtesan, and their affair leads to trouble with the region's chieftain. The priest's public shaming is averted by a miracle, but that results in a personal crisis, because he is now seen as a saint and wants none of that attention. He informs the audience that the courtesan has left town before commiting suicide. There weren't too many options left for Karnad after the miracle, but keeping the irony, pain and bitterness involved in the priest's situation alive and unresolved would have worked better for me than the precipitate suicide.
When I started writing for newspapers, one of my early commissions was a review of Karnad's Nagamandala, an English translation of which had just then been published. I liked the play a lot, aside from the cop-out ending, and said as much. A couple of months later, I applied for a scholarship to study in England, and who should be on the final interview panel but Girish Karnad. The first thing he said to me was that he had read my article. I don't know how he would have taken it if the piece had expressed an intense dislike of Nagamandala, or how that would have fed into his and the committee's opinion of my application, but I've never been gladder to have published a positive review.

Lahore Memories

In January 2006, I travelled to Pakistan to watch the first match of a series between India and Pakistan. The cricket was just an excuse; for years I'd wanted to visit Lahore and the easing of visa restrictions during the test series gave me access to the city. I went first to Delhi to get the visa. In the morning, a crowd of us collected up at the Pakistan embassy in Chanakyapuri to hand in our documents. We were asked to return at 4pm to collect the stamped passports, which was cutting it fine, because my flight left at around 6.30. Till 4.30 that afternoon, there was no sign of any passports being given back. Then a small window opened in a giant door, and names began to be called out. By 5pm, I was sure I was going to miss my flight. I called Indian Airlines who told me there would be no problem. I learned later that the flight operated a bit like those buses which wait until they're full before leaving. My name was called at 5.15, and I got to the check-in counter at the airport 15 minutes before the scheduled departure for Lahore. As I'd been assured, it was no problem.
An acquaintance of mine, Quddus, had recommended a hotel near Lahore's museum and university, but I hadn't got written confirmation of my reservation because every Pakistani worker had taken the previous week off for Bakri Id. I'd had a telephone conversation with the manager, though, and that gave me confidence to head to the hotel, driven in a Ford taxi that was no more expensive than ones available outside Bombay airport, but offered a much smoother ride.
I'm glad cricket was not top of my agenda, because the pitch was the flattest imaginable, as docile as anything offered up during the current tour by the Sri Lankans which has been cut short cruelly this morning. Pakistan's batsmen butchered the Indian attack, putting pressure on the Indian line-up, which opened with Rahul Dravid and Sehwag because, controversially, only one specialist had been played at the top to make room for Saurav Ganguly in the middle order. Sehwag responded in his typical style, with which Pakistanis have become painfully familiar. He scored the fastest double century ever, Dravid supported him with a steady hundred, and they fell just three short of the world record opening stand. By the time Sehwag was first out, the match was virtually finished, because mist and drizzle allowed little more than 200 overs to be bowled in the entire game.
On my first morning in Lahore, I visited the museum, after stopping at a traffic island to view the cannon Zamzama which features in Kipling's Kim. The museum houses, among many fine artefacts, a startling fasting Buddha from the Gandhara period.



What photographs fail to capture is the impact made by the hollow sockets of the Buddha's eyes. In the story of Siddhartha, this represents a point before his enlightenment, when he fell in with yogis who believed in extreme austerities. He emerged with a comprehension of the Middle Path which rejects extremism of all kinds. Hmm.
At the museum's ticket counter, I paid the foreigners' rate, and was surprised by the surprised expression on the ticket seller's face. I had assumed everybody would realise I was an Indian as soon as I opened my mouth, but this was far from the case. Pakistanis simply are not geared to seeing Indians in their country, and so anybody who looks like I do is assumed to be a native. Also, there are great variations in the way Urdu is spoken, allowing my Anglicised Bambaiyya to pass with ease. For the rest of my trip, I quietly handed over the cheap local fee while entering monuments like the fort and Jehangir's tomb, saving a few hundred rupees. A pleasant change from being labelled a foreigner in many tourist sites in India because my shaved head, backpack, Lonely Planet and bottled water signal NRI.
That afternoon, I met Quddus for lunch at a restaurant on the Mall. I was surprised by the lack of beef on Lahore menus, and even more so by the absence of paneer. I knew paneer serves primarily as a meat substitute for vegetarian Punjabis, but wasn't prepared for its complete disappearance once the border had been crossed from one Punjab to another. For the rest, I didn't think the food was anything to blog extensively about. The stalls in Anarkali bazaar provided tasty fare, but nothing sublime, and the same was the case in top end restaurants. Two eating experiences stood out, the first being Cooco's Den at the edge of Lahore's red light district, known as Heera Mandi (Diamond Market). The Den is owned by a painter who grew up in the area because he was the son of a Heera Mandi prostitute. His paintings, many of which one sees on the way up to the terrace restaurant, are unexciting, glamourised portraits of local whores. The food, too, is standard Mughlai. What raises it above average is the excellent view of Badshahi mosque and an eccentric method of getting plates to tables. The kitchen is on the ground floor, and dishes are placed in baskets and hauled up by ropes.
On the third day of the test, I lunched at a restaurant near Gaddafi stadium, not far from where the shootout occurred this morning. The chef in charge, a man called Sajjad Mughal, initiated a long conversation after realising I was Indian. He was a Protestant, he said, and wanted to leave Pakistan. Were there good job opportunities for a chef in India? I suggested Canada or Europe were better destinations, if he could convince those countries to offer him asylum, which was very unlikely. He stuck with me through the meal, standing next to my table and asking me detailed questions about life in India.
That was a typical response even from Pakistanis who did not want to quit their homeland. Eyes would light up as soon as my nationality was revealed, and a flood of queries would follow. Almost all were friendly: the lone exception occurred in a dilapidated cybercafe where I was trying to finish a column before mosquitoes bites turned my skin into a mess of welts, while also answering the owner's questions about Sanjay Dutt and Shahrukh Khan. A loader who was sitting around waiting for his shift to begin, pushed a tabloid toward me and tapped meaningfully on its banner headline. "I can't read Urdu", I told him. "It says the Indian government wants to demolish every mosque in your country", he explained. "No, that's not the case", I said. He looked at me blankly, then went back to reading his tabloid.




On the fourth day, I headed for monuments in the suburbs: Shahjahan's Shalimar Gardens and the tombs of Nur Jahan and Jehangir. I wanted to climb to the roof of Jehangir's mausoleum to look for signs of a pavilion that was supposedly dismantled and taken away during Ranjit Singh's reign. The upper floors were off limits, but I was so comfortable in the city by then that I fearlessly slipped a hundred rupee note to a guard to let me up the stairs. The only persons inside the complex, aside from guards, were four students mugging for an exam, who gladly interrupted their work to chat about India and Pakistan and ask for souvenir currency. Indians going to Pakistan would be well served by a wad of their own ten rupee notes and plenty of small change.
That evening I wandered into the Badshahi mosque, more or less a replica of Delhi's Jama Masjid, aside for the exchange of some delicacy for sturdiness. If the two structures look similar, the atmosphere within could hardly be more different. Lahore's biggest mosque is almost a picnic spot, a place where families gather when prayers are not being said. Women walk around the couryard in salwar kameezes, many not even bothering to cover their heads with a dupatta. Delhi's Jama Masjid, in contrast, is very female unfriendly. The one time I visited it with my wife Jabeen, I, the kafir, was allowed in, while she, the Muslim, was forbidden to enter.
It wasn't the Badshahi mosque that became my favourite living monument in Lahore, however. That had to be the gorgeously decorated Wazir Khan Mosque in the innards of the old city. There's nothing in that style in India, as far as I know. The mosque is right in the middle of a crowded, dirty, narrow-laned precinct, but cross the threshold and you're suddenly transported into perfect tranquility. The morning I visited, an old maulana was tutoring two young boys, sitting on a carpet, reading off a low wooden table. But for the electric heater about ten feet from the group, the scene could have been taking place three hundred years ago.



The evening before I was to leave, Quddus and an artist named Rashid took me out for dinner to a hip place where the waiters were dressed as cowboys. The servers attempted to be gruff, banging mugs on the table while serving drinks, but their forced impoliteness was somewhat at odds with the spiffy decor which included monitors embedded in the wall next to each table, playing music videos. The drinks, moreover, were not alcoholic, further distancing the restaurant from the wild west. Since liquor is more or less prohibited in eating houses in Pakistan, outside of luxury hotels, the serious partying happens in private homes. Rashid said I had to visit for Basant, when there was kite flying during the day and revelry in the evening. I had found Lahore an extremely convivial town, and said I'd be happy to return some year in February or early March. Unfortunately, the Punjab government banned kite flying soon after, ostensibly on safety grounds.
Before we drove to the cowboy eatery, we had visited the home of two artists, one of whom was moving to Delhi later that year. She asked if I'd take some of her books over, and I readily agreed since I had little luggage of my own. On my way to the airport, I stopped at Beaconhouse university, where she taught in the art school. It was a different world, full of boys and girls in tight T-shirts and jeans, the sort of clothes never seen on Lahore's streets.
At the airport I was surprised (OK, shocked) to find luggage inspections being directed by two white men. My carton of books was suspicious enough for one of them to handle it personally. As he swirled a high tech form of litmus paper around the box, he asked questions in a Brit accent. After answering, I asked what people like him were doing in charge of Pakistani airport security? "It's a collaboration between our two governments", he said pleasantly. "Collaboration? So are a few Pakistanis flying out to take charge of security at Heathrow, then?" His expression darkened. We have a wise guy here, I could see him think. But he said nothing, just pointed me to a counter where my carton could be resealed.