Lodge Road

Lahore is still haunted by ghosts.
Qadir invited us
to his apartment in the heart

of the old city. I felt uneasy
there was still so much left to do,
so many souls to free.

How even after two and a half weeks
old men still approached me,
their arms always moving in unison.

They really like to stare
at you, Jason said
to me. To them, you are

a Mehmaan. They don’t see people
like you anymore. Anne smiled.
Sardar ji! Sardar ji! they cry out.

They tell me how khush they are
to see me and where
they have fled from. Sardar ji, I

came from Ludhiana, Patiala. I came
from Jalandhar. And
Amritsar. I stopped and thought

of the man with the golden hazel eyes.
He wore a long ochre shawl
draped over a pale yellow

kurtha, a white kufi cap.
We stood beside each other
in the Lahore Museum and stared

at a custom-made silk Kashmiri shawl.
The shawl was once adorned by
Maharajah Ranjit Singh

during the empire.
The man cried and told me
his ancestors were

Sikhs before partition.
He started to touch my hands
and kissed me softly.

My speech was slurred. I do not
have WhatsApp on my phone, I stammered.
It was the truth, but I

began to walk away from
him, feeling empty inside.
The apartment where he lived

sat behind ancient courtyards on Lodge Road.
Those homes were magnificent once.
They had beautiful havelis

and exquisite golden lines of
marigold hanging from
the rafters for the weddings.

The people loved one another.
They celebrated Eid
Vasaikhi and Diwali,

and they grieved for one
another, intertwined for
generations, they were drenched

in harmony. Sayera turned
to me, her hands stroking her cheeks.
Green cardigan, orange

scarf, and silver earrings,
auburn and brown hair.
Lahore was once the Paris

of our South Asia.
Artists, writers, musicians
flocked here, wanting

to be free. Lahore
could have been the greatest
city in the world!

She said the last word loud, with such flair,
her hands thrust in the pale air—
World! World! World—

reverberating, mixing with
rickshaws honking,
muffled sounds of beggars

in the unswept skies.
We sat on the rooftop,
our arms resting on the rock surface.
Can you imagine how people just fled?
The earth-orange house
across the street still sat empty.

They said the whole block is haunted,
stone Kandhay still etched in the doors,
covered in green vines.

I touched the surface, my fingers resting on the lines–
A spectacle of suicides,
of murder, of rage, of violence,

People jumped from those rooftops
when the line was drawn.
Four days later, I read your bitter

truth. Al Jazeera cried, “You Filthy Culprit!
How Britain stole $45 trillion from
India and lied about it.”