Before Pakistan was made, my elders lived in Jalandhar. But my grandfather, Hafiz Rahim Bakhsh, whom we called Ada Ji, was always travelling to Lahore for business, to visit relatives who had settled here after migrating from the United Provinces in 1857, and for weddings and family gatherings. Around 1941, Sirajuddin Ahmad enrolled at Government College, Lahore, and for a while he stayed with Babu Sharif near the Janazgah in Mozang.
In those days Mozang was called Mauza Mozang, the village of Mozang, a settlement on the outskirts of Lahore. What I heard from my elders, and what my memory has kept, is that Mozang had a curious history. Its people, it was said, once lived where King Edward Medical College stands today. When the British decided to build the college, the residents were told to vacate the land. The British also had Mayo Hospital to build, or perhaps the hospital already existed and the college was still to come. Either way, the displaced families were resettled in Mozang, which was then empty land.
The story goes that the British government allotted them generous plots for large havelis, and that the land was measured out with the rope of a charpai. That may be an exaggeration, but it is what we heard. The land lay near the Janazgah mosque. More likely, there was only a funeral ground there at first, and the mosque came later.
Any old photograph of Mauza Mozang looks exactly like a village. In my childhood I saw dense banyan trees here, open unpaved ground, a hand pump, a trough where animals drank, and countless horses, cows and buffaloes tethered in the open.
The people of the area built a beautiful mosque. Right beside it, along the lane, stands a house, now partly turned into shops, where my father’s family lived as tenants after Partition. The mosque is called Jamia Masjid Jamiat-ul-Quraish. Its ornamentation, its inlay work and its calligraphy were worth travelling to see. Its minarets and domes were a fine example of Islamic architecture, and its colours were so striking that, while it still had its old vigour, it brought to mind Masjid Wazir Khan and the other mosques and buildings of that era.
Just inside the entrance was a lovely pool, and a strange tradition was attached to it. On the nights of the ninth and tenth of Muharram, women of credulous faith came in droves and poured sugar into the pond as they made their vows. When a wish was granted, perhaps they poured in more sugar, or halwa. It was said that if the sugar made a soft hissing sound as it hit the water, the vow had been accepted.
The same pond was used for ablutions, and beautiful fish were released into it. On the day of the vows, every one of those fish would die. For days afterwards, maunds of sugar and food were dredged out of the water. Eventually the pond was closed to the practice.
Today all the domes and minarets of the mosque have been pulled down, and it has been given the look of a contractor-built five-marla house. Its individuality is gone. Tinted glass and air-conditioners have arrived.
The road between the mosque and the flower shops is called Bahawal Sher Road. The rear gate of Masjid Jamiat-ul-Quraish opens onto it, beside the shrine of a saint named Bahawal Sher. Opposite stands a crumbling yellow building known as Jhandu’s building. The old man it is named after must have been quite famous in his day.
One evening, probably in the 1970s, a crowd of us boys were drinking tea at a very old tea stall in front of it when a thin, slight boy walked up. We learned that he lived in Jhandu’s building and that Jhandu had been his grandfather. When we said we wanted to see inside, he took the whole group in. The two-storey building was open in the middle, with rooms around the courtyard. We went up to the first floor, stayed a while and came back down.
The road beside Jhandu’s building runs towards Chauburji, and on the left the graveyard begins. Here stood the house of the Khaksar Latif Butt. I saw him at the Chinese Lunch Home and all over Lahore in the Khaksars’ coarse khaddar uniform. Butt Sahib was intensely emotional, as most Khaksars were. Once I saw him quarrelling with a wedding band playing in front of the mosque: had they no shame, playing music outside a mosque? When we lived alongside Hindus, he said, this very thing used to start riots. Now the last Khaksar, too, is gone.
At the start of Bahawal Sher Road there used to be an empty plot. I have heard it was a cattle market at the time of Partition. The graveyard’s real gate was further on, where the mound, the tibba, begins. When the cattle market moved from here to Yateem Khana, graves began to appear on the plot, a few at first. We would walk through it to visit the grave of my uncle Muhammad Sadiq, which was on the tibba. My maternal grandparents and my maternal uncle were buried on the same mound.
In the early days, when the old market ground was still open, one of the first graves dug there was that of the mother of Liaquat Ali Khan, Pakistan’s first prime minister. It was a fairly high grave. I heard she had been buried in trust, to be moved to Karachi later. But who would look after the mother’s grave of a prime minister who was assassinated, and whose assassin was shot dead on the spot so that the story ended there? So the grave is still here. Around it, my parents, both sides of my family and many friends have since returned to the dust.
Here too lie the 13 people whose throats were mysteriously cut in Krishan Nagar. Neither the motive for their murder nor the killers were ever found. Such is the law of this land.
On the right side of the road lies Muslim Ganj, one of the oldest neighbourhoods here, with its own very old mosque. From the other side, the mohalla joined Masjid Jamiat-ul-Quraish and opened out towards the graveyard. Beyond it there was nothing but emptiness and silence: the graveyard on one side and, on the other, a dhobi ghat, where the slap of clothes on stone rang out and washermen in loincloths beat the laundry in the troughs. An open drain ran alongside.
Facing it stood two or four large bungalows, one or two of them owned by Pathans and the others by well-known families. Then came an open ground that is now filled with graves. The tibba that began near the road ended here, and my uncle Sadiq’s was the last grave on it. I do not know whether any trace of it remains.
This open stretch of land was deserted. On one side stood a dilapidated old building where carpet weavers worked their looms. On its roof was my maternal uncle Abdul Razzaq’s pigeon loft, the khudda, also called the jaal, which could be seen from far away. Lahore’s best-known pigeon fanciers gathered there. Even the film star Yousuf Khan used to come, at the height of his fame.
I climbed up to that roof too. I made it up the swaying, wobbling, trembling wooden ladder, but the fear of the way down stayed lodged in my heart and would not let me sit still. My uncle’s pigeons were famous by name, and he was known as Ustad. When the matches were on, all kinds of dishes were cooked and every win was celebrated. The judges sat on each other’s rooftops, and runners carried news of every moment from one roof to the next. Those were the means of communication then.
This is the first part of a Lahore-based writer’s series Old Mozang (Purana Mozang), translated from the Urdu by Raja Furqan Ahmed.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and not necessarily those of The Lahore Times.
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