From Memory Lane to Love Lane

How long does it take to travel down the memory lane? The answer is: in a jiffy, and a journey as long as life itself.

My memory lane of Karachi, the city I call my own, begins at Love Lane, nearly sixty years ago, at the confluence of Pakistan’s birth as a free state. Whenever I travel down the nostalgia highway, it never misses to exit at that intersection.

I must’ve fallen in love with Love Lane, on first sight. Love is blind and of early youth, it’s also for life. It lingers with you forever. It becomes part of you and grows with years, without, sometime, your realizing it.

Love Lane started, westward, at the junction of Karachi’s famous Gandhi Gardens with the road leading north to Soldier Bazaar. It was much later in my youth that I started wondering why Karachi’s only zoo had to be named after the Mahatma whose life was dedicated to ahinsa, non-violence against all, humans and animals alike. Wasn’t keeping animals confined to suffocating cages a kind of violence against their right of freedom—a very un-Gandhian trait?

But that kind of sophistry or philosophical nitpicking was farthest from my fledgling intellect in those salad days of my youth, when the focus of my infatuation was that shaded, verdant—certainly so by Karachi’s somewhat brown standards—leafy lane that ran along the entire northern length of the gardens until it ran smack into a gently humming Lawrence Road. It didn’t end there but carried forth a further half-kilometer or so, until it touched base with Lyari Naddi, that thin streak of water in the mostly-arid and dry bed of River Lyari, which, then, was remarkably clean on its banks.

My father, then an accounts officer with Karachi Administrator’s Office was allocated living quarters in that hastily converted residential ‘colony’, to the northwest of Gandhi Gardens, which came to be christened as Pakistan Quarters. The living quarters in that colony used to be military barracks for jawans and officers stationed there during World War II. But as Karachi was suddenly morphed into Pakistan’s first capital city, these barracks were given a patchy and hotchpotch makeover to welcome the families of those civil officers that had, voluntarily, opted for Pakistan.

My father had a large brood of children—there were ten of us—and because of that the three-room quarter, with an open verandah up front, was a little constricted. But those were the days when such an inconvenience was just pooh-poohed. We’re the new citizens, pioneers to be honest, of an independent country and were game for such worldly discomforts. All of us loved our new abode, though a far cry from our ancestral home in Old Delhi. But the spirit of revolution and sacrifice that it necessarily entailed was alive and kicking.

I was quickly enrolled in class 3 at the nearby government primary school. But the school would break at an hour past mid-day, after which we’re free to explore the neighbourhood with the inquisitiveness and abandon of an inborn explorer. I’ve always believed that an explorer and adventurer is alive in each soul born in this world; it’s only our circumstances of growing up that give it a further lease or snuff it out for good.

The afternoons were long and languid when I’d quietly sneak out of our home as the elders usually retired for after-noon Siesta, and join that small posse of soul mates and peers who, like me, didn’t know what a Siesta meant. Love Lane’s gently swaying trees and their inviting halos of shade beckoned us in their direction, and enveloped us in a gently caressing embrace to beat the heat of the day. Often we’d dose off, for long stretches, until the horn of a passing car or the whining of a lumbering horse, harnessed to a gently chugging Victoria, jolted us back to senses.

In the evening, after a good game of cricket or football, we’d steal ourselves to the bank of Lyari to savor Karachi’s famous sea-breeze. There was hardly any pollution in the air in those days and we’d inhale, in large doses, that refreshing air for which Karachi had no rivals. A dahi-bara wala, hawking his freshly cooked ensemble of spiced chholas, dahi baras and pani puri was invariably at hand because that was a good spot to market those goodies. And one could always bet that the clientele, appreciating the market sense of the savvy dahi bara wala, wouldn’t disappoint him, ever.

Especially on those fragrant and caressing nights of the full moon the ambience was, simply, breath-taking. People of all ages, from the nearby quarters, including, sometime, our parents and older sisters, would flock to the banks of Lyari to escape the drudgery of a routine work-day. Those were divine moments for us, and brisk business for the dahi bara wala, chhole wala and their ilk.

All of us, in the gang, wondered why Love Lane was given its romantic appellation, until the panwala whose little kiosk at the vantage north-eastern corner of Love Lane’s tryst with Lawrence Road, unraveled the secret of its name to us. He said the leafy lane had acquired its appellation from the courting lovers, from the neighbourhood and surrounding areas, who used to converge there, after sunset, when there was hardly soul around, or traffic, on the deserted street to impinge on their courting. He’d also confide to us, with an impish chuckle, that gora soldiers, during the war- time, would bring their sometime English but otherwise mostly Anglo-Indian girl friends there, to stroll down the long lane, sit under its friendly trees for courting and necking. We wouldn’t know, in that early learning curve, what courting or necking meant, and the grinning panwala didn’t bother to educate us, though he remained our guru and sage.

Love Lane grew in tandem with my memories of those carefree years.

I associated it with everything that cheered me up. Like, for instance, those tall orders of meetha pans that Amman would, invariably, ask me to fetch from the guru panwala after every meal for invited guests. The guru was so delighted by those orders that he’d throw in a few extra pans as his token of appreciation.

It became intertwined with my memories of those trips to the spanking, new, Nazli Hotel—the finest modern building in our vicinity at a stone’s throw from Love Lane—to make a telephone call to my sister who lived near Radio Pakistan and had a phone. We didn’t. So Amman would give me a chawanni (25- Paisa coin) every time she wanted a message urgently relayed to her and rush me to make a call to my sister from the front desk of Nazli Hotel. The scraggy, middle-aged, man with a perpetual frown and beedy eyes, who monitored the front- desk from behind a pair of horn-rimmed glasses, would watch over me like a hawk to make sure I didn’t swindle him and use his phone more than once. He insisted that I place my chawanni on the counter before touching the phone.

Love Lane was also interwoven with tragedy.

I remembered that hot summer day when early in the morning a PAF aircraft of World War-II vintage, from the Mauripur Base, started buzzing and circling over our quarters. It was flying dangerously low and doing some hair-raising daredevil manoeuvres. Not long afterward, we heard a massive boom, an explosion, as the aircraft crashed to the ground at that very intersection of Love Lane and Lawrence Road. I remember I ran, like in a trance, to the crash site and could still see the aircraft engulfed in flames when I reached within a hundred feet of it. The tragedy was worse compounded because the plane plunged in flames over a car parked by a shop on the southeast side of the intersection; all five occupants of the car were also killed in that collateral damage.

The pilot of the aircraft happened to be from our neighbourhood. He was killed because his plane got entangled into the overhead cables of power transmission. He was trying to impress his girlfriend who lived two blocks from our quarter.

I carried with me all that baggage of memories of Love Lane, as I grew older and wandered around the globe as a puffed-up and pampered foot-loose gypsy, a.k.a. a diplomat. Love Lane was never far from my mind be that on Paris’ glittering Champs Elysee or Manhattan’s flashy Fifth Avenue, or the leafy Mall of London. It remained inseparable from me, like my alter ego.

That was until I returned to it as a middle-aged, worldly-wise, man in early 90s. I’d to rub my eyes to make sure I wasn’t at the wrong address. Gone was all that gentle ambience of leafy trees and salubrious gentle haloes underneath. The trees were largely gone, uprooted. An unbearable stench hung all around from huge piles of uncollected rubbish, instead of fragrant breeze of my youth. The air was thick with acrid smoke exhaled by rickety buses and screaming auto rickshaws plying madly around. The pavements had been taken over by roadside body and auto repair workshops. The whole spectacle looked like a dream turned into a horrid nightmare.

I knew in that moment that my paradise was lost, forever. But I didn’t wish to lose the sweet memories of my Love Lane. I’d to preserve them from the grubby reach of a tacky and humourless present. I swore, then and there, never to visit that part of Karachi again. That was the least I could do to preserve my sanity and save my treasured past from being purloined. I know I’ll keep it in me for good, till my dying breath.