Chapter 6 Lahore
My one evening in the ancient city of Lahore was spent in the cinema, watching "The Last Time I Saw Paris". I had seen this film many years ago and recalled that a critic at the time disliked both the film, and the choice of romantic hero, had commented unkindly on the glycerine tears trickling over Van Johnson’s honest, wholesome, freckled but unromantic countenance. Now I was to see them again, though from politeness, not choice.
The young Pakistani who took me, averaged three visits weekly to the cinema and his uncritical enthusiasm for "the pictures" reminded me of my own youthful addiction. He assured me that the cinema was air-conditioned, but apparently attached his own meaning to the phrase for we sweltered, high up in the balcony, while a few ceiling-fans revolved in a tired fashion, as though exhausted by the heat. But my friend made amends the following day, Sunday, when he took me on a sight-seeing tour.
In a temperature of a hundred, we slogged up a minaret of Lahore's great mosque, claimed to be the largest in the world and to be capable of accommodating a hundred thousand worshippers at prayer at the same time, with room for each to prostrate himself. Two hundred feet below us, water-buffaloes were being hosed down. They would prefer to spend the heat of the day submerged, except for nostrils and eyes in a river or mud hole, but as working beasts had to accept this substitute. From the Mosque we moved on to the Fort of Akbar, pausing at the foot to refresh ourselves with warm lemonade before scaling its heights. We contemplated the graceful symmetry of the Shalimar Gardens, still maintained as in the days of the Mogul Emperors.
Despite Lahore's antiquity, it is a thriving city, the next in size to Karachi and the capital of the province of West Pakistan. It is a city of considerable charm, and it is a pity that apparently, it will for ever be linked in my memory with the mournfully banal air: "The Last time I saw Paris."