Around it was an intricate jumble of old brick and stone work, the upper stories of Old Lahore -- fallen-in roofs, lots of satellite dishes, and kites fluttering and swooping and attacking each other above the old city. Colorful paper kites were one of Lahore's liberations. Popular throughout the country, they were an obsession here; Lahore hosts a huge kite festival every spring. The idea really was to attack: each kite string was made with ground glass, paste, and flax, and with great skill you could use your deadly twine to saw through another man's kitestring and send his treasure plummeting to the ground. Many power failures came about when children's kites flew into the rats' nests of convoluted electric lines. In the rainy season people often got electrocuted, trying to untangle their kite strings from the naked old wires.

A motor-rickshaw to the Shalimar Gardens, just outside Lahore on the GT. Among donkey carts and shaded tongas packed with families for the afternoon. On the road's edge in a square of busy shop-stalls a barber was squatting and shaving a courageous man with a straight razor. In India this would be a good way to get mortally infected.

In a city of so many gardens the only ones built by the Moguls are the Shalimar, with the same fabled name as those over in Indian Kashmir. These Shalimar were built by Shah Jahan around 1642, midway through the construction of the Taj; few rulers have commissioned so much beautiful architecture. The walled gardens were peaceful and full of people strolling, mostly men. They wore that look of stupefied repression and frustration which comes from having your sexual fantasies fed on a public diet of film posters and the occasional slip of a veil; it made me think these must be the most unsensual people in the world.

I stood trying to picture the gardens all in bloom, before the marble that was once everywhere had been pillaged. The Mogul gardens tend to be planned rather like an elaborate board game, on several levels and with an almost classical symmetry. Eventually I realized that what my eye was missing in the formal garden layout was statues, which are forbidden in Islam. When the British came they used the Shalimar as a honeymoon site and turned some quarters into dak bungalows; they also tore up lots of centuries-old mango trees to make way for a rose garden. At least they somehow resisted building a bandstand. (In Lahore's Government House, built around the tomb of a Mogul khan -- a cousin of Akbar -- they had not been able to resist using the carved marble sarcophagus as the kitchen chopping board.)

My hope was to see the Shalimar fountains playing and avoid the buffalo, which are used to drag the lawnmowers here but wander around a little too freely the rest of the time. The fountains were dry, the buffalo were resting, but I did meet Aamer.

He was a young man, mid-twenties, in blue jeans -- one of four pairs I saw in the entire country. (This is not the case in India, where the young especially try to be up-to-date.) We were both standing above the Hall of Light, an enclosed chamber in the middle of the trilevel gardens. Water sluiced from the upper level through the chamber, whose walls had hundreds of candles set in niches on three sides. The effect by night must've been dazzling: the musicians playing in stereo by a little pond with a stage like a lotus leaf, on which dancing girls cavorted before tossing clouds of gold dust on the guests. One satisfying thing about Mogul emperors is that they used their power to ensure pleasures that most of us, were we in their slippers, would choose as well -- from dancing girls to gardens of paradise to enemies' heads impaled on kos minars.

Aamer said, "Are you English or American? I hope so."

"Why do you hope so?'

"I don't speak French or German. Don't worry, I'm not a guide."

"What are you, then?"

He shrugged, and laughed ruefully. "I'm an airline pilot, actually. Out-of-work, is that how you say it? Some problems with ... well, with bribing the right people for a job. We'll see. Meanwhile, I'm meeting a friend here and wasting my life."

I explained that I was doing much the same thing.

He said, "It's too bad for you the fountains aren't working. I've seen those guidebooks that tell you which hours to come for the water. But I haven't seen these fountains working for weeks. I don't understand why the Moguls could do it and we can't, four centuries later. Back then every tree had its own gardener, can you imagine?'

"Cheap labor."

"So what? It's that way here now. We'll see how things change with the different government."

The ease with which he brought up the touchy subject of last week's coup surprised me; all the talk of corruption had made me imagine that talk too had been corrupted. I couldn't have been more wrong. Total strangers were comfortable telling you exactly what they thought, just as in India.

I asked how he'd vote in the coming elections, assuming they were held.

"Oh, they'll have to be held. Maybe a bit later than they say. I'll vote for Imran Khan."

This was a Pakistani cricket hero, a handsome playboy in his forties who had retired to London and recently married the young and very lovely daughter of one of the richest men in England. Now, returning, he was being talked about as a fresh breeze in Pakistani politics, rather as if Bjorn Borg were to marry well in Monte Carlo then go back to Sweden to run for prime minister.

"He's a good man, a straight man. And he doesn't need more money now, right?" So we can trust him. Not like Benazir."

A country of sports fans, but they wouldn't vote that way.

"What about you, Aamer? Are you married, like Imran?"

"I've got a girlfriend."

"Will you marry her?"

"Maybe. Probably." He was evasive, but perhaps he wasn't sure himself, and I guessed she was the friend he was here in the gardens to meet.

"I thought most Pakistanis had arranged marriages."

"That's true. Most of the time. But, you know, my father's an eye doctor, and her father's a businessman. Our families are modern. I've got a sister in Texas. Married to a Pakistani doctor with a green card. So the families understand. We're lucky."

He seemed a little nervous and it occurred to me I must be making him late. We shook hands and he said, "You ought to do something for that cough. Just a moment." He wrote out a word on a slip of paper. "Ask for that at any little store. An old herbal remedy. As old as the Shalimar." He grinned. "You see? And these fountains have a cough today, too."

A dizzying morning of coughing and sleeping fitfully, waiting for the Indian antibiotics to take effect. All those gas fumes yesterday. In the end Aamer's remedy -- a teaspoonful of a powder called joshanda that looks like the bottom of a hamster's cage -- did the trick, mixed in hot water.

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The street heading down to Anarkali Bazaar, one of Kim's old haunts, led from a tires bazaar into a bicycle and small arms bazaar, where one store sold ingenious wheelchairs, handcranked on both sides. I nearly feel into an open sewer when an old man on a bike let out a blast on his horn, which was attached to a bicycle pump that made it louder than all the cars. Throughout Pakistan I was constantly amazed at the complex melodies of the vehicle horns: they ran with great velocity up and down the pentatonic and whole-tone scales, or through intricate Oriental flurries. I was told of one that played Never On Sunday.

On the Mall a corner display had newspapers hung so people could stand and read for free, and along a sidewalk was a mini-bazaar of outdated foreign magazines. There was also a Jewelers' Row, for much of Islam has a deep faith in gold bracelets and a deep distrust of banks. The paradox was that even though Pakistan economically looks pathetic on paper, worse off than India, to someone just strolling around, people looked much better off here. Perhaps there's a more equitable distribution of what little money there is, for I was rarely confronted with the bone-breaking poverty I saw at all times in India.

A few of the old private clubs from British days, like the Punjab Club where Kipling was a member, do still exist, but they have been forced over the years to shift their premises from those embarrassingly grand edifices on the Mall to obsequious lesser quarters on side streets. The enormous white mansion that was the Punjab Club, where Kipling went to drink after writing the newspaper all day -- "the old, wearying, Godless futile life at a club -- same men, same talk, same billiards" is now a government staff headquarters a blinding block long. Men who might not have been permitted into any London gentlemen's club could relax in one larger than any of them; it was here that the young sub-editor nearly got into a fist fight with O'Dwyer, the bully partly responsible years later for the Amritsar massacre.

Kipling's years in Lahore (1882 to 1887), in his teens and early twenties before his big promotion to Allahabad, were spent on the staff of the Civil and Military Gazette. It was where he joined the Freemasons and also had his first encounters with Indian "courtesans." As half the newspaper's editorial staff, he had to painstakingly correct the Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs who set the type by hand and had little idea what it all meant. The building where he worked, like the large bungalow where he lived with his family, has been demolished. "Outside during the day everything is dusty and redhot," he said once. "You drink there for the liquid, and not for the liquor, and the minute you drink it you feel it coming through your shirt." There were the fans, too, blowing every piece of paper but kept "ceaselessly going to prevent suffocation." And there was also the cholera, that killed foreigners off regularly. No wonder (although most of the Indians around him and in his stories were Muslims) that a core idea of Hinduism and Buddhism, the illusory nature of this world, seeped into his bones; Kim, with the lama's spiritual quest on the GT, is saturated in it.

The best way to see how the British relaxed here was to visit the main public library on the Mall, whose staid white arches and columns look rather formal and parliamentary on the outside. Once the Gymkhana Club, it could easily be the national assembly of some medium-size country. Inside, though, the arches go up, up, up past five glittering chandeliers, the balustraded mezzanines of books look over grand lawns and tennis courts, the ceilings are a dreamy swirl of flowers and skylights and inset flower mirrors. It makes a serene and pretty library, warm with sunlight pouring in, full of English books and foreign magazines immaculately kept, and quiet reading nooks with standing lamps. You sit there trying to imagine it as the private club for a membership of several dozen, served by turbaned waiters and the rest. Or in later years, just before Partition, when Lahore was bull of bars, cafés, cabarets, theaters, and a fashionable red-light district; and when here in the Gymkhana Club under British auspices, according to one historian, "the distance between the communities was often reduced to the thickness of a sari as Sikhs, Moslems and Hindus rumbaed and did the fox trot together." Then the muezzin goes blaring off outside and you are really not sure where you are, or where this ever was.
Aug. 5, 1997

Anthony Weller has won awards both as a poet and a foreign correspondent, including a Lowell Thomas Medal in 1993. His writing has appeared in GEO, Vogue, Gourmet, G.Q., Travel & Leisure, Pan, National Geographic, Condé-Nast Traveler and the Paris Review.

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Copyright ©1997 by Anthony Weller. Excerpted with permission of the author and of Marlowe & Company.

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