Today was the first proper day of the Lahore biennale and also Imran Khan’s birthday, so much of the city was in lockdown against a birthday dharna. In the morning (or, correctly, around noon, which is morning in Lahore) I went to one of the galleries which I thought was likely to be accessible but was also not boringly close. This was on Temple Road, where I used to go to Basant in the long-ago days when Basant hadn’t been outlawed. The gallery was someone’s private enterprise in their family home, and the house took me back to my childhood, when there were many of these houses still around, with their high ceilings, their odd layouts, like having to pass through a bathroom to get to the next room, their seemingly random steps up and down into rooms, their grey chip floors (from before it was renamed terrazzo), their stairs at particular angles to roof tops lined in brick with the tops of courtyard trees peeping over the brick sides.
The art itself was fine but nothing special. There was one painting I liked, a miniature showing weapons in a battle, and one bit of interpretation where I wished I had a pen: it said something about showcasing obscure Urdu poetry, with the verse in question being well known enough that even I, an imbecile when it comes to Urdu poetry, recognised it. Anyway, I wanted to scribble on the little sign.
In the afternoon was another event, this time the Lahore edition of the calligraphy performance I went to in Istanbul a few months ago. It was in the garden of a small government-run gallery, and where the opening of the biennale last night (which I didn’t attend but others did) was about the art patrons, this was about the art intellectuals. I recognised a startling number of them by sight, remembered remarkably few names, and met some people I hadn’t seen since we were in our mid-teens. The show itself was significantly better than the one in Istanbul, though not as well explained. There was a singer of the raag bhairavi here, which made a great deal of difference, as did the projector screen with a close up of the calligraphy performance (the artist wishes to make a statement of calligraphy as being a white-cube performance-worthy art form). Then just as the event ended I got a phone call from a senior aunt and had to dash back as quickly as the choked residential street and the containers placed at angles across all roads to prevent or slow down the dharna, would permit.
The senior aunt is very senior indeed, but it was not so bad. This is the second time in the past few months I’ve met her, after avoiding her for many years. She was here to see my grandmother and made a very good suggestion that clearly animated my grandmother.
Deafness is a terrible thing in the old, and I’ve taken to bringing a notebook and pen to help with communication. She also likes to respond in writing, which fair enough. Today she told me she really wanted some books to read, so I will go and buy some tomorrow.