‘Disrupted City’: A rich and multilayered narration of Lahore’s long history

Due to a mechanical issue, when Ahmed Ali’s plane landed in Delhi, he refused to get off. He was on his way to Australia from Karachi when this mishap took place. “I am not getting out,” he said. “You call your damned Chairman. But I’m not putting my foot on that soil which was sacred to me and which was desecrated… They got the entire staff of the airport there to get me out, but I didn’t move… How could I revisit that which was once mine and which was now no longer mine?” The fiasco ended with him reciting Mir Taqi Mir’s verses to the staff: “What matters it, O breeze/ If now has come the spring/ When I have lost them both/ The garden and my nest?”.

During the Partition of British India, Ali was a Visiting Professor in China and was refused entry into India by the Indian ambassador there. He had to fly to Hong Kong, and from there to some friends in Karachi. He never returned to Delhi, dying in Karachi in 1994. “I never opted for Pakistan… The civilisation I belong to – the civilisation of Delhi – came into being through the mingling of…

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