‘I wake up by 12.30, I go to my gym, I have breakfast, then I come to work. I do about nine projects a day.’ He reckons he finishes a film every 28 days.
‘Are you allowed to kiss on screen?’
‘Not on the lips. On the hand or the forehead, or you know on the side cheek or something, but not on the lips. My wife’s not going to agree to that, so forget it.’
‘Does that seem unnatural to you?’
‘No, that’s very natural.’
I wonder if he fears any backlash from resurgent, conservative, Islamist elements in the country, who’ve made no secret of their dislike for the cinema.
‘There’s a bunch of people that need to be taught that this is something that has nothing to do with religion; it’s a form of expression, it’s a form of art and that’s it.’
There are shouts from the set. The bride’s father has been handed his gun and had his moustache reapplied, and pink spray is erupting from the fountain at the bottom of the stairs at the back. To my surprise Shaan calls me onto the set to have my photo taken with the actors.
‘They are all big fans.’
I shake hands with the bridegroom, who beams with excitement.
‘This is very exciting for us. We love British comedy.’
I shrug modestly.
‘Oh yes. Mr Bean, Benny Hill. We love it!’
I think it’s time for me to go to bed.
Day Twenty Seven : Lahore
A short night. Spend the morning at what has been described as the ‘Versailles of the Punjab’, the Shalimar Gardens, created 360 years ago by that prodigious creator of fine monuments Emperor Shah Jahan, the tasteful tyrant who gave the world, among other things, the Taj Mahal.
Long, metre-thick pink and cream sandstone walls protect the gardens from the commotion outside, and a great and soothing sense of space and tranquillity envelops you as you enter.
In a city bulging at the seams it is both gratifying and surprising that these 40 acres of royal pleasure gardens survive at all, even though it’s clearly a struggle to maintain them to Shah Jahan’s specifications.
The layout is formal, based on descriptions in the Koran, with three descending terraces and the ultimate in water features - streams, pools, cascades and waterfalls - all set in precise geometric harmony. In the days when the Emperor and Empress looked out at each other from their own personal pavilions, separated by shaded walkways and water channels, 400 fountains played in the gardens, kept at constant pressure by water from huge storage tanks continually topped up from a canal by a conveyor belt of wheels and buckets.
But that was the 17th century and modern technology just hasn’t been able to keep up. The 20th-century pumps are far less effective and water springs from the calcified fountains in dribbles rather than jets. An old man is wading around in the water tank unclogging non-performing fountains by hammering a wooden peg into their sclerotic spouts.
There is, sadly, no sign of the 128 gardeners recorded in an early description of the Shalimar Gardens. Instead there is a man cutting the grass with a small domestic lawnmower hauled by a water buffalo. Every now and then he brings the buffalo to a halt and empties the grass cuttings into the nearest ornamental lake, where they’re devoured by large and slothful fish.
Eating being one of the preoccupations of Lahoris, I end the day in Food Street, on the recommendation of Asim and Azam, my friends from the train. I think they’ve slightly oversold the place. It’s picturesque enough, with fresh-painted wooden verandahs and shiny, stuccoed balconies, but it’s obviously designed for tourists and has that cheerful soulless glow of civic improvement. The food, especially the house speciality of Mutton Karahi, served in the wok it’s cooked in, is good, strong and filling, but how I long for a beer to wash it down. The soda I’m allowed is just not the same.
The alcohol ban brings the conversation around to religion, and my assumption that because Asim and Azam are young ‘modern’ Pakistanis they would be less interested in matters of faith than their elders proves to be wrong.
Azam, the accountant, maintains that being a Muslim means that the Koran orders everything for him, offering guidance and instruction in every area of life.
He picks a glass up from the table.
‘Even a simple thing like this glass. How I hold it. In my right hand, never my left. I should always drink sitting down, never standing up. I should look into the glass as I drink.’
He puts the glass down and looks across the table at me, almost defiantly.
‘I do all these things not just because it says so in the Koran, but also because I know they are good for me.’
Tomorrow Azam will become engaged and they will have a big party. He doesn’t know when they’ll marry. It could be a year, two, or even three years.
‘Will you live together until then?’
Both he and Asim shake their heads vehemently.
‘Oh, no. No. Sex before marriage is out of the question.’
Day Twenty Eight : Lahore to Amritsar
On the front page of the newspaper there is a photograph of a man on a ladder painting black stripes over an advert that shows an unveiled woman holding an apple drink. He is described as a member of the Shabab-I-Milli Islamist Activist group. Lower down the page are pictures of two sisters, their faces disfigured by acid thrown by the husband of one of them. ‘Acid attacks,’ notes the report, ‘are among the worst of the huge numbers of crimes against women committed in Pakistan.’
There could hardly be two more graphic reminders of the problems that loom ahead for the country as it tries to reconcile progress with deeply entrenched tradition.
As I pack for the last time before crossing the border to India, I have to say that Pakistan has been a revelation. Simplistic post 9/11 propaganda sought to equate it with terrorism, as if you could equate a population greater than that of France and Germany combined with any single thought or idea. I have found Pakistan to be infinitely more complex and diverse than I had been prepared for. Wilder and more beautiful too. Never once did I feel threatened. Give or take a few cold beers, I leave it with regret.
The Indian border is only 18 miles (30 km) from Lahore, an accident of politics that brought terrible suffering to the city when Pakistan was created in 1947. The exact details of where the frontier would run were not revealed by the British until a few hours before independence was declared. When it became clear that one of India’s oldest and most prestigious cities was to become part of Pakistan an hysterical panic broke out. As half a million Hindus and Sikhs fled east and even more Muslims fled west, reprisals on both sides were swift and bloody.
Cross-border trains arrived at Lahore station full of massacred corpses. Men, women and children on both sides were attacked and killed. Law and order were paralysed as the communal violence took its course. The British refused to bring their army out onto the streets to help. Across the subcontinent as a whole it is estimated that partition resulted in over a million deaths.
The legacy of hatred still smoulders. The border post at Wagah is the only official land crossing between Pakistan and India, and even then Pakistanis and Indians are only allowed to cross in specially secure trains between Lahore and Amritsar. Foreigners, if they have the time and patience, can walk through from Pakistan to India, and this is what we intend to do.
The thermometer has fallen to a mere 41degC (106degF), but the humidity has risen. There was quite a storm across these plains last night and a combination of dust and moisture makes the air thick and sticky. It’s what Roger calls a three-shirt day.
The canals that run along the side of the road to Wagah are thronged with people cooling off. Families picnicking on the banks watch children splashing in the mud, men wash rickshaws and bicycles in the water, women, veiled and sari-ed, take tentative dips. Hot-headed teenage boys fling their shirts off and leap from bridges. There seems to be a heightened devil-may-care mood along the roadside today. As the traffic grinds to a standstill boys who would not normally have dared approach us dance like scarecrows in front of our minibus and bang the sides as we move on. It’s nice to have one last image of Pakistan with its hair down.