ne afternoon, in late October, the city – the historic, the new, the lived and the imagined – was opaque with dense brown smog, with the highest recording of AQI in the world at 1,400 in some parts when I arrived at a collateral exhibition with Lahore Biennale, delicately curated by Fatma Shah at 11 Temple Road. It was titled Tomorrow isn’t Promised and showcased twelve artists’ stories at the intersection of personal, political, ecological and historical. As I walked into the beautiful pre-partition house and wandered through it, I was beyond time – I could be in the past or imagining a future. Or we could be in the liminal space of the intangibles, as a point of origin or departure, as Georges Perec writes in his seminal freeform essay ‘Species of Spaces’.

Fatma Shah asked us in her curatorial note “what is the present, if not the future of the past?” We look at the relationship between humans and the world they inhabit and interact with — the ecology, the flora and fauna, the city, the elements of air, water and earth. James Baldwin writes about how it is “the intangible dreams of people, which have a tangible effect on the world.” The intangible dreams of twelve artists — imagined, dreamt, real and retold - were now housed at 11 Temple Road.

Rahma Shahid, an interdisciplinary artist, had a poignant and powerful installation, River City, depicting an imagined bank of the Ravi. One walked amid stalks of Pampas grass, slowly decaying like those by the river itself. “There is no future to predict or a past to lament - just an evocation of possibilities,” Shahid had written in her artist’s note. She said the installation was meant to recreate the beauty of the River Ravi ecosystem and instil hope before the ruin and degradation through time – from how the colonial rulers had removed its forests to the recent ones who had sought to displace the fishing population to allow construction of upscale housing societies.

At Shahid’s River City, we conversed about living and growing up in our Lahore, the one we could never leave behind; the one we won’t mourn; the one we wanted to walk through in romance and love; the one we wanted to protect even if we had to fight for it; the one we carried with us wherever we eventually lived.

We walked back and forth amongst the stalks, to the end near the painting that depicted erosion of the banks; to the attached balcony with the furniture inspired by river flow patterns. “I envisioned and created this embankment. Our generation has not actually seen or lived by the banks of Ravi. They should see this and realise that many people around the world live by their rivers, picnic and walk beside them. It is sad that this generation has never had that privilege,” says Shahid.

By the windows before the courtyard verandah were placed Ameer Hamza’s delicate and beautiful paintings and scrolls. These were made in the tradition of manuscript/ miniature painting which he had studied at the NCA. He handed me a magnifying glass to look at the art. Suddenly the scrolls expanded to the eye. They revealed a shaadi. “Or it could be a royal march to the battlefield,” curator Shah added with a smile as we looked through the magnifying glass. There were warlike scenes and detailed calligraphy on other scrolls. There was a beautiful ’alam in one of the paintings. Hamza spoke about Karbala being his inspiration for the spear-like ’alam he had painted. The room was suddenly full of visitors while he softly spoke of his art. Everyone was listening as he pointed to the painting that reminded one of Palestine: the sky lit up with sparks. Palestine was on the artist’s mind; it was also on the mind of the curator. The visitors were drawn into this world, too.

Sidra Khawaja’s Map Shawl of Kashmir was a delicately stitched cartographic depiction of Kashmir placed in front of a screen playing a documentary, Longing for Paradise, shot in collaboration with Zafeer Butt. It was about a Kashmiri freedom fighter who spoke slowly about the loss of his mother and his identity as a Kashmiri; decades of occupation; and how he sought refuge in his craft. The visitors could take a magnifying glass to appreciate the details on the shawl.

On the other side in the same room, there was Saba Qizilbash’s beautiful graphite drawing showing a part of the historic trade route from Skardu to Kargil, a reminder of the Line of Control between Indian and Pakistani administered parts of Kashmir; a site of wars climate disasters. The focus of the drawing narrowed down to the abandoned houses of the Hunderman village. Qizilbash said that in 1947 the village was part of Pakistan. In 1971, it was occupied by the Indian military. Hunderman, possibly no more than a footnote in the region’s history, left one haunted.

Placed side by side, the two works speaking of two different times made me think about documenting loss through cartography. Over the days that followed, I returned to it several times.

Butt’s documentary played in the background but it wasn’t the only sound one heard. There were always visitors gently murmuring as they walked around the room and those outside the room running into familiar faces seldom from the same social circle.

“How have you been? I’ve not seen you since the Qawwali night?”

“The smog is terrible, hain nah. I need to get a bigger purifier?”

“Can you take another photo of me by these flowers and diyas, I want to post it on Instagram.”

Outside in the courtyard, one could hear the chirping of birds sitting by the alley of the old beautiful house. A week ago, the house had hosted a forty-five-minute documentary screening on Androon Lahore, Life in the Walled City of Lahore by Shireen Pasha. It showed footage of everyday life near the Walled City gates. Here, life was simple but not without its disruptions. The city had always been disrupted, if not by historical occupations, then by governments or the inadequate infrastructure. Other times, the disruptions were ecological and environmental, like the smog. Pasha’s documentary took one back to the simple pleasures of life in Androon Lahore.

As the evening turned, it seemed as if the house existed in a liminal crepuscular light. It would be maghrib soon.

The sun had set; I was making notes on my laptop, sitting by the verandah of the house. Farther away, perhaps from another street, you could hear the azaan. Time was a river now, flowing like the Ravi, slowly. We were all by the banks here. Time had contracted within the space; the year was coming to a close, as was the exhibition. Outside the house, there was no sound of looming traffic, just the footsteps against the pavement.

The writer, a development economist, has worked with several UN agencies in Pakistan and New York on humanitarian reporting and programme implementation. She is currently working on her novel with South Asia Speaks Fellowship. Her Instagram handle is @portraitsoflonging