hen the year started and January stretched into what felt like a hundred days, the genocide had reached fifteen months and most of us were struggling to focus. It was as if we were all watching the world go by – slow and sparse at first – until, gradually, the flowers arrived. The seasons were changing now.

Two things were certain this past weekend. First, Lahore’s spring had arrived and the breeze was inspiring poets to write to their beloveds. Second, as Lahore’s festival season unfolded, it became clear in retrospect that cultural festivals tend to archive fractures in a society. These festivals not only highlight where fault lines appear – alienation, disconnect – but also offer opportunities to rebuild spaces of solidarity.

Let’s retrace briefly through the last weekend.

“Five minutes,” my Google Maps indicated as I detoured to Alhamra Hall for the Lahore Literary Festival’s thirteenth annual programme, avoiding the Mall, which was closed off for the cricket teams travelling to the stadium. Messages on WhatsApp and social media suggested otherwise for the city’s commuters, though.

While scrolling through Instagram, a reel appeared showing Alhamra Hall’s façade against the blue sky, accompanied by faint music, laughter and bookstalls. It made me impatient, wishing I weren’t missing out. I’ve attended the festival since its first edition when I skipped my first internship to attend a literary event in Lahore.

The roads were still blocked, and while crossing, an older woman gently held me back by my arm as a motorbike zoomed past. “Mera bacha, araam say, itni jaldi kyun hai?” she said, her voice warm and concerned.

As I entered the hall, a few minutes into the session, clips from Palestinian filmmaker Azza El Hassan’s documentary played as she narrated the visual narrative of Palestine through images plundered and archived by Israel. Palestine had been on my mind. We were reminded that it is the coloniser who controls the narrative of the colonised.

The talk, moderated by Professor Ali Raza, explored how one can build solidarities and amplify Palestinian narratives through storytelling. Panelist Hira Wasti, founder of Acacia Magazine, read a poem by Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha. The crowd listened in silence. Poems have the power to dismantle cultural hegemony in the quietest way sometimes – at least briefly.

There was no dissonance up until now. The panel addressed what other sessions and festivals before this had silently avoided – a space for amplifying Palestinian voices and the cause of liberation. After the session ended, the floor was opened for audience questions. A woman raised her hand and asked whether the festival was introspective about its platform and how such cultural spaces could be co-opted by those complicit in silencing dissent. The silence that followed was palpable.

Walking out to the bookstalls, which were swarmed with people stuffing bags with signed copies of the panellists’ books.

Cultural historian Diana Darke had an early morning session in Hall Three. Every seat in the room was filled, and people were filing in to sit on the stairs while she stood on the stage with a presentation of images playing in the background.

Darke was introducing her work from her new book, Islamesque, a follow-up to her previous bestseller, Stealing from the Saracens. She was determined to highlight erasure through her research, as she has done before, by bringing to light the forgotten and erased role of the Muslim craftsmen who built medieval European architecture. This erasure supported Eurocentric assumptions and placed these artisans, sculptors and designers beyond mainstream history.

Europe – its Leaning Tower of Pisa, its Notre-Dame – we are told they were built by Europeans. The erasure ensures that this version of history prevails. But here, Darke came armed with books full of visual evidence showing that Islamic art had a deep influence through consistent borrowing, theft and the use of craftsmen who were later written out of the narrative.

These festivals not only highlight where fault lines appear – alienation, disconnect – but also offer opportunities to rebuild spaces of solidarity.

Such deliberate erasure also ensured that Muslim communities and their role in medieval Europe were erased, fuelling far-right fascist sentiments in modern Europe, where Muslims are now only remembered as immigrants crossing borders from war-torn countries.

Mishal Husain’s session on her book Broken Threads will stay with me for a while. I had been following her broadcast work for the BBC for some time.

In late 2024, Husain was accused by an Israeli spokesman on a BBC broadcast of “blindly repeating what the terrorist organisations feed you” for asking legitimate questions about Israel’s human rights violations, the bombing of schools and the torture of Palestinian prisoners. The BBC defended Husain’s professionalism, questions and courage.

It was this journalistic integrity that had drawn me to Husain’s session about her memoir – about her grandparents, the empire and the partition of the subcontinent. She spoke about the journeys her family made across the border and the ghost trains they witnessed carrying the dead from both sides.

Eloquent in her telling, Husain aimed to recount her family’s stories dispassionately – Partition stories are often intertwined with national histories and told through a nationalistic, partisan lens that fuels divisive hate for the other. She spoke about approaching her ancestral history with the investigative tools of journalism, tracing the lives of her four grandparents and how they witnessed the unravelling of an empire.

Her detailed research began with family memories and anecdotes. She sifted through letters, diaries and audio tapes. These eventually led her to corroborate these stories in the archives of the British Library. But it was a frayed piece of silk brocade from her grandparents’ family, “whose threads caught light,” that became the starting point of the memoir. The title of the book, Broken Threads, plays on the disruptions that came with the partition of 1947.

Alongside logistical deterrents, after a month and a half, perhaps festival fatigue had also set in. The month prior had seen a series of cultural festivals.

Here, at the Lahore Literary Festival’s thirteenth edition, there were panels on Sikh and Mughal heritage, Urdu short stories, theatre, Sufi Tarot, climate change and speculative world-building. Renowned historians were among the headliners – Eduardo Moreno, Peter Frankopan, Ayesha Jalal, Diana Darke and Mishal Husain.

Sara Suleri writes in Meatless Days, “Can’t you see that Lahore plays on the enchantment of the obvious? …That it refuses to be anything besides what it seems to be?” Perhaps this held true for its festivals as well.

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