The lounge in Bridgebottom, my home in Lahore, looks out onto a small garden. It existence is testament to my gardener Bhola, who turned what was essentially a square of mud under a bridge into a lush, fragrant sanctuary surrounded on all sides by towering walls of greenery. I don’t have a green thumb - a fact confirmed by an unfortunate incident in 2009 involving garden shears, a parrot and a DVD copy of Edward Scissorhands that I’d rather not go into for legal reasons - so I’m glad to bask vicariously in the glow of Bhola’s enviably green talent. I stare out at the garden every so often when I’m working through something in my head, and so it was that a few days ago I made myself a cup of coffee and went to the window for some quality staring.
This is usually stage 3 of me trying to work through a problem in my head. Depending on the magnitude of the problem, I can gradually dial it up from Stage 1 (talking to myself) to say stage 5 (calling friend to vent) through to stage 27 (imagining self on daytime TV talk show dramatically recounting all the drama I’m having to go through and taking audiences questions).
My first inkling that something was off came because the lounge was dark, even though it was the middle of the day. Perhaps it was overcast? As I walked over to the window and took a deep breath to begin, I noticed bizarre shapes and colours where the ferns should be. Well, that can’t be right. There I stood for a solid two minutes, sipping and looking, until it dawned to me that I couldn’t actually see my garden at all. Instead I was looking at a pair of eyes three feet wide, grinning next to a six-foot tea cup. It wasn’t until I walked outside that I realized that the wrinkled expanse of giant ads as they stretch across a nearby billboard had come undone and draped itself artfully over my entire home, turning it into the art installation nobody asked for.
Some information: in addition to being beneath busy bridge, next to house with five goats, and at the end of a colony of inquisitive widows – my house is also directly beneath one of the largest billboards in Lahore. Words cannot describe how loathsome it is, but let’s try anyway. The behemoth rises up like a steel monstrosity in the empty plot between my place and the bridge, its massive base legs over a dozen feet wide and wedged deep in the ground. It rises over five stories high, a mess of steel and lights and noise and hate, before blooming into two gargantuan expanses of flattened steel that overlook the bridge. The ads change every two weeks, so you never know what you’ll see up there. One day it’s a packet of crisps and the next it’s two feral models pouting sexily holding a soda can. It looms so close and so large that I cannot see the sky when I look up. The worst bit is that at night they turn on the the lights, which casts an eerie, unflattering green-blue glow over my whole place. If you look outside the windows at night it feels like the moments right before a space saucer lands to kidnap you.
Obviously the billboard people and I don’t get along. I shout at them for leaving garbage behind every time they change the ads. They plead with me to stop cutting the wires to their generator and our dance goes on. But seeing over 500 lbs of mangled plastic sheeting suddenly fall over the roof of my house like a tea cozy from hell was the last straw. If someone had been sitting outside when it fell, they would have died under the weight of it. Worse, they would have been killed by an ad for artificial sweetener, their flattened remains found under the printed tagline “Live your best life…”
To get rid of it, I marched with anger to the Cantt Board offices, which is the opaque central hub that runs all things in the cantonment area. Like most bureaucratic offices, it’s a sad little place run by a neverending hierarchy of people – each desperate to assert that they are infinitesimally more senior than the person to their right. Going to these places feels like being in a video game where you have to slay six characters before getting to the one that actually has usable information, who in this case was a man called Abid. He brought out some documentation which proved that the more he uncovered, the less he found out. Ownership deeds were mysteriously missing, owner names were conveniently blank, records were outdated or else completely false. There is no mention of how much money the billboard makes, nor who the money goes towards. Eventually it became clear the billboard people had paid someone off to erect the thing, and had done it skillfully enough that there was no way I was going to be able to bring it down without an epic court struggle.
I returned defeated to see the billboard people had already replaced the old ad with one for Ispaghol. And right then, standing in the middle of my garden, I came to a decision. As much as I love Bridgebottom, the time has come to move on. A bridge I can handle. A few widows? Sure. A goat or two? Maybe. But to battle all those and still risk death by a falling laxative ad? No. Not even for Bhola’s garden.
Write to thekantawala@gmail.com
This is usually stage 3 of me trying to work through a problem in my head. Depending on the magnitude of the problem, I can gradually dial it up from Stage 1 (talking to myself) to say stage 5 (calling friend to vent) through to stage 27 (imagining self on daytime TV talk show dramatically recounting all the drama I’m having to go through and taking audiences questions).
My first inkling that something was off came because the lounge was dark, even though it was the middle of the day. Perhaps it was overcast? As I walked over to the window and took a deep breath to begin, I noticed bizarre shapes and colours where the ferns should be. Well, that can’t be right. There I stood for a solid two minutes, sipping and looking, until it dawned to me that I couldn’t actually see my garden at all. Instead I was looking at a pair of eyes three feet wide, grinning next to a six-foot tea cup. It wasn’t until I walked outside that I realized that the wrinkled expanse of giant ads as they stretch across a nearby billboard had come undone and draped itself artfully over my entire home, turning it into the art installation nobody asked for.
Some information: in addition to being beneath busy bridge, next to house with five goats, and at the end of a colony of inquisitive widows – my house is also directly beneath one of the largest billboards in Lahore. Words cannot describe how loathsome it is, but let’s try anyway. The behemoth rises up like a steel monstrosity in the empty plot between my place and the bridge, its massive base legs over a dozen feet wide and wedged deep in the ground. It rises over five stories high, a mess of steel and lights and noise and hate, before blooming into two gargantuan expanses of flattened steel that overlook the bridge. The ads change every two weeks, so you never know what you’ll see up there. One day it’s a packet of crisps and the next it’s two feral models pouting sexily holding a soda can. It looms so close and so large that I cannot see the sky when I look up. The worst bit is that at night they turn on the the lights, which casts an eerie, unflattering green-blue glow over my whole place. If you look outside the windows at night it feels like the moments right before a space saucer lands to kidnap you.
Obviously the billboard people and I don’t get along. I shout at them for leaving garbage behind every time they change the ads. They plead with me to stop cutting the wires to their generator and our dance goes on. But seeing over 500 lbs of mangled plastic sheeting suddenly fall over the roof of my house like a tea cozy from hell was the last straw. If someone had been sitting outside when it fell, they would have died under the weight of it. Worse, they would have been killed by an ad for artificial sweetener, their flattened remains found under the printed tagline “Live your best life…”
Obviously the billboard people and I don’t get along. I shout at them for leaving garbage behind every time they change the ads. They plead with me to stop cutting the wires to their generator and our dance goes on
To get rid of it, I marched with anger to the Cantt Board offices, which is the opaque central hub that runs all things in the cantonment area. Like most bureaucratic offices, it’s a sad little place run by a neverending hierarchy of people – each desperate to assert that they are infinitesimally more senior than the person to their right. Going to these places feels like being in a video game where you have to slay six characters before getting to the one that actually has usable information, who in this case was a man called Abid. He brought out some documentation which proved that the more he uncovered, the less he found out. Ownership deeds were mysteriously missing, owner names were conveniently blank, records were outdated or else completely false. There is no mention of how much money the billboard makes, nor who the money goes towards. Eventually it became clear the billboard people had paid someone off to erect the thing, and had done it skillfully enough that there was no way I was going to be able to bring it down without an epic court struggle.
I returned defeated to see the billboard people had already replaced the old ad with one for Ispaghol. And right then, standing in the middle of my garden, I came to a decision. As much as I love Bridgebottom, the time has come to move on. A bridge I can handle. A few widows? Sure. A goat or two? Maybe. But to battle all those and still risk death by a falling laxative ad? No. Not even for Bhola’s garden.
Write to thekantawala@gmail.com