The Lahore Museum, the 'Wonder House', was full on Saturday. They tell me it's the time to visit, now that the sauna heat of summer has passed but before winter sets in. I continue to wonder how cold that season will be - the locals speak of it with a kind of dread. Or maybe it's just the contrast with the baking summers, days when everything you touch is warmer than your blood.
As with Lahore Fort it was an excursion for the students at BNU. And as with the Fort it was the first visit for some. These were not the expatriate Pakistanis, raised in Manchester, Ireland or the Emirates, but locals. People who have lived in Lahore all their lives.
The Museum was also full of groups of school children. Loud, friendly, eagerly gathering to watch me draw clay figurines from the ancient civilisations of Harappa and Moenjodaro. The goats and dogs, children's toys most probably, bore strong resemblance to other clay figures seen in the National Museum in Budapest. I read somewhere that the most ancient words in English, those carried since the first days of the Indo-European expansion, are dog, water, fire, brother.
The museum is haphazard but that is its great charm. The divisions [Sikh, Muslim, Buddhist, Ethnographic, Freedom Movement] are made mostly without explanation, and not always with any sense of beginning or end. Sheltering at the back of the Sikh room are a collection of African masks. A statue of Queen Victoria is in with cutlasses and suits of chain mail armour.
The arms and knees of the statue are polished from years of handling. The students gather in rotating groups of ten or twelve to have their picture taken with this monarch, former Empress of so much of the world.
