The ruination of the inner city was attributed to time’s proclivity for change. It lay abandoned, half buried in and half surrounded by the squalor of shanty towns. New settlements cordoning it on three sides seemed to avoid the shadow of its sunken grandeur. Streets connecting new colonies skirted off its periphery. Links binding old and new neighborhoods were either never formed or broken at the start. The wide serpentine alley of high, arched gateways dividing its residential and artisan quarters looked strangely desolate.
The ravaging winds of Partition had left it unscathed. The turmoil that had seared the fiber of men and gored their souls had not touched this quiet habitation. There had been anxiety that things would be greatly changed, but later there seemed hope that the worst was over and life’s routines could now be renewed. Nobody expected that in Partition’s wake would follow a slow disintegration of values that would unravel the inner city. In a way, the inner city was always a cat’s cradle—a crisscross of life’s many faces, each sustained by the other. The strings of this cat’s cradle had not snapped but they had become hopelessly tangled.
The inner city had been emptied of most of its old inhabitants. Just as its walls had been stripped of their turquoise-colored mosaic panels, time’s ravages had forced into oblivion its generations of the dead, too. To answer the fierce demand for construction material during the last few years, the memory of those who had shaped the inner city was not only stripped of the tombstones that commemorated their existence, but also the bricks that marked their graves.
The disfigured architecture and worn, paved stones of the inner city still intoned its past splendor in broken whispers. There were a few enclaves where the last of its remnants were yet visible. Unconcerned and out of step with the currents of time, even after the recent changeful decade, these enclaves and those who inhabited them had continued to exist by exercising some power to resist change, or perhaps because no one found it worthwhile to remove them.
They had been left on their own and forgotten, and it occurred to some that the mist of oblivion would hang over them forever.