Amaltas
Outside my window I see a perfectly triangular roof of the house next door, the kind that we were taught to draw as young artists in kindergarten. These roofs are built at a slant, so that rain and snow may fall off with ease. They’re built at an angle to minimize water damage.
It does not snow in Lahore. There, the roofs are flat, but when it rains the clogged drains sometimes retain the rainwater for days before it evaporates. The roofs sustain this routine. When it rains in Lahore, children come out into the street to splash around and jump in the puddles gathered on uneven street sides. Sometimes, they’ll make boats out of old newspaper scraps and leave them in the puddles, and days later the street would be littered with news from a far off time.
December swallows Lahore in choking thickets of smog. The city fades into an invisible haze, and its people, teary-eyed and suffocated, retreat into their homes. The dilapidated buildings, the overflowing garbage bins, the potholes that turn streets into obstacle courses, all are blurred by the smog. The city is camouflaged. The suffering of the homeless, the struggles of the street vendors, the daily grind of those working in the shadows of prosperity – these, too, are easier to ignore when the world is blurred by smog.
Summer brings its own agony – blistering heat, hours lost in traffic jams, birds displaced from their nests. I wait in traffic, horns blaring around me, a headache lingering from the hours spent in a dingy office in Liberty. I see children crammed into pick-and-drop minivans in the sweltering afternoons, while others with their Thermocol-stuffed shalwars float carefree in the canal. Ice cream vendors and popcorn sellers bring fleeting joy, overshadowed by billboards advertising floral lawns and the latest sector of DHA.
On the opposite end of the canal is my home with the straight roof. I wake up in a house where I am never the first to rise. Mornings start with the hum of the washing machine, the distant murmur of news broadcasts, and the quiet hiss of a pressure cooker preparing for the post-Jummah lunch. This is the house where I sleep with the lights off. There’s the room with the TV with its water-damaged walls repainted by my father. There’s the kitchen where a pot rests perpetually on the stove, boiling milk, chai, rice at various times of the day. The walls of my room are adorned with paintings my father created during COVID, the cupboards are lined with clothes my mother embroidered by hand, and the shelves carry books I’d bought with the hope to one day share with my brother. There’s the lawn where an ailing lemon tree shrivels under the summer sun.
On Khayaban-e-Jinnah, traffic comes to a standstill. Bikes, rickshaws, and cars weave into a tangled mess, a puzzle that will take hours to unravel. Amidst this chaos, the Amaltas bloom on a late May afternoon. Like cascading sunbeams, the Amaltas pour down, bursting forth in the otherwise drab landscape, bringing life to Lahore’s streets. The Amaltas are abundant, lining the avenue in clusters, their branches drooping under the weight of the vibrant flowers. The sight of the Amaltas is refreshing, their vivid hues catching the eye of every passerby, a reminder of nature’s persistence even in the heart of the urban sprawl.
On an April morning, thousands of miles away under the angular roof of the kind of house I once only knew how to draw from the outside, I get up and open my bedroom window. I look out and see a yellow tree, and I see Lahore.
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– Rabia Malik is a writer from Lahore. She writes around themes of womanhood, familial bonds and nostalgia. Her work has appeared in The News on Sunday, RIC Journal, The Aleph Review and Fahmidan Journal. She is currently pursuing an MFA in Writing.
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