Murree
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Murree
The Dark Side of Murree
Text and Photographs by Z. N.
A stroll through the heart and soul of Murree is a step back in time –– the languid days of the late 1800s and early 1900s. This is where, in many respects, the pace and flavour of life has retained the truly laid-back essence of a hill station of yore.
A donkey on its daily round of milk delivery ambles down uneven cobble stones careful not to miss its step. A female resident of a fifth story apartment lowers cash in a basket attached to a rope to the shop keeper on the ground floor who measures out the requested amount of dal, tosses in a bunch of fresh dhania for luck, adds the lady’s change and tugs on the rope to signal the job is done and the basket ready to be hauled back up. Two teenage girls lean out of their respective fourth floor homes on either side of a narrow alley way, so close that they can pass a plate of biryani easily between them. A bare bottomed child squats over an open drain by an out of order Victorian standpipe as an old lady sits cleaning rice on her wooden doorstep. The narrow ribbon of blue sky visible between the towering buildings helps create an ambience which no longer exists less than a hundred yards away where life is a completely different phenomenon.
To the millions of visitors who swarm to Murree almost all around the year, ‘The Mall’ with its overdeveloped hotch potch of new buildings which have mostly replaced the old, and the garish display of low cost, local and imported ‘bling’ is the only place to be and they rarely, if ever, venture off this purely commercial, tourist highway.
However, directly behind the shops full of cheap toys, trashy jewellery, cut cloth, imitation designer gear and fast food joints is a parallel street leading to an absolutely parallel world…. the world of Lower Bazaar in which people have, so far, hung on to their traditions of hospitality, tolerance and a time honoured patience with the world around them. Offers of tea, of hot samosas with home made tomato sauce, of a plate of fresh fruit, of a chance to rest your weary feet and gossip for a while are the currency here rather than the money grappling hullabaloo of traders on ‘The Mall’ most of whose back to back buildings actually join on to the sadly dilapidated splendour of their Lower Bazaar neighbours.
The astronomical, all round differences between these two conjoined worlds is absolutely stunning but, at the same time, heart rendingly sad as, here and there, where decaying old buildings have collapsed through lack of attention, the new monstrosities are poking through, beginning to fill the gaps and the skyline with the blatant greed of uncontrolled profiteers.
Lower Bazaar, like Murree itself, was the brainchild of the British Raj whose agents purchased the ridge on which the town now stands from the local populace back in 1850. The British immediately set about constructing the hill resort of their dreams with classy bungalows being constructed at an amazing rate along with a few shops, churches and banks on ‘The Mall’. Locals were banned from the main street itself but as the newcomers needed the services of butchers, bakers, tailors, laundries etc. the Lower Bazaar came into being and the period buildings of the day, with their fancy woodwork and ironwork embellishments must have been a sight to see. As the years have passed though, these once proud façades have suffered badly from shameful neglect with many, if not all of them, now in a dangerously dilapidated state and, unless a serious conservation programme is launched, these historical monuments will soon crumble in to dust.
