Nakhlau (Lucknow)

Lines in praise of Nakhlau (from Qaiyum)

Well it is known to all the peoples of the earth that the city of Nakhlau (which the vulgar and the rough-toungued called Lakhnau, or One Hundred Thousand Boats) stands without equal for the beauty of its gateways, and the majesty of its walls, the grace of its towers, the sheen of its domes, the lustre of its meanest dwellings washed with lime and shimmering under an indigo sky. Who has not heard of Chowk, with its heaven-embracing markets loaded with silks and incense, sugar and mangoes, its colonnades festooned with peacocks, its fragrant stares washed hourly with crimson juices? Here, veiled, pass heart-expanding women with chaplets of flowers and comely boys with languid gait. Here are bejewelled elephants and haughty eunuchs, there frolic charioteers and vegetable lamps. Here are pannikins of crushed pearls, trays heavy with sweetmeats, the mouth-rejoicing gulab jamun, the tongue delighting jalebi, the tooth-vibrating kulfi, the universe-arresting Sandila ladoo; there are philtres, a thousand roses distilled in a vial; here again are gossamer bodices, chikan-worked, of which a courtesan may put on twelve and still not be modestly clad.

You who have feasted on the coconuts of Cashmere, who have lolled upon the nag-phan of Ceylon, who have slumbered beneath the kamchors of Thibet, and found no peace, stop in these scented gardens. Pause by some twilit lake whose ripples finally slice the clove-of-lahsan moon, whose shores are fringed with rubber trees and broad-leaved grasses where some dark lady clothed with the night plays on her flute a solemn air and one rapt bird stands unmolested by a company of pythons. And when, borne on cool breezes, the laughter of the citizenry wafts to you down some perfumed canal, voices so mellifluous that the traveller Kuo Chin-wu once asked where were heart-easing bells that he might buy one, board you your sandalwood barge and hope to leave. Alas! there is no leaving. Have not visitors from Constantinople and St. Petersburg, Toledo and Tashkent, Peiping and Aleppo, Bokhara, Kon, and Mandalay, stood speechless on the top of Lakshman Tila? And do they not then burst into tears and coming down disband their retinues, paying of their assherds and muleteers, their cooks and compote factors, there masalchis, sutlers, food-tasters, scullions, guides, guards, unguent-mixers, herbalots, mustard-oil-pressers and masseurs, because after this can there be more travel?

(Excerpt from the essay : From The Troter-Nama by I. Allan Sealy)