With time, I’ve come to witness that nothing appears as it does on the surface. Behind the cultural landmarks that lie across my city or the development that sweeps through the uneven freedoms of Lahore, rest stories.

There is an orange line that runs through the most ancient parts of the city; the government dubbed it our pride and joy, the bridge between the present and the past. The transportation system is a semblance of development, proof that Lahore is the up-and-coming hub of modernity. I passed one of the sites while visiting Anaarkali’s tomb with my younger sister. I saw cranes at their stations, almost scowling with the pride and ferocity of prison guards. In the distance, behind the crevices of land and the brick bastions and the towers of concrete, I saw bags — bundles of clothes being pushed out of the carelessly contrived slums on the periphery of Old Lahore.

If you ventured through and went close enough, you would marvel at how they were still standing. When you see the people outside, throwing whirlwinds of glances, almost lustful in their intensity, you stop, and you learn. The structures we discard and perhaps even belittle in the name of advancement are, for certain people, homes and palaces.

We realize how little we know when, in actuality, the houses we live in and the buses we ride and the Gurdwaaras (shrines) we know and love are all products of sacrifice. Even, sometimes, the products of oppression. Living in a community that is still entrenched in the muddles of the developing world makes the ethical considerations accompanying modernity clear. I look at the sculptures in the middle of roads, the houses with plaques on them, or the flower beds that teem with colour. I am suddenly daunted by thoughts of unregulated labor practices and eviction, the free reign that construction companies have over our vulnerable, defenseless soil.

My community has taught me to look beyond what meets the eye through the simplest of means. We often take our surroundings as they are, justifying them ruthlessly instead of moving on to understand their origins. With time, I began to read, looking for the minutest explanations regarding the objects that made my life what it was. I learnt that even bars of soap were products of eons of slavery.

I’m not the most observant of people, but the bags on the side of the road lured me into a rabbit hole, one that magnified the cracks in the foundation of an ancient colossus, rather than allowing me to accept its apparently flawless façade.