It struck me as odd that the sisters, who had got the house without giving my family a penny, should be complaining about the ants while my father, who had built and added to the house over many years under the pressure of loans and mortgages, hardly ever spoke about losing it.

Aijaz, Shahnaz and I started walking through the house, with the sisters following close behind.

The house was the first pukka, or permanent, structure that anyone in the Mehta family had ever owned. It was, by Lahore standards, small and elegant, 21Ž2 stories tall, of brick and mortar, with running water, electric lights and electric ceiling fans. We thought of it as a monument to my father's progress from the windowless mud hut lighted by mustard-oil lamps in which he had grown up to the modern city of Lahore, which even our British rulers called the "Paris of the Punjab." As a boy of 10, my father had migrated from the kucha, or impermanent, village and come to Lahore for his education, becoming the second person in the family to graduate from a college (his paternal uncle, Ganga Ram, with whom he had lodged in the city in the early years, being the first). Afterward he became a medical doctor and later obtained a coveted government job in the Punjab's public-health department.

Unlike my father's contemporaries, who were also dusting off the traces of village life but were building indifferent houses in small towns or outposts of Lahore, my father wanted to put down his roots in the pre-eminent city of the Punjab. So, when he was 33, married and with two children, he bought a plot of land for his house on Temple Road, the most central and desirable part of British Lahore. As it happened, when my brothers, sisters and I were growing up—there are seven of us—we scarcely ever lived in our own house, because my father's job required periodic transfers to different cities. Consequently, we children were either packed off to boarding school so that our education would not be interrupted or, if we did move with our parents, lived in minute rented cottages in an expensive hill station or in a ramshackle government bungalow.

When I was 11, we finally started living at 11 Temple Road for the first time in my conscious memory. My father had provided for everything. There was a separate room with an attached bathroom for each of us. The walls were painted in distemper, and the floors were finished with marble chips, which shined just as well as the marble slabs in the palaces of rajas. An internal staircase rose from the back veranda past my sisters' rooms to the terraced roof, which had a traditional barsati, or rain shelter, at one end and high brick parapets. Like many Lahoris, we used to sleep on cots out in the open during the hot nights, and if it happened to rain, we pulled them in under the shelter, which was used during the day for stacking and storing the cots. We also played on the roof, just sitting around there or flying kites. When coming down, I hardly ever used the stairs; instead, I slid down the beautifully polished teakwood banister, running my feet along the metal balustrades, making them ring and clang as I came down and jumping onto the landings just long enough to take the turn and jump back on the banister.

Although the house was built on a plot of barely 650 square meters and shared common walls with two flanking houses, it seemed ample. On the other side of the lane, across from the rose garden and the main house, was a stall in which to keep a buffalo for fresh milk; a garage, something we had never had before; and an external staircase, which provided a second access to my sisters' rooms so that they could come and go independently. For us, the house was like a castle, our foothold in a city where no less a person than Alexander the Great had left his mark. (One of my older brother's friends was called Secunder, the Hindustani version of the Greek name.)

In the evening, my sisters, our cousins and I would walk up Temple Road to the Mall. We might look into one of the British shops for some sweets or run around in Lawrence Gardens, a British-type park that was a favorite among English and Indian children alike. More often than not, we would stop by the famous cannon Zam-Zammah, the "fire-breathing dragon," which stood in front of the Lahore Museum, where Rudyard Kipling's father had been curator from 1875 to 1893. The cannon was constructed in Lahore in 1757, but most everyone I knew believed that the British had hauled it in from London to impose law and order on the anarchistic Indians. It was said that whoever owned the cannon ruled the Punjab and, for all we knew, the world. Like Kim, the eponymous hero of Kipling's 1901 novel, we grew up in its shadow. Because Kim was English, he felt entitled to defy municipal orders and so climbed up on Zam-Zammah. Sitting astride the cannon, he fought off a Muslim child and a Hindu child who, each in turn, tried to take his place. In contrast, we children were not only law abiding but were cowed by the gun. I remember my father once walked me up to it, and I touched its trunnions. I was so mortified by my transgression of municipal orders that I shrank back, even though I thought that by touching the gun I was paying homage to the British crown.

A Lahori friend of mine, the Indian painter Krishen Khanna, also grew up in the shadow of Zam-Zammah. In 1988, some nine years after I went to Pakistan, he went there to sketch the cannon. He brought back scores of drawings, which he used for a series of abstract paintings. I own one of the paintings—nearly two meters tall and more than a meter wide—in which three barely discernible children climb monkey-like on the cannon, as in Kim. The painting now hangs in our dining room in New York, commemorating the Lahore of my childhood.

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