When you walk into the enormous central hall of the Lahore Museum, your eye is quickly drawn to the two rows of miniature paintings displayed along the walls on either side. Women on horseback playing polo; Radha and Krishna consorting under a mango tree. You approach the glass cases to observe the minute details of individual strands of hair, of eyelashes, of fingernails. Perchance, you look up.
And you are transposed. Telescoped from the micro to the macro! There, 11 metres in the air, are the sparkling stars, the whirling planets, the spiralling galaxies, all beaming directly at you. A viewer may not be able to immediately recognise the intricate Kufic calligraphy, the use of the letter noon as a design element, but the dynamism of the geometric shapes, the bold and energetic lines, the feverish cross-hatching, will intrigue and engage any imagination. This is a mammoth, 29×7.8-metre oil painting by the famed Pakistani artist Sadequain, rendered in a genre called 'calligraphic cubism', spanning the entire ceiling of the entrance hall. If your vision is sharp and you know Urdu, you will read the line of a poem by Mohammad Iqbal painted on one panel: Sitaaro'n ke aage jaha'n aur bhi hai – Beyond the stars there are still other worlds.
Standing there, humbled by the celestial orbs, another poet's lines echo through this writer's mind: Aur bhi dukh hai'n zamaane me'n mohabbat ke sivaa/ raahate'n aur bhi hai'n vasl ki raahat ke sivaa. These are Faiz Ahmad Faiz's immortal words: There are sorrows in this world other than those of love/ joys, other than those of union with one's beloved.
In resonance with the memory of the famous communist litterateur, I discover, at the far ends of the painting, the human collective. Metamorphosed into cactus forms, their fingers grope for light, for knowledge, for tools – the sickle and the hammer, held against the rising sun. The whole motif is a visual pun on the Urdu lettering aaj, Today. And in the middle of the huge rectangle, in the centre of the starry heavens, is the traditional image of procreation, a man and a woman. The powerful draftsmanship of the figures recalls Michelangelo and his "Creation", on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.