Multan is the hidden riddle in the middle of what is historically a hinterland. It has long remained just that but now it is growing and beginning to cross the line that kept it rural. Sizable malls are springing up all over town, a desecration of the sacred tradition of low buildings, close to the ground and humble. The city is finally changing, shifting, gnawing at the dreams of a hundred thousand immigrants from all over southern Punjab and responding to their pleas. It is no longer a solitary entity.

Today, Multan is a multitude that is barely recognisable as compared to my childhood, when the city was calm in summer afternoons, and when we bicycled through the streets, played in deserted playgrounds and felt that freedom which comes with physical space. That freedom is gone, so is that space, with the playground near my house taken over illegally and constructed upon by religious lunatics.

My village at the bare edge of the town is ebbing away as well, dissolving under the slow tread of time. The mud-baked walls have been replaced with brick-and-mortar and once-hospitable people are vicious thugs now. Many are dead and the crop yield is greater than before, but the scent of roasted cotton twigs in milk tea is gone.

The haveli appears smaller now, sun-wrecked and cold-bitten, abandoned for the most part and propped up with ramshackle constructions here and there. All of it will be consumed by time, sucked into a black hole which is devouring its own flesh to sustain itself. Someday, the fields will be sold out for new housing colonies, the trees cut down for cheap profits and the walls of the haveli turned to rubble. They will raze the old beams and oaken doors and the woodwork in the rooms. It will all be dust and ashes, and some snobbish kid blundering by the ruins will find a shiny toy and brag about his find.

But that’s just my end of Multan, my edge of the city. At the other edge of Multan is its modern downtown, wound around the army cantonment.

There are lights and wide open bazaars and malls filled with people all day who flit across floors in slick lifts. New and international franchises have sprung up all along the Gol Bagh Road. People can now order pizzas at every half a kilometre of every main road. You can now buy a shawarma at every half-populated corner of the city, with soup stalls in the poorest of places and absurdly-named culinary establishments at the remotest of corners. There are jeans stores, tie and cufflink showrooms, giant LCDs in Samsung outlets and banks.

In fact, banks are now all over the city; in the old city’s crowded, uncertain streets, on all the peripheries of the town, in the market by my home, at all major cantonment roads. They don’t come alone. One of them creeps in one night and the next morning, there is a tangible stir in that part of the city. People start to act strange, money becomes abundant and cheap, and everyone feels that ecstatic urge to splurge it when withdrawing crisp notes in the air-conditioned ATM stalls. There is a new dimension to life and it promises freedom, prosperity and the fulfilment of dreams.

Then another bank opens in the opposite lane. And then another. Until there are half a dozen of them, stacked against each other with colourful logos, brightly lit in the evenings, posh interiors and air-conditioned scams. They come in a fleet, determined and successful. Sometimes I feel that they are taking over this city and one day, we may find little of anything else under the sheer mass of banks and food joints. We’ll withdraw money from the ATM, go to a pizza joint, eat and go back to the ATM, withdraw, eat and go on and go on. And they will continue to fund more and more cars for the roads, jamming up the boulevards and piling up flyovers with tinfoil and carbon. And then, on the ruins of the multi-storey dereliction, of humans and buildings, will be built a new city, one also started with noble ambitions and succumbing to the inevitable stride of progress and mankind’s desires.

Multan once fitted a loose definition of being a muddy backwater: where home-fronts were huge and cosy, and one could anticipate the sound of evening quiet on weekend afternoons; where one could go back and rest and think things over and be at home, the traveller reaching the safe shelter on a strange, tumultuous road that is life. But in the last few years, I suspect that the storm has chased us down. There is noise all over the city, a thin racket of mindless voices that congeals on the top of the city and floats towards the morning sun when it rises, every single day. The storm has reached us and there is no consolation.