Walk down any prominent street in London, New York, Istanbul or Montreal talking only of cities I have had the opportunity to spend time in and you see a few things for sure. The street will tell a story of the city through the buildings.

A lot of the buildings will be dated. Their architectural style and detailing will tell you of the times it has lived through and, in some places, you will have boards and plaques telling you about some details of the building, its origin, style of construction, people who might have lived there or businesses that might have been conducted out of those buildings.

Visit shops and many shopfronts will tell you how long a business has been in business and in that place. Many shops will give you the history of the business, some details on the founder and other prominent facts too. Many public purpose buildings, and there are many of those on almost all prominent streets of these cities, will tell you about who all gave money for the building or its eventual upgradation and upkeep.

Hospitals, museums, colleges and universities tend to display names of benefactors quite visibly, while schools are usually named after individuals.

Religious places mention their denomination and, usually, not the names of individuals.

Visit and sit in the cafes of a city and you will find people who will tell you about the city: its history, origins, the myths of the city and its stories, what the city has seen and who all have lived through it all.

The people of the city, their walk, talk, mannerisms and pre-occupations will also tell you a lot about the city and its history. Cities live through citizens and citizens embody cities in them. Cities have a character that shows in its citizens and citizens, over time, make the character of the city.One big theme in Dr Manan Ahmed Asif`s book, Disrupted City: Walking the Pathways of Memory and History in Lahore, is about the disruption and (partial) break with the past that Lahore has gone through or suffered. Walk around in Lahore and you see a lot of old buildings, but what was once a city of Hindus, Sikhs, Christians and Muslims is a city of Muslims only now.

The names of many streets, roads, buildings, gardens and establishments have been changed.

Statues, plaques and other records of history were removed, burned, destroyed or damaged in 1947 and in the years since. The Sikhs and Hindus left in 1947. The Muslims, mostly from Eastern Punjab, came and settled in Lahore.

But since 1947, a lot of history has been rewritten too and most non-Muslims have been removed from it. This has been done quite systematically. There are historians who have strived hard to start the history of Pakistan with the advent of Muhammad Bin Qasim and have tried hard to only mention Muslims as the ones fighting for freedom and for a Muslim majority state in this part of the world.

Novelists have romanticised this narrative in many ways. Naseem Hijazi`s name is prominent here. But he is not the only one. Textbooks, especially of Pakistan Studies but for other subjects as well, have cemented this version of history for most students in Pakistan. A handful of historians and writers have resisted (K.K. Aziz, Mubarak Ali to name a couple) but the mainstream current has been over whelming.

`There is a melancholy about this version of Lahore about what happened to it, what could have happened to it and did not, and what will happen and what we`d rather did not happen at all.

The city disrupted is a city melancholic,` Dr Asif says in the after word to the book. He also offers this apt summation: `I had an opportunity to spend a month in Istanbul recently and it was there that I noticed this the most forcefully. The connection with history that you see in Istanbul, the continuity and evolution of narrative that you get a sense of, from the people and places in the city, came as a surprise. The city gives you a sense of inclusion and openness. Irrespective of what happened in the past, people are connected to the past and all of it. They own it. It is embedded in them. This is missing in Lahore. A lot has been lost in the process of making the city Muslim.

Five Nobel Prize winners have had some connection with Lahore: writer Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936), physicist Arthur Holly Compton (1892-1962), biochemist Har Gobind Khorana (1922-2011), and physicists Subramanyan Chandrasekhar (19101995) and Abdus Salam (1926-1996). Do we see them anywhere in Lahore, in the memory of its people or in the stories of the city? This is just one small example. The book gives many and better examples.

We do have an attempt at modernisation. New walled residential societies now dominate the narrative of the city. On one (or two) sides of the city is the sprawling and ever-increasing Defence Housing Authority (DHA) with its 15-16 phases. On the other sides are housing schemes for the rich, with their replica Eiffel Towers. The story of disruption is not just the story of Lahore; it is the story of Pakistan too. Lahore is the case study and a very apt one.

The book is very well written and Dr Asif has spent a lot of time researching Lahore and its history. It was a pleasure reading it. Dr Asif grew up in the Lahore of 1970s and 1980s. I too have grownup in Lahore over the same period. Dr Asif brings his personal experiences of growing up in Lahore into the book, too. This not only makes it more readable, for me, it also made it personal.

While reading, I could walk the streets with Dr Asif, see the buildings and trees he was talking about, and smell the same smells and feel the same ambience. What a treat to be able to go down memory lane in such an intimate manner. But it is not just a story for Lahoris or even Pakistanis, given what is going on in the world. It is a story that should be read widely.

What was one of the most prominent cities of the region for hundreds of years is a backwater now. The city is struggling to breathe under excessive and choking pollution levels and will soon have a water crisis as well. `The city disrupted is a city melancholic.

This is a challenge for the citizens of Lahore. Can the citizens deal with the disruption and move the city along? Can what has been lost be (partially) recovered? Can the city grow into a vibrant and thriving society and culture again? The reviewer is a senior research fellow at the Institute of Development and Economic Alternatives and an associate professor of economics at LUMS