“'Yonder is the Sahib.' said Kim, and dodged sideways among the cases of the arts and manufacturers wing. A white-bearded Englishman was looking at the lama, who gravely turned and saluted him… ‘Come to my office awhile.' The old man was trembling with excitement. The office was but a little wooden cubicle partitioned off from the sculpture-lined gallery. Kim laid himself down, his ear against a crack in the heat-split cedar door, and, following his instinct, stretched out to listen and watch. Most of the talk was altogether above his head.”
-when the Lama meets the Museum director, a stand-in for Kipling’s father Lockwood
The Lahore Museum’s Additional Director is a fascinating and widely-published numismatist named Naushaba Anjum, Keeper of the world famous Coins Collection held in a wood-paneled and red velvet-upholstered private room off the main gallery wing through a secret door. Ms. Anjum was brought up in this room as a protégée several generations removed of R.B. Whitehead, the great British scholar whose 2 volume catalog of the Museum’s (then known as the Punjab Museum) Indo-Greek and Mughal coins remains Ms. Anjum’s lodestar. Her life’s work is to bring the century old catalog up to date.
But Ms. Anjum is a far cry from Kipling’s white bearded museum director and father figure. Her hair is raven colored and drops below her waist, her face is made up like a knowing doll’s- cheek-rouged, lip-lined, eyebrow-penciled, and her voice’s register high and enthusiastic, not the hushed and muffled scholar-talk of a desk-bound curator.
The gold bangles dripping off her wrists and chains off her neck speak of a woman who dresses to impress the even weightier gold she hefts daily in the palms of her hands- such as a 2nd C. Kanishka coin with an Iranian kingly title, a 4th C. Samudragupta coin depicting horse sacrifice, and the Mughal Emperor Akbar’s, Jahangir’s, and Bahadur’s Islamic text and Zodiacal coins. Ask her about other rarities and stand-outs- Indo-Bactrian, Indo-Sythian, Indo-Kushan, and Indo-Parthian- and she will talk for an hour, and let you hold examples of each one in your own palm. Two stern assistants stand an eagle-eyed watch behind her.
The obverse of a 2nd C. BC Bactrian coin minted by King Eucratides shows a paired portrait of his parents, with his mother Loadice alone wearing a diadem proving that she alone of the two was of royal blood. Something that only Ms. Anjum, and something of a queen herself, would notice.
