3 ideas
Qibla is Basharat's father-in-law, a hot-tempered timber merchant from Kanpur who ruled his shop and household with intimidation. After Partition he migrates to Karachi, but he keeps behaving like the master of the haveli he left behind, and he rejects the new city's ways. The haveli grows grander in his memory as his real circumstances shrink, until his pride becomes both comic and tragic.
The past seen from far enough away looks like water in the desert. It seems lush and life-giving because of the distance, not because of what it actually held. The further a person travels from a time or place, especially after a rupture like migration, the more the remembered version replaces the real one.
An old man's contempt for the new world can be read as grief rather than judgment. When he declares that everything was better before, he is saying that he himself mattered more then. Seeing this turns cantankerous old age from a comic flaw into a portrait of lost relevance.