Eating

Friday night and we're having a cheese-tasting do. I've just got back from a village where the science of geology meets the art of cheese-making with a rock of metamorphic cheese. Place it in water, I was told by the man who sold it to me, and you'll get cheese-spread. Well it's not laughing cow but it sure is cheese, strong too. By morning it's dried out and is a rock again.
We've also got something from Karachi. We thought from the label, 'Karachi Butter', that it was indeed going to be butter but on smelling it, it transpires to be a ripe white stilton. So that's Christmas sorted.
Finally my friend has brought me some Tesco Mild. And oh how mild it is.

Whether something's from Tesco or from town it's 'foreign' to many of my neighbours here. Local food is what comes from the garden, and only local, desi, will do, I am told by the matriarch of a neighbour as she pours lassi into steel cups. "The thing is," she explains, "you don't know what they put in them cartons. It could be donkey's milk. Or dog's." I splutter on the sour milk. "No offence," she adds.
"And eggs - foreign chickens [in the small cages at the bottom of the track, ie, in town] eat only plain rice. I feed mine like my own children, with a little sabzi, little rice, little dal and a fresh roti - and such nice eggs we are getting." As if ready spiced on this curry-rich diet, the yolks of their eggs are bright orange. Fried up with more masala, seven of them feed a family of twice that number. Steel saucers of this scrambled-egg curry are placed on top of a carpet of rotis, spread across a sheet on the floor. We tear of bits nearest to us.
Every Thursday in this home is a mini-Eid and eggs will not do. Something must die in memory of the sacrifice. So we have chunks of goat (from the butcher's field this morning, its insides steaming in the cold morning air, I wonder) cooked in rice which Ammi-ji personally apportions. If honour is in anyway proportional to size of piece, I am honoured indeed, as is the favoured youngest son, but four-years-old, eating the portion of a grown man, sitting between mummy and daddy, looking in all regards just like a grown-man, except for his tiny size, with the serious expression of one on whom a weight of responsibility has fallen. His older brothers, sporting mustaches and capes, hunch in corners, glowering, watching TV gangsters so that the whole occasion is accompanied by sounds of gunfire. Oh, that his father may never give him a coat of many colours, and, if he has dreams, that he may never tell of them to his brethren.
I am in the bosom of family, feasting on meat in memory of Abraham.
The mantou man makes food into a different spiritual experience. He stands, silent as a mandarin, amidst the to-ing and fro-ing of town. Indeed, he is from China, Kashgar, but is angry with his government and has come here. He smiles seraphically at my request for six of his momos, (dim-sung, mantou, cholesterol dumplings, they go by different names) places his hand on the lid of his huge silver steamer and invokes God: "In the name of Allah, the most merciful, the most kind..." Then, with the flourish of a Parisian cartoon waiter, he lifts the lid and traces an arc through the air. He was right to pray, because we are transported into another realm where, in the billows of steam, nothing is as it seems. His arms remain aloft, as he shields his eyes from the heat -and visions too? Fortified by prayer, he defies the heat to count out seven pieces, one for luck. He wraps them in newspaper, bungs them in a bag and bob's your uncle we're back in the bazaar. He compliments me on my Urdu and I compliment him on his as his own language is one he calls Toorqi. We've both come a long way to be here, not least through this cloud.
While my neighbours are rooted in this place and suspicious of foreign food, I am not, but more like one who dreams, and it is often food that roots me, grounds me.
I try to locate myself on maps and get lost for the mountains and the jangle of political boundaries. What can such a place be like, so remote? I taste and know.
Mantou tells me I'm halfway to Tibet. Pomegranates stain my fingers with a juice fresh from Kabul. Early Mughals sang of the almonds from here, still nostalgic for their Central Asian home. I shell some on my doorstep and eating, sympathise.
A thin voiced azan threads its way into my waking dreams and disorients me nearly everytime. How good it is then to sink my teeth into the fatness of a chapli kebab. Here I stand, I can be nowhere else.
Twilight, and all is murky mauve. Then I see it: a golden crown half circling the sky. Peaks high enough catch the sunlight, long since fled west from us mortals in the valley, blaze. As if in another time zone, another zone altogether, I simply don't know if I really am in the Himalayas. I eat yak and the cloud of unknowing lifts.

Dust to dust, ashes to ashes

If 'dust to dust, ashes to ashes' is the story of our lives, then I live my life in a day.
My path to school begins as a desert road through that field where but a month ago I picnicked with harvesters. Had I not already seen it yield corn, and if I did not believe in miracles, I would laugh at anyone like Isaiah who prophesied in chapter 35 that,"The wilderness and dry land shall be glad,/The desert shall rejoice and blossom like the crocus;/It shall blossom abundantly and rejoice with joy and singing." This field is not looking glad.

Late for school, children and I kick our way through the sand and dust. Then we pass through an alley of shadows and emerge blinking onto the main road and into the sun, filtered through the smoke of every stove in every home trying to heat up the morning.
School is silver sand. A rim rings the infants' sandpit but it may as well not. It is dust inside and it is dust outside. I've stopped policing this boundary line and I've stopped insisting that they don't throw sand in each others' eyes; it's there already. "Blink often," I tell them.
We're all doing battle against the dust. We shake it off our shoes, brush it off our clothes, comb it from our hair. We clean it from rice, pick pebbles from dry fruit. And just when it's killed nearly all the colour from the town, men plant a profusion of plastic flowers everywhere: bouquets sprout from the middle of peanut carts; machinery for fixing cars and sawing wood are garlanded; tractor exhaust pipes are slender vases, each holding a single rose. I wonder the plastic doesn't melt.
The hero in the battle is the avuncular Chacha-ji, both gate- and goat-keeper to the school, who incidentally has something of the goat about him: cocked head, private smile and sad eyes, an earthy fixation with the ground and all that grows on it. Whenever the headmistress receives a dust-related complaint from the mother of an asthmatic child or another who has not yet discovered TV's washing powder that makes all things white, the cry goes out, "Oh Chacha-ji! Irrigation karo!"
Playtime is about to begin.
Chacha-ji diverts water from the gutter-stream running alongside the school onto our dust-bowl of a school yard. First there is a river. He sets to work on this shovelling dust banks here and cutting channels there then damming up streams when the dust is fully submerged. We are an island in a delta.
The bell rings and the children dive in. The sandpit's not so popular today. A hundred tiny wrappers from lunchboxes are launched upon the waters as toy boats. Some children lend Chacha-ji a less-than-helpful-hand making mini dams, ox-bow lakes and canal-ways. Some just run: wet feet, mud shoes, filthy trousers. Sodden sock-balls explode puddles onto girls' frocks. Confiscations, trouble.
To inaugurate a new classroom block a colleague and I put on a drama folk-tale festival. Parents have been invited but how will they see the stage for the dust? It's due to begin at two. Sand dunes are hardly fitting seats for our guests. And so the command is once again given: "Irrigate!"
One o'clock and the outdoor auditorium is wholly aqueous. The geography teacher rolls up his sleeves and leads the way in bringing dust from elsewhere to mop up the the water. Chacha-ji, now looking like a goat ready for sacrifice, joins in. There's still a worry that the chairs will sink in this quick sand, quickly laid. But the show must go on.
The production was muddier than expected, but no one drowned.
Home, hands white with chalk-dust, and I'm dealing with ash. I empty cinders from last night's fire into the stream to the sound of twilight azan. I pack the stove with sawdust and almond shells leaving a hollow core for air. Underneath I kindle a paper fire until the sawdust catches. It is silent, no crackling or spitting, so it is only when a warmth creeps round the steel that I know the work is done and it's time for a cup of tea. Or time to put water on for one, anyway.
This bukhari stove has turned my bedroom into barbeque, bonfire and bavachikhana (kitchen). I roast vegetables in it, fry onions on it, make tea and toast, stew fruit, prepare porridge. I've lost a few potatoes to the black abyss of carbon, but only had my fingers burned metaphorically. I've forgotten what my room used to smell like.
Finally, I wash soot from my hands and plaster them with vaseline to stop them desicatting completely in the dry.
We're all looking to the heavens and waiting for rain.

*************

A soldier aged 25 came home last week to get married. At the bottom of our path he was killed by a tractor the next day.
I cannot tell you how many women there were mourning. But I can say I have never before seen a garden so covered with shoes respectfully removed, nor rooms so choked with feeling and so full of women, sitting so close their knees were on others' laps. All that showed were eyes, and eyes - red, full of tears - showed all. No one spoke and no one stirred. This silence and stillness was strained for when the preacher broke down - "Ya Ali!" his voice cracked, "Ya Hussain!" in anguish - there was a collective sob and the women, having waited, wept. In the next room, someone, having planned a wedding not a funeral, wailed and wailed. What they released, I, not knowing the man, took in, and I wept for them.
I'm looking to the heavens, waiting, wanting to give comfort.
I will not laugh at that prophecy.

The greatest sport ever to be played on embroidered cushion covers

"What a glorious land, so full of splendour and beauty."
This was the libretto for both the overture and the finale, broadcast across the stadium and surrounding valley from the tannoid, of the Game of Kings. What took place in between proved the truth of these words.

I was frying breakfast on Saturday when the chowkidar burst in. "Mem, aaj bulu hai, bulu!' (bulu being polo.) I had to go, he said. I agreed, I had to go.
Town was heaving with independence day festivities. The jovial expressions and easy chat among the police contrasted with the black of their uniforms, amount of weaponry they sported and the sheer size of their presence. Squeezing between their lines and the crowds they controlled, I made my way to the stadium gates and was ushered up a red carpeted staircase to the VIP block by one of their number, along with plenty of hoi-polloi for I was not in the tea-and-cake-and-serviette VVIP block I hasten to add.
Preceeding the action were twenty minutes of public safety announcements:
"Please no one has the permission to be upon pitch," it went, while crowds made merry on that very pitch. "Maintenance has been with much difficulties," it continued, while men whooped with laughter. "During match is strictly forbidden for entrance." Could they not hear? Finally, pomposity turning to exasperation, "Please gents, remember last year!" And he went on to describe how people had entered the pitch while battle between the two valleys' teams was raging. Apparently it wasn't very nice and ought never to be repeated.
It was only when horses sprung onto the pitch, possessed, that the men chose to take their seats. At the same time a local band piped up, its reedy sound a little feeble after the patriotic numbers. One doddery fellow entered the fray to do a wee highland fling of a dance in front of the bagpiper and drummer. He soon tired and another came on, fearless in the face of so much horse power being unleashed all around.
We were ordered to salaam the dignitaries: various ministers of sport; a brigadier and a veteran freedom fighter. We stood to attention during the solemn presentation of woolly hats. Our salutes were nothing compared to those of the polo players'. As each of the eight teams rode past the dais, the riders' bodies were nearly torn in two as they restrained their steeds with one arm: biceps bulging, veins throbbing; while with the other arm they expressed dignity, honour and respect amidst all the animal energy, with it raised in a steel-girded salute. Some weaker players could not do it; their horses were no respecters of personages and bound out of rank, thinking the game must surely have begun.
As the ball was at last thrown into the fray by the Most Important Person, dignity, honour and respect were also thrown to the wind, and caution too. Whips and mallets cracked and sliced through the air. Horses reared and showed their teeth. The ball flew and the race was on. They thundered down to the goal. The whole crowd of spectators craned their necks to see. Every muscle of every horse and every rider, every mallet and every movement was focussed on that same point. All strained in one horizontal direction. And then - with one thwack - back in the opposite direction. Riders bent over their animals as if eager to beat even their own horse to the ball.
A crowd of schoolboys sat - as in Lahore Kim sat, 'in defiance of municipal orders, atop the great gun Zam-zamar' - on the pitch, behind the goal posts. As the action neared them, they rose in terror and fled, momentarily, to the sides. There were others, too, defying both tanoid and death itself by running onto the pitch when their heroes' mallets fell, to pick them up and present them again to the players.
Meanwhile the horses streaked back and forth, showing the whites of their eyes and sweating profusely. I had never before heard the sound of two horses colliding at speed and hope never to hear that low gutteral thud resound again through the bodies of two such beasts. Unhindered, they continued in hot pursuit of that ball. All the while, the sound of the surundi pipe threaded through the action and the dudun and daman drums added yet another beat to the stampede of hooves.
Play was interupted several times. Questions about the referee's judgement were followed by those about other aspects of his morality and manhood. Other questions had to be resolved too: Was the rider who fell off fit to keep on playing? Yes, it seemed he was. If the ball injured a spectator did the game have to stop? No, it was decided not.
And then intermission. Pakistan has a mascot for its cricket teams and another for all polo matches: Chacha Cricket and Chacha Polo respectively. Chacha means uncle. So Uncle Polo did his own jig as crowds once again flocked onto the pitch and gathered round. Police circled him to give him room and turned a blind eye to the tiny lad who joined him, wonderfully replicating chacha's moves in miniature.
"Man, I love this country," said the chap sitting next to me.
"I do too, so much right now." I said in reply.
Eventually a more serious minded police officer escorted the child away, deciding he probably was a threat to the peace of the land.
By the final ten minutes of the game, there was a distinct diminuendo from the musicians. Equally, the horses could not keep it up and began to be sluggish when their masters steered them back down the pitch yet again.
The score was 10-2 to the police.
I left, exhausted from just watching, as the searing light turned dusty and faded. The mountains were as still as ever.

What a glorious land, so full of splendour and beauty.

Great game, too.