Substance and Shadow

There are women in my neighbourhood from the 'mothers of a great nation' stock. It was fitting to celebrate the most recent Eid and think on Father Abraham with one such, whom I sometimes see on the path to school, always surveying her livestock and the offspring who graze or mill about her. She is vast, built for a lifetime of service to cattle. Her scarf barely skims her bosom where a similar-sized one would normally swamp other women. She never moves. Her still, stable solidity seems to keep her flock safe. She is their centre of gravity, they will not stray. I pass her and greet her but she never turns her head to look at me. She does not say hello but always, 'come in and eat something.' So it was good to be able to accept that day after months of having to decline and say, 'got to get to school you know.' One of her sons attends our school. I police him more than I teach him.
Inside, lesser family members revolve around her. Her scrap of a father in law is hunched in blankets in the corner and croaks out a small greeting to me. Brothers in law come and go and fail to make an impression. Children scuttle hither and thither but only this lady of such ample carriage has any standing. Her clothes, all the length and breadth of them, are deep red. Before her sit three large cauldrons from which she ladles out meat, tea and veg with one hand while changing a nappy and swaddling a baby with the other. she smooths down cloth, positions the baby on it and with a deft flick of the wrist flips him over once, twice and back again and lo and behold he is a tightly bound Christmas present with a face. There won't be any more bother from him.
I struggle to know what to talk about with this capable woman. After all, what has chat ever done to help rear her young? 'You must have had an early start to cook all this today,' I attempt. 'Every morning is an early morning,' she replies, and casts her gaze over the assemblage of children. 'Ah, yes, I suppose it is.' I shovel more rice in, obediently.
I feel it would not be well received to tell this bastion of womanhood that I didn't want too much as I wasn't feeling too well. Everything she feeds thrives; she has never heard of ill-health or reduced appetites in man or beast. So I go home feeling green but it doesn't do to be on one's own on Eid so shortly there are knocks at the door as women come to invite me round. 'My health,' I stammer weakly. This buys me neither time nor space. 'Oh no! Alone and unwell!' That will never do. And in they come, kicking off their shoes. 'Salty tea or sweet?' I ask as I hobble through to put the kettle on. I fish around for something to feed them and find the remains of my birthday snacks to fry up. (Nothing goes off in this weather.) It transpires none of the children are well either as they all cough and splutter into their cups of tea (salty) and my room takes on the air of a hospital. A neighbour of ours had a baby recently, by c-section, so the conversation turns to childbirth. 'If you work hard in pregnancy,' one woman informs us, 'you should never have difficulty in childbirth and never have to have one of those operations.' Her tone is derisive. 'Take my lot, for example,' and she paused to tot them up: '...eleven, twelve, thirteen. I had thirteen of them, never took more than an hour for one of them.'

The tea and conviviality had a reviving affect. Maybe there is something in not leaving a patient alone after all.

A trip is planned to go and visit the sister of some friends who has moved to the other end of town after she got married. I am keen to visit her after her life has so completely changed. After more tea and more refusals of sweets and kebabs and slices of roast and cake we bundle into the car, dressed as chic as possible in the bitingly cold air. We pull off into the night. We pass a few huddled figures moving from one meal to the next. It's known locally as the festival of meat. 'Don't worry,' said one lady who fed me the night before, 'it's not like the last Eid, all salads and chickpeas. You'll only get meat this time.'

We keep overtaking a motorbike that stops and starts, stops and starts. Every time it stops the passenger gets down and pushes it, running, head down, sleeves rolled up. Then it starts and he rides for a minute, then pushes till sweat drips from his brow like it's July. Mr Front Seat stares forward, oblivious as to whether his bike is powered by fossil-fuel or friend's brawn. He cares not if his energy source is sustainable. I marvel at the strength of their friendship that would keep a man pushing.

We begin to wind through an unfamiliar part of town where there is no electricity right now. I peer out into the darkness. Most people will be inside around fires and floor-cloths that speak of plenty. Then a cold square of gas-light flares into view. In a dirty white-washed diner, three men sit hunched over their plastic tables as a boy wipes up. A lonely steel pan simmers. I hold the child on my lap closer and turn back to face the cosiness in the car. We're laughing at song lyrics and I'm glad to be with friends.

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

The stove is my centre of gravity, I shall not be cold. Its warmth, its quiet voice and the occasional funny noises it makes as it expands, contracts and plays with wood chips makes it like a friend whose side you don't want to leave. Nipping into the kitchen I am cold and fretful, hurrying the washing-up, the only job I have not been able to bring to do by the fireside. I have moved my desk so I sit almost on top of the stove. From there, I mark exam scripts, chop vegetables, read and pray. I can lean over and give the onions a stir or brew tea thick and fast. I've forgotten why it was that houses were ever built so big. The other rooms are cold places, voids.

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

This morning when I had no reason to wake early I woke early and pulled back the curtains for the light that the electric company is currently unable to provide. I caught the mountain iced and the first rays of the sun burning off the cloud. I have never seen this mountain silver and white before, as I only see the south face. Seeing the cloud linger and then slowly peel back reminds me of my own reluctance to pull back the blankets these days and expose myself to the cold. But, by the time I've had my breakfast, there the mountain is again, stone and still, standing guard over the city with no sign of ever having slumbered. I take my cue and get out myself.

I am trying to escape the shadow of the mountain looming over me so I walk north to the middle of the valley which basks in the sun when, as this morning, it comes out. I walk along the ledge to see the river and see my shadow moving sometimes along the rocky bank far below, sometimes over dried grass in winter orchards or barren land. It is cut up by the long lines of poplar shadows. The shadow has a great big chadar flapping about it and no clear shape I can call my own. For a moment it seems I am watching another woman's life - one who walks in dry remote places. Then I wonder how much is she me or I her?

very happy moments and golden youth

It was my fault. I should never have told my maths class it was going to be my birthday the next day. Just because they'd multiplied 6 by 5 it didn't mean I had to say any more than that they'd got the answer right; keep up the good work.
And so I find myself locked out of my classroom, concerned about the number of unsheathed pairs of scissors inside and the number of days till exams. We still haven't done triangles. Someone is arranging furniture inside and someone is lunging somewhere.
Eventually the door is opened by a giggly gaggle of girls who stand back proudly to reveal a blackboard full of balloons and Happy Birth Day Miss chalked up where I'd hoped to be reviewing acute and obtuse angles. As if to compensate, a large triangular package (isosceles) is thrust into my arms. I now notice that everyone has brought a gift, laid beside their pencils and exercise books. I received:
1 bouquet (the triangular package, made in China)
10 items for the hair
2 earrings
48 bangles
1 picture frame
1 picture of the Simpson family
2 items of unknown name and/or purpose
1 mug saying 'I love you.'
1 piece of tapestry, made by a pupil's aunt.

The cards were full of good wishes:
"may very happy moment continue all year through."
"God! give you Beautiful future"
"Happy longlife"

I was told that, in the same way that roses are red and violets are blue, I am sweet, like sugar is. I was told that my 'golden youth is like a picture' (of Marge, Maggie or Lisa?) and that 'Our miss Hanna/Likes to eat banana/she like honey/and also like a bunny/she like to act/ and the light reflect. Whilst thankful to be reflecting light on the one hand, I hung my head in shame on the other. Who has been teaching them English? Who? My only consolation is I have not asked them to write a poem for the final exam; I won't have to read any more year 4 verse. Stick to prose kids, you're much better at that. (While I think of it, I might drop the triangle question from the maths paper, too.)

Azhar has been a very good boy so he is allowed to go to the store cupboard, walking not running please, to bring the big drum, carrying it very carefully please. So off he belts and is back in an instant with the drum, broken, and two pieces of firewood to hit it with. He beats out a rhythm that the boys flick their wrists to, stamp and swirl to, cock their heads to. Aah golden youth.

Thus the day at school continued, punctuated by snippets of teaching and learning: Aesop's Fables, The Enormous Turnip, the Age of Exploration, magic 'e' and where babies come from (well, that's what Nouman had chosen to research.)

Back at home the party wasn't swinging so much as swimming - in oil. The kebabs and spring rolls I'd got in were taken over by my colleagues who decided there wasn't enough oil in the frying pan. They ladled it in and we had cream cake for afters. I'm not sure I will have such a longlife.

Travelling Companions

If we read to know we are not alone then I have found a close companion in Dervla Murphy in her book, Where the Indus is Young: Travelling in Baltistan. I am rereading it under a vast weight of blanket not too far from where she wrote it, under an even more ample weight. I have come in from the cold and have brewed a degchi of tea and am reading her book, the part where she has just returned from a frozen landscape and is brewing a degchi of tea to thaw out. It's as if we're sharing a pot and having adult conversation about the Karakoram. However, since it was too cold for her to ever undress and wash and too remote to find anything other than apricots and sometimes lentils to eat, if she saw me (clean-ish, well-fed) she'd justifiably react like the great explorer Thesiger did when he met Eric Newby and his friend after their 'short walk' in the Hindu Kush: 'pansies'. But I am heartened to read that even she "despaired of ever being able to convey in words any adequate picture of this region. Everything is so extreme here that language loses its power."
For I too am struggling. I have just returned from my own even shorter walk to a glacier and would love to be able to convey the solemnity of inching upwards between the walls of a mighty canyon to approach a whole congregation of peaks enthroned ahead. The trepidation one feels is partly natural: O, that my foot may not slip, that the mountains may not tremble and fall and O, that the icy waters may not pass over me. But partly it is awe.
I would love to describe an uncanny silence: the space so vast, the sounds so small; the sense of being lost in a landscape, trespassing where we don't belong; the unearthly power of the place. But to do so, I'd be lying. Yes, yes, sure the silence is broken by the sound of water rushing through the gorge and the echoes of rock falls sometimes ringing out. But the truth is, I never had a chance to attain such lucidity or even hear such sounds. I was interrupted not by a six-year old such as Dervla Murphy had for her travelling companion (her daughter Rachel) but by the fourteen thirteen-year-olds whose geography field trip I was helping to conduct.
Picking my way over scree or conglomerates of pebbles I am overtaken by boys pretending convincingly they are on motorbikes. I am trying to consider the insignificance of man and his perilous existence when I was told that he is hitting her. (She started it.) Can they have their apples yet? Please miss. Where are Ali's biscuits? Was there anywhere Faizan could charge his phone? He'd brought his charger. A quick survey of the scene revealed that no, there was not. (But did I think there might be somewhere soon? A socket among the rocks?) Anyway, not for want of trying, no one fell in the river or got a stone in their eye.
That day the glacier retreated at an unprecedented rate. Scientists, be concerned. One has not reached it until one has eaten it, it is believed, so the children chipped off ice to have with their lunch.

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

Shadow here is not a vague thing. It is not nebulous, not ephemeral, not shadowy in that sense. When the shadow of the mountain to our south passes over us in the early afternoon of a sunny day, it turns hot to cold, light to dark and day almost to night. If the North Wind and Jack Frost talk to people in children's stories, then Shadow can touch you in real life. At 2:20 today we said goodbye to the sun till tomorrow morning and for signs of daylight looked upwards to the south faces of the mountains across the valley. We are plunged into a gloomy grey of rock frozen in shadow. But far above, where the snow has never melted, the sunlight blazes pink and rosy orange before nightfall and it's as if it's summer there, the only warm place in the world, a Himalayan Hawaii.

Power and the People's Party

Before the electricity gives up the ghost, sparks sometimes fly. They fly from the wires in displays of fireworks. I passed a pylon once when blue fizzled and flashed. I remembered, remembered the 5th of November when I had turned homeward after a good show happy to have been so dazzled when - surprise - the encore stopped me in my tracks. It happened again there on that path. I'd just got back on my way when rockets whizzed out of a Catherine wheel and then exploded into blue fire and smoke. Then, at last, I got going.

Electric blue: it's also the colour of the river we cross on a wooden bridge for the school trip to the power station where the water hurtles past three turbines and generates enough electricity for the whole city (as long as we're good and turn off the lights). But the water looks so charged that the children think the electricity is in the water and our power station somehow extracts it. Gravity is too serious, too prosaic an explanation. The children also do a lot of hurtling past the turbines too, and generate enough sound energy to supply another city. The engineers stay safely in their control room smoking and, um, controlling things, yes, that's what they're doing, from comfy chairs strewn around. A peon comes out and offers my colleague and me tea but the wiring of their tin kettle looks dodgy and we decline. They leave us explain to the kids what D-A-N-G-E-R means. One impudent child, Lisa Simpson, asks a foreman if it's not dangerous to smoke here. He takes a drag and in a cloud of smoke asks her why ever should she think that. 'Fire and electricity,' she says archly, 'they don't mix'.
I assess that she has learned and is able to apply the learning objectives of Monday's science and safety lesson.
He stubs out his cigarette and turns to leave. We were such a cute group until she opened her mouth. We too leave and eat our packed lunches downstream.

Nature is also going out in a blaze of colour. There's the new blue of the river as glaciers cease pouring out their torrent of melt water that in summer churns up sediment that gives the river the appearance of much tea. My garden wall is purple with vine leaves who seem to be trying to apologise for not bearing any purple fruit. Above it, the fig tree that did bear fruit (purple) is yellow. And so, increasingly, is every tree in the valley.

The colour is rising.

Election fever has infected the town and every street, every wall and post-box, bus-stop and pillar is positively gangrenous, bursting with green bunting and angry red banners. It has blinded the populous to nature's more decorous display. One taxi driver is blinded to more than just decorum, too: on his windscreen there's a banner telling us to support the party symbolised by the bicycle. It's all empty words; the way he's driving he doesn't support cyclists at all. I should have taken another cab.
Most of these other cabs have been commandeered by boys, some of whom will have to wait a good few years before they'll be enfranchised but can't wait till the procession begins soon when they will open the sunroof and stand as tall as they can for their age, raising high a picture of a waving gent and flags of his chosen symbol: a kerosene lamp, arrow, kite, bike or one of several constellations of a moon and star. They'll honk their horns, play some tunes and bellow a name and slogan memorably so that on the great day two weeks hence we'll be swayed by that carnival memory and tick - now whose was the kite box again?
The men who've set up campaign stands are all wearing sunglasses these overcast days. They are looking forward to a bright future, you see; and there are a lot of luminaries around.

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

The betrothed is swathed in orange, the orange like that of autumn leaves: sad. This is her engagement party and I have never seen my friend looking so sad. She is pinned into place by safety pins down the back of her dress and the stares of the women who will be her world one day: a host of in-law aunts, their unnumbered offspring and in the middle of them all, one supreme Mother-In-Law-To-Be, the queen bee, the victor who has won this precious jewel of a girl.
(The fiance sends his apologies. Work, you know.)

There are no party games. No music (until the in-laws leave). No chatter, crackers or clink of glasses, just a long hard stare at this latest addition to the clan. She is beautiful when she is happy.
When the men are done and only their cigarette smoke lingers, it's feeding time for us. This lounge is normally a terribly civilised arrangement of 1 coffee table, 1 vase of flowers and a 3-piece suite but now is 2 parallel feeding troughs. Bums down, tuck in. If you can't reach what you want, lady, lean further.
Everyone is eating more than the recommended daily allowance and soon scarves hang limp, lipstick is smudged, tissues litter the floor, women are on top of each other, some laughing raucously, most shouting to be heard.
A nephew walks in. "People's Party of Pakistan," he says, and walks out. Nobody noticed.

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

In early winter there are days when we are surrounded by cloud not mountains. On such days it is a cozier, moister and more muffled place than when the sides of mountains stare us down and make us feel small, lonely and lost. Under the staff tree, we stamp our feet, sit closer on the bench so our shawls touch and brew tea in the first break because we can't wait till one.

But then sometimes the clouds part and a distant valley between two hills in the sky is revealed, or an alpine meadow - sometimes basking in sunlight - comes into view. They are impossibly remote and I wonder why I never saw them before on clearer days.

Then I remember the songs we sang in Sunday School.

The Inconstant Moon

By anyone's reckoning we've had a great evening, cruising around town in a car with good suspension and speakers, in the groove with some nice Bombay beats, eating ice-cream. Then this: "There's no murder here."
My friends are terribly disappointed. It was bad enough the other shop being out of Dairy Milk on Eid of all days, but no murder, now that's bad. Rose shrugs her shoulders and sweeps her shawl round her in a defiant gesture that makes it clear she's done with that DVD shop, like big time. That's it. No murder; you've lost my custom. Honey.
Our driver is a dashing young fellow for whom pleasure and work happily meet if, as I assume, fast cars, pretty girls and good music are his bag. But even he slows his pace to match the mood.

I'm never too sure what's being celebrated at this Eid. All that's ever mentioned is food (green custard featured large this year) and family (which is reason enough for me) but I know what a lot of lads with cars are celebrating: Independence.
Not from the British as such, that's in August, but from the stern laws of one Sir Isaac Newton, particularly that pesky number 3, threatening an equal and opposite reaction to every action. But there'll be no collisions here, we're free of all that! So let's drive towards each other really really fast so we get bigger and bigger and the horn will crescendo. Let's swerve this a-way and that a-way. Let's have a race. Acceleration? Yes please! Constant velocity? Boring! Let's swing our partners round and round, once to the left and then to the right. Dosy-doe!
Since no one seems too concerned about the punishments for breaking these laws, I can only assume they don't apply in this part of the world.
The street is a party.

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

These are the things that cease to be pleasant in times of uncertainty.

1. toy guns
2. deserted streets
3. men breaking into a run in public places
4. bonfires
5. fireworks

The evening before, as darkness fell, someone with good eyesight saw the first curve of light in the sky that reminds us that after a dark night, life goes on, although with more regular meals to sustain it this month. This is another reason to celebrate.
I had been invited to welcome in Eid with my headmistress, a woman of great poise. At first, this consisted of hearing her phone far-flung nieces and nephews to wish them a blessed day in four or five different languages. There seems to be some doubt every Eid whether we do, in fact, all share one sky, one moon. "How much of your moon can you see?" people ask.
"Is the moon out where you are?"
"Yes, yes, I see it, it's here - is it there?"
O, it's a capricious world.

Tea was served with hot samosas. As with everything she does or makes, they were of impeccable quality.
All of a sudden, we heard explosions. We both put our cups of tea down with a shudder.
"Fireworks," she said after a moment, managing a nervous smile. "It's Eid, it'll be fireworks," arguing away her doubts.
We regained our equilibrium with the help of tea.

As headmistress, it is her job to pronounce bans on the 'vices of the day'; three before 9:00 is not uncommon: "Children, no dirty fingernails, we'll cut them off; no home language, we are English-medium; no Dodge Ball, not everyone can dodge."
There's another thing that has to be banned and rebanned: bazaari food. Like cigarettes in other climes it comes with a health warning and it's simply not seemly. Good families eat wholesome homemade food. Bazaari food is for those that play fast and loose, those that do a bit of duckin' and a-divin', dodgin' and a-weavin'. That driver, for example, now he would be a bazaari food type. Don't tell anyone but I'm quite partial to a bit of street food myself: liver kebabs, spring-roll surprises and gol-guppe, that comedy element in a person's diet, due to it's amusing flavour and mode of consumption. It should not be found in the lunch boxes of any child.

But I have never heard her ban anything with the vehemence with which she said that night, 'Fireworks should be banned.'

So should bombs, so should guns.

We're sitting round the telly watching the news a week later wishing it was only fireworks. We wish murder was only on the movie channel. But games have exploded into destruction round the country and no one knows the death toll yet. These bombs are worse than the moon; you never know when they'll appear. We're glad the smoke we smell is only someone burning the first of the autumn leaves.

For it is nearly autumn and I have been here a year. The crops I saw being harvested when I first arrived are ripe again. I've had the freshly-prepared festival food whose stale left-overs I tasted in the first week of October last year.

The moon is waxing.
There's a lot you can depend on, yesterday and today and forever.

Feasting, Fasting

My chaperone is ten. He's a boy though, so he'll keep me safe. 'Baji', he asks me as we pass our goat friends and pause to rub their foreheads with our knuckles to their consternation, 'Do you like goats?'
'Let me count the ways,' I began, but faltered. How, I wondered, do I render into Urdu 'cheeky-chap grin'; 'their all-knowing wisdom and frabjous joy'; 'the bolshie head-butting stance that turns to timidity on one's approach'? But reader, know this, that I love them.
'That's good baji, because that's what we're having for tea.'

They live at the back of a school-house. They sleep on the desks and by day, stay in the father's workplace, his tailor's shop. The only furniture is the sewing machine stand. The smell of goat stew blunts my sentiment. I am now hungry and heartless.
Everyone is expectant as the floor-cloth is spread and wiped down with tailor's scraps of georgette. A basin is brought in, we wash our hands. Rotis are thrown down, frisbee-style, and curry is ladled out. Everything changes when I get my plate. It's less of a meal than a biology lesson. Anatomy is on the menu, and such long, tubular organs smelling like, well, smelling like that can only be intestinal. I compliment the pickle.
At the end of the meal, when the children are outside, the mother whispers, 'He's only ten, he doesn't know how to buy meat yet.'
It is my professional opinion that no child, whether boy or girl, should be responsible for meat and poultry purchasing until they have been taught and tested on that diagram in the bio. textbook.

The father sets his alarm for four a.m. as tomorrow is Ramadan: Day 1. It's thoughtful of him, as he'll not hear it ringing himself, he's deaf. So he doesn't hear it ringing now, piercingly, until he turns and sees his children, wife and guest all covering their ears.
Actually, no one needs an alarm clock to wake for the pre-dawn breakfast. After an incident many years ago, when a man repeatedly beat his two wives for only waking at dawn, too late to whip up a smorgasbord, someone commissioned a sort of extra muezzin to make a call not to prayer but to breakfast. So at 3:30 I awake as electricity surges and a tannoy tells us to all get up, and eat food. 'EAT FOOD,' it said, again and again, 'EAT FOOD'. Then, an hour later, 'Right, stop eating now.' Yessir.

Silence, and then the first light is accompanied by more profound thoughts suddenly filling the sky, each man's voice from every mosque weaving together into a polyphony. Morning has broken, the fasting has begun.

Later, evening falls and the fasting is broken. Hunger makes the azan ring out louder. It is somehow more substantial, like food itself. I'm going down the lane after darkness has fallen and it is, of course, a moonless night. A rich panel of star-studded sky gleams so ostentatiously that if it were a woman's scarf, we'd all gossip about how showy it was. 'Who would use so many jewels? Such a shocking show of extravagance, don't you think? Are there no limits?'
No. Not for this designer, it would appear. He's into 'lavish'.

However, I am flanked by darkness unrelieved. For a moment I wonder where the stars went to the right and to the left of me. Then I remember that there is more overhead than sky: the firmament here comprises terra firma almost as high. Whole swathes of the universe are blocked from view because of it.

Between these two hills is my town. I make my way to my neighbours'. These are the folk who bake bread, make fresh noodles and lightly spice home-grown greens. Nigel Slater and his co-religionists would love these foodies. They feed me clotted cream and marmalade on naan, bring me steel tumblers of lassi, share rice with me off big platters. But it's more than wholesome. The kids can crack walnuts in their fists. Sparks fly in the kitchen and not just the linguistic sparkle of hot-headed TV chefs, either. While the children fiddle with the hot-plate wires, it's fireworks.
Most celebratory of all though, is the invitation to take-off my headscarf, hold it wide open and feel it grow heavy with fruit raining down as children dance in the orchard branches. My scarves haven't yet broken, but it's a distinct possibility.

Tonight, though, it's offal curry. I get two kidneys and an intestine.

There can be great joy in fasting.

Hill-station-upon-sea

"All aboard?" Poop poop! "We're off, hold on tight!"

Well what the fat-controller actually said was "Bismillah ir-Rahman ir-Raheem" but with such jovial spirit that he might well have said the above, as he revved up his bus, giving extra gas for the hill.

For me the summer holiday began with the bus trip up the hill to the foothills. It was the bus man's holiday too, he took such joy in his work. 'No one will thirst on my bus,' he declared, brandishing two bottles of water. Nor did we. Thereafter he greeted every toll collector and every vendor at traffic lights with arms outstretched, lowered from the window, blessing them, asking obliquely after the health of those at home, inviting them to join him for a cup of tea when he next passed by. (Pity the passengers on that trip) He tooted his horn and waved to all the school boys we passed, who beamed back at the spherical face of Driver Uncle, bobbing above the steering wheel.
Eventually, high above the plains he pulled up outside an old cinema. He took up his position at the door and mine host personally conveyed his very best wishes for our holidays, calling all alike 'beta', except me, whom he called 'son', proud that he could distinguish between Urdu and English speakers, even if subtle gender distinctions elude him.

It is while walking from there up the hill to the hostel I am booked into that I have a horrible thought. While I napped on the bus, did uncle take a sneaky left to bring us all to the English seaside? For while the sea that laps at the banks of the promenade is monsoon mist and the fish'n'chip shops do samosas instead, the stag-do style, kiss-me-quick kitch and roaring trade in sweetmeats is Blackpool is Scarborough is Brighton.
You take a family, any family, and put it in a street lined with livid snacks and lurid hats, add donkeys beats and lights, and it changes. Men for whom romance is roti from their wives in a tiffin-box leer. Boys who study accountancy hard so as to provide for their parents in old-age get a pogo-stick in their pants and walk funny. Girls with good grades who wish for world peace let down their hair and loosen their tongues. Their mothers, short of breath as they walk, giggle and squander household budgets on toffees and topis.
What sea air does there, the cool mist does here: it makes you want to cruise, to whizz round really really fast on a ferris wheel and eat fried things. My holiday here has a soundtrack. I sit and study and hints of dizzy beats or lusty love songs build to a crescendo, steal my heart for a second then fade out round the corner, leaving me feeling suddenly stranded. The fog and the forest it seems, is conspiring to keep me from this party.

For here, where I am staying is more convent than Comfort Inn. At the end of the lawn (keep off the tennis court) rises a building (To the Glory of God, 1920) built to house white-faced deaconesses. And it's as if they've never left. The napkins are still numbered and placed in embroidered pockets on side plates. Above one of the mantelpieces is one of their tea-towel maps of Scotland and above the other is a watercolour of a Fenland parish church. While I'm meant to be here studying Urdu, it's the coats of arms of Ayr and Dunoon I can't help memorising over mash and peas. Oh, and simply none of the features we have come to expect from A Passage to India is missing. Each room is one with a view. There are porticoes and verandas, gables and balconies, a godown (but don't ask me which one's which) kitchen quarters and ceilings lost in shadows. Employees whose forefathers served before them testify to the Raj tradition of swearing a covenant with their servants of steadfast patronage for steadfast service from one generation to the next, even unto the end. These boys were born with a knowledge of butter knives and marmalade spoons and they look at me sternly if I muddle them up. One simply cannot get the memsahibs these days. 'Mango pickle. She asked for mango pickle!' What would the good deaconesses have thought?

After a day of study and a constitutional round the hill it's time for cocoa. I'm reading my bedtime book in a pool of lamplight in the lounge. I'd like you to imagine it's gas light for atmosphere. The rest is cozily dim. The silence is disturbed by the watchman coming in from the cold. I suspect this ancient servitor may have himself stood to attention to the last of the Sahibs who ruled India. But now as he dodders in to fill his tin mug with tea, he seems to bring with him a song, a sort of lovers' lullaby, I realise as I listen. Faint violins bow out a harmony of heart-ache and the voices pipe their yearning quietly round the room. 'Ji?' I ask, 'where is the music coming from?' He finishes stirring in sugar before he lays down his spoon. Then he gestures reverently to his heart.
'Hmmm,' I say, having no other words to show appreciation for his deep understanding of the true source of music. He mistakes my monosyllable for a matronly note of disapproval and fishes under layers of shawl for the off button on his shirt-pocket radio.
It is silent again.

I tiptoe upstairs and lift the latch on the laundry door trying not to wake the women in their wooden-walled cells with the clatter of zinc jugs and tin tubs. I brush my teeth on the balcony, staring into the dark of the forest below. The quiet pays off, for from the funfair in the distance wafts another song, this time, to the moon, asking that if it should grant the singer any favour, it would be to see her again, Subhan Allah, Subhan Allah, Subhan Allah! This last vocative, originally intended as thanksgiving for some particularly fair filmi maiden, it seems to work well as thanksgiving for all this forested loveliness too.
The burden is taken up again several hours later, at dawn.
Allah hu akbar. Allah hu akbar. Allah hu akbar.
It too clicks off abruptly, before the azan is over and after that, as the first light of dawn creeps through the branches across the the range of hills, birds tune up and a thousand flute-like voices echo this truth over and over.

Out of the Eater

My flight back to the mountains didn't quite make it. The pilot tilted a wing and swung round back to Islamabad. He took one look at the clouds and wanted to go home. He announced their height in numbers meaningless in their magnitude but when I saw, I sympathised. Up there the the line between mountains and meteorology is blurred where solids are etherial, and out of the ether, walls block the way. The other suspension that makes flight possible is that of disbelief. I am willing, it'll get me home.

So I am holed up in a hotel with a carpet on the wall and a doorway in the shower. I could do with company and although there's a talkative type, from the part-of-the-furniture school of service, I'm wanting to hear more than his litany of 'hello-please-thank-you-ma'am-welcome-please', repeated often, with pride, in person and telephonically. He hopes I'll tip as Dickens was paid, by the word, but I'm no philanthropist and I leave him empty handed and strangely lost for words. Not me: 'Thank-you, Uriah, good-bye, good night, allah hafiz and inshallah never again.'

The plane makes it on day two. I arrive to sand dunes glistening in the light on the one hand and flora and fauna being fruitful and multiplying, each according to its kind, on the other. But once I've swept and bleached, the house is inhabitable again and I'm able to venture outside and enjoy the last of the lilies, just blossoming when I left, and the first of the figs. I eat them standing on the chair I pick them on, as the race to get them before the birds gives the operation a sense of urgency. I step into the school and a schoolful of children turns its collective head and hurtles towards me. Balls are left to bounce to a standstill, 'it' gives up the chase, climbers descend from apricot trees; buckets and spades, once so highly sought are abandoned; a hundred hands are outstretched. I must shake them all. A hundred good mornings later and I am hoarse. I am happy, home at last.

WALCOME BACK MISS!!! it says on the blackboard, making me glad I am their maths, not spelling, teacher. I've been led back to the year 5 classroom in my break, after fervent whispering through division. This class, who I harangue and detain, are throwing me a party. On a grubby desk 15 tiny lunch boxes are offered as oblations. I have a chip, a crisp, a bite of sandwich, of samosa, of kebab. I take namkeen and tear a bit off a fried egg. There's a biscuit and some cake. My cup runneth over.
Men are hunting and girls are gathering. By neighbours I'm given apricots and their kernels, mangoes, plums and roses. One lodges a lump of venison in my fridge, as he has none, and invites me to enjoy some. I've had lentils for lunch and tea so one hungry night I hack a piece off, pound ginger, fry it up and cure my anaemia.
The crown prince of a nearby valley is coming to dine with some dear friends. In his honour, rare 'blue sheep' is served - no woolly pastoral breed here but a hardy beast of the mountains. It's so dark it looks like it's burnt to a cinder but it is as much like blueberries as it's possible for meat to be, yes sir, yes sir, three bags full.
I am warmly welcomed back into the ecosystem: out of the eater, something to eat. My knees are nibbled, my ankles are attacked and my scalp is someone succour. I am being poured out. They make their home on my head, but there's no WALCOME here, just NIDAX! (something from the chemist.) I scour and scrub, beat bedding and sun it, burn smoke offensive to the six-legged and comb with aggression. We all groan together, as was promised for the time being.

But I've decided not going to fight this battle alone. I enlist help. I'll take care of the home front - kitchen and carpets, floors and furnishings - but the battle of the bedding and endless fabric that makes up our clothing someone else has to handle.
The first dhobi I approach doesn't do women's clothes, so to speak. I don't blame him, neither do I as of now. But I finally find my comrade standing at the window wielding his iron, so big it might explain the the occasional power outages we have as a city. His shop is more library than laundry, men's drab kameezes neatly referenced according to the dewy decimal system of washermen. You check them out to wear and return them for a wash. I know my clothes will be safe with him, but the bugs won't stand a chance. A powerful smell of clean billows from behind the back curtain. 'Will you help me...?' I begin.
A week later and trousers I'd begun to hope were meant to be crinkled are knife-edged. Kameezes stand to attention, dupattas unfold into a neat square pattern that makes teaching 3-D shapes a pleasure.

Battle-weary, I get the news. My phone rings just as a school parent stops his car and winds down his window to inform me, and tell me to go home. 'Pakistan has won'.
'What?' I should have known. The World Cup. Cricket.
I do a u-turn and join the throng of children who've also been dismissed as a national holiday is declared. I just check, for the record, that they know why, after a school girl in a neighbouring country thought she was off on Good Friday because it was someone's (not too sure whose) birthday, 'kisi ka happy burday hoga' as she put it, bored of the births of so many great men and gods. Although some know, many others simply pump the air and cry 'Happy Birthday!' in celebration of such a display of, this time sportsmanlike, strength.
And out of the strong, something sweet: Happy Rest Day.

A quietish morning

It's a quietish morning at the airport, but then it always is. The only chap expending any energy in the sunshine is a sweeper raising billows of dust on the runway. The lone woman on security is delighted to have someone to talk to. She looks like some of the mothers of my neighbourhood but in standard-issue blue and lipstick. So I greet her as such, calling her baji, sister. She sits me down and tells me about her children. You would not believe the hassles with school buses, you simply would not. And fees! Oh dear me, no. What a lot they do charge these days.
It's unseemly to frisk a friend so she doesn't and she doesn't have time to inspect my bags, what with sisters-in-law to discuss.
"Cup of tea? - Of course", she answers the question herself, "you're a teacher."
What a lot she knows about schools. Tea for two is brought by a tea-boy (Shouldn't he be at school?) moments before two embassy women stride through flashing their ID. That's the other way of avoiding her hands, but it won't buy you a brew. Next a grandma bundles in with such general bagginess of both luggage and person the light ruffling of garmenture by my bosom buddy is not, I am guessing, effectual.
Some sort of superintendent of security drops his specs and then his safety standards. He kicks the shards of glass under a carpet. Don't tell the embassy women.
Outside, in the Aviation Authority's own Chelsea Flower Show, the men I saw lighting cigarettes eight months ago when I arrived seem only just to be drawing the last drags now. They stub them out, wander up to the cabin crew and exchange hearty greetings and manly hugs. They are ushered on. It seems almost a shame to break up the party by boarding the plane.

The mountains between that place and now are so silent, still and large they make me wonder whether that green cherry orchard of a place behind them was all a dream.

Party Time

Though green is grey and grey is black, what the night lacks in colour, it makes up for in heady scents. Somewhere, something big is blooming.

Inside, under buzzing tube lights, balloons are bursting and it will stomachs next; there ought to be laws against this many helpings. It's party season and fizz is flowing, the rice is spiced and there's a cherry on top of every cake. I pity the boys and girls born in winter when living is low-key and to party is to stoke the fire, when the bread is wholemeal and the only things cracked open are walnuts. Still, their cheeks glow red with alternate hot and cold and they know they're loved as they huddle with families around stoves.

These spring time babies are a different breed. They lick cream with their tongues, wear foamy dresses, cry for pepsi and jiggle to film songs, aunties adoring. I am tested, teacher though I may be, to the limits by the constant prodding in the rib cage by unnumbered pointy ends of party hats. I try to sit and grow oblivious and plump like the mothers of this poking horde. At such a moment a man -a man? where did he come from? - whispers over my shoulder, "Sister, will you take a drink?" I am concerned that my face is displaying signs of being driven to drink by kids, for he does not mean pepsi. No, but it is white, I am one of Those Girls.
"No thank-you"
"But...it's the local brand." He is shocked.
"Even so."
The room has gone silent.
He leaves. Is his tail between his legs? I can't quite see. The women breathe a sigh of relief. Not, after all, one of Those Girls.
"Paani pass kijiye please?" I ask, and a cheer goes up. Someone obliges by passing not only the water jug, but seconds of cake.

I miss a boy's birthday and am treated to the video of it instead, when I go round later. I watch the children's mouths go orange with fanta, the women adjust their dupattas for the camera and for ease of eating, the cake being cut. An unflattering camera angle shows hefty women having a go at 'Happy Birthday'. They realise after the first line that they're not too confident with the rest so they let it linger on a surprising note mid-scale. At last the smiles and double chins also come to an end, disappearing with the camera man's own party spirit as the room sways and finally fades to black and I can leave.

I prayed for the gift of hospitality and now the party's swinging at Hannaz Place. It started with sharing breakfast with ants and birds. They nibbled and pecked respectively while I, greedier, grabbed whole handfuls of cherries, happy that the porridge season had passed. I begrudged the the insects theirs and wished a community liaison type would help us dialogue about them taking the higher branches and leave me the ones I could reach below. While Dr Dolittle did not appear, more cherries did. Like the Israelites stumbling from their tents to see what was laid out for breakfast, I woke and went outside and found provisions weighing down the branches, new every morning. The red was alarming. I picked, I ate, I fed them to my friends at playtime.
Seeing the bounty ripening higher up, I was glad now that I had not signed away my rights to the upper branches. Bravely I erected a ladder and began to climb. The mountains got ever so slightly nearer and the neighbourhood appeared over the wall. I appeared, meanwhile, to the neighbourhood. Soon, there was a bang on the gate. Children came brandishing plastic bags. More nimble than I, they were soon aloft in the higher branches. Brothers followed and mothers. I lost count of cherries and of children. They were on my roof, in my kitchen, climbing the walls they were driving me up.
Bring back the ants.
Bring back the birds.
Bring back the cane.

At last, the fruit and the families left.
That evening, I made cherry jam.

A week has passed. Silently, the unripe cherries left untouched in the carnage have blackened. "Baji, my blood pressure is low, the doctor says I need cherries."
I cannot refuse a friend who has herself fed me so many times so I give her a bag and she calls her sisters who come with her brothers too. Among them is the sullen teenager I have never seen away from a computer screen. I guess the doctor would prescribe him some 'cherria' too, pasty as he is, but he only needs to look at them to be transformed. He is all of a sudden a magical-mystical-trapezing-troubadour. He shouts us all down, for no one must cramp his style. He scales the ladder to the top and I mean the top. Two feet touch the single-pointed prong of one side, his usually lanky self now taut as he touches the very tip of the tree. A lean mean harvesting service, he fills two tubs suspended I know not how. Safety is touch and go. I might be the tenant of the house, but he is king of the castle. We his subjects look up in awe. He descends and grunts his teenage thanks when I say shabash, well done.

We had a party with cake and cream and a conjurer. But he got the cherry on the top.

Winning the Day

"Slaughtered, ma'am?"
"Please."

Dead or alive. That's your choice here. Not free-range or buy-one-get-one-free; not RSPCA monitored or corn-fed. Fresh, at least, is a given.
So my poultry man does his dreadful deed and wipes up afterwards with a wodge of wing. I hand over cash and make a mental note: next time bring exact money. The bloodied change puts me off my tea.
Cooking time is shorter here: the bird's still warm as it hits the pot.

Guestz meanz meat so in this season of new life I have been responsible for the killing of two broilers. But life seems to be winning the day. The gauze of thin green over the grey has given way to a plush carpet of leaf and grass. Trees are no longer blushing pink but fully fledged and growing fruit. Mammals abound. A man, embracing a baby goat, a baby girl and a lit cigarette, greets me on my way to school. Something tells me he is happy. Indeed there are cries of the young of both the species he holds emanating from the homes and gardens all along my track.

We celebrate spring with a jolted drive through the mountains processing up the highway - the aisle through our colossal Easter cathedral - built mainly by men from China believing Blake that, 'great things are done when men and mountains meet,' but extrapolating, 'and greater things where machines and mountains meet.' So they set their faces as flint and their feet apart and hold huge drills poked into the sides of mountains so solid, so steep and towering I tremble just to look at them. The trembling of these men with plastic hats and audacity has a more tangible cause. Then, they simply scoop up the rubble to which the the rock-face is reduced and tip it down the hill. At other places they employ brick layers to build walls to separate road from mountain and I wonder what they'd say if asked as Job was,

Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?...
Who determined its measurements - surely you know!
Or who stretched the line upon it?
On what were its bases sunk,
Or who laid its cornerstone,
When the morning stars sang together...?

Job 38:4-7

It was no man who built this monumental mountain range, neither in a Great Chinese Leap Forward, nor in a cathedral-building Middle Age. My school infants don't know this. I watch them take inspiration and have a go themselves at attaining to the lofty heights in the sandpit. They share out sand and shovel undeterred even by their brethren with a different game, the looting and pillaging of said sand. They pile up bucketfuls higher than their heads. I fear for the day they will attend sir's science class and hear just how many geological ages it takes to make a mountain and just how many years it takes to make a geological age. They will lay down their little tools and lament the brevity of life - oh, how like grass we are, which is here today and is tomorrow thrown into the fire - and the brevity of playtime in particular.

We live in the place that the Earth's crust was freed from the underworld, where it pushed its way up and out so its strata of many colours could fill the sky with its earthy rainbows. Here rocks, redeemed, seem to rejoice in their roller coaster lines, folds of tectonic plate forced into looping the loop. There are crazy patterns: zebra stripes, zig-zag cracks and jagged edges. A generous jeweller has set slabs of silvered stone one on top of the other and decorated chunks with rust-red ribbon and fine white filament. Ten thousand purple tinged fingers point out of one cliff face, another is jigsawed into cubes and cuboids, fractured but perfectly stacked to the sky. Truly the earth has felt the breeze on its brow and enjoyed the rain and river on its back but the elements have aged it. It is cracked, chapped and gnarled.

"We squeeze the earth," boasts the SCO advert painted on one rock. Adequate though your phone and net services may be, SCO, I'm thinking its not you that's done all this.

I prefer the reverence in the word emblazoned on every vehicle, 'Mashallah', praise God for beauty. It prints what's in our hearts and on our lips, its long letters in the middle, Alifs and Lam, seeming to raise it upwards, even as it pushes on ahead, on the windscreen.

Like the architecture of minsters where many will have gathered that day, everything - even the sand left by glaciers, bearing aloft boulders - stretches through the skies, straining for the celestial.

Night falls and plunges us into solid-state formlessness and void. We creep round towers of blackness and avoid the abyss below. Then we turn round the corner of a mountain. The stone is rolled away and there is the moon, full, like a piercing through to a brighter place, like light at the end of a tunnel.

There's been a resurrection. There is light at the end of the tunnel.

New Day

There are four whites in the sky at night: blossom, snow on the mountains, stars and the moon. I arrived home 'after dark' beneath all this white and for a moment saw my garden reflect the night-sky like a still pond. The ground twinkled with starlight. In the first spring breeze, petals had drifted in and were radiant with moonlight at my feet.
Something else must have drifted in on the breeze: whispered beauty tips, for everything is looking good. Who told the mist to sneak between the the branches of a sparsely blossomed tree just so? Whoever it was I'm glad, it's a great pastel-and-watercolour Japanese scene art lesson sorted. Who advised just such a green to stripe the grey fields? Even the concrete and stone of every building looks right with this season's flora.

I wondered why, when so much life was springing up among the stone, there was yet a desolate feel, an uncanny quiet, as half the populace is absent. It's the goats: gone, leaving a ghost town behind, giving ascendancy to the plant kingdom at last. They're not actually gone, there's been no blood-letting since Eid, they're just behind bars, presumably doing time for some crime against nature or at least cultivated plant-life that their ancestors once committed. I have to feed my vegetable waste to them stealthily now. I give pea-pods to one I see chained up, slipping them into her diet of straw. She loves me, I know it.

The cherry tree in the school-yard opposite my house was the first in town to explode into a candyfloss mass of flowers, so Young Scholars Public Academy and College must be doing something right even while educating far too many children in what is actually just a family house.

Saturday morning, 9 am and my waking dreams mingle with the opening lines of 'Pak sar Zamin', the national anthem that chases sleep away. I am told through song by a hundred children or more that I wake to a nation exemplary to all nations, a sultanate superlative in every way. As I stumble to my coffee-pot we're glad the land bestows such happiness and we bow to the republic and I light the gas. They have school on Saturday and I don't: another source of happiness.

"Come to scholar, go to leader,' boasts the motto on the school sign, filling me with wonder, puzzlement and hope in equal measure. The children are certainly going somewhere. As I walk up the hill on a weekday morning I pass them all in crisp white uniforms either hurtling or toddling, 'coming to scholar, going to leader,' as their badges also say. Indeed one lass has wee scholarly specs already.

Well I hope some of them do go to leader, I really do, but even if they don't, I simply hope they will continue to go to school at all, for on some days, when the triumvirate of turmoil, terror and all-talk-and-no-action tyrannises particularly badly, it is a hopeful thing to see girls - yes, especially girls, as the town has had a visit from the other terrible T from the west - going to school. It is good, also, to walk past soldiers in helmets with story books in my bag on my way to teach. I teach how to do a watercolour wash; how to count in tens or tenths; why the Highwayman loved Bess, the landlord's black-eyed daughter; where Spot might be hiding. Is he under the stairs?

Meanwhile the current leaders in the capitol could certainly do with 'coming to scholar', having a retreat under the cherry tree, maybe, and pondering the vision of the national anthem.

We celebrate the first day of spring and traditional new year tomorrow with a festival called New Day, Nawroz. "Why is it tomorrow when spring started on Tuesday last week?" one bright spark asks. Out come the torch, globe, and orange (not to scale, children). "Well, class, when the sun is as so, we call it the equinox..." I'm fooling no one. Everyone knows spring started on the 12th. We all kicked of our blankets that night and in the morning felt it time to open the drawer marked 'summer clothes' and put away yesterday's woolens till next year. I opened the door and went back in for sun-cream. The snow began to melt and the stream ran rich after the frozen months. And from that day, as quickly as the snow retreated, the blossom bloomed as if the valley could not bear to be without something white and fluffly between the rock and the hard place. My garden smells of honey.

I guess the newspapers don't mention that.

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

"You must be foreign; come in for a cup of tea."
I am foreign; I do go in for a cup of tea (served, satisfyingly, with fried meat and cake). My hostess is a sprightly grandmother. We discuss poetry. First a zabour by the ancient poet Hazrat Daud that says, 'The heavens declare the glory of God.' She believes it and so do I. She nips out and returns with a treasured possession, a handsome volume of Christina Rossetti's poems which she wants me to explain when I next come round. (pray!)
It begins with a section on spring. In "There is a Budding Morrow in Midnight" I read,

Winter is the mother-nurse of Spring,
Lovely for her daughter's sake
Not unlovely for her own:
For a future buds in everything;
Grown, or blown,
Or about to break.

I know it's true of nature. I hope it's true of the nation.

The Lie of the Land

I travelled a great deal in February with my companions, Kevin and Harry, aged 4 and a half and two and a half respectively. We once even made it to the park. They taught me the texture of the ground, that Lahore is not flat. Every shop and every house has its own platform of concrete, clay or marble. Between each is a ditch so that to walk anywhere is to climb. If purdah is one reason women stay in, the lack of pavements and pushchairs must surely be another. In the child-sized valleys and peaks of the city-scape is another world. They see the cat in every corner and rejoice in the litter, for here is another way Lahore ties its fun to danger. Matchboxes are decorated with delightful cartoon characters laughing out at you and your children, who will forever associate their early arson attempts with Bambi and Noddy. So to look at the litter is to read a comic.
But I see now the joke is over as the knot tying pleasure to pain has strangled the city. Lahore's premier stadium has become a place of killing and sportsmen are martyrs.

As I cross Punjab by train, I see that the built environment reflects the rural. The land is deeply furrowed, a scratch pad for the Himalayas ahead. No, the earth is not flat.

"Welcome to the City of Serenity" reads the sign between Rawalpindi and Islamabad. The driver puts his seat belt on, signalling a departure from the rest of the land. Roads suddenly bulge out into four lanes and the cars are like those polo horses, so glad to be let out onto the pitch. If the cars had manes, they too would stream out behind these cars, careering around trying to decide which lane they'd like. My taxi, however, has contracted a limp of some sort, due to a flat tyre I suppose, or some misalignment. We hobble between lanes. But where are the real horses that add life to other cities? There are no rickshaws, qingchis, wagons or tongas. They are banned. I feel more welcomed to a city of sterility than serenity.

Islamabad from the air is a sheet of graph paper where other cities are Jackson Pollocks. The blocks have names my guidebook describes as Orwellian: F-6 1, I-10 2, H-9 1. You ask for a street named after a good Muslim like Sir Justice Abdul Rahim and the taxi men stare blankly back. Give them a number and you're there.

I walk miles here on the flat and get lost in the right angles and the streets that all look alike. I am hungry but where are the chai, chat-pattay and gol-guppay wallay? Where are the malta, fruita and mamphalai men? They too are banned. You want a cup of tea, ma'am, you go back to your hotel and you dial 4 for room service.

But the germs have got to crawl somewhere and here they go to the edges of each block, the strips of wasteland. It's a car's city, so I walk to see what we're meant to speed past. Is it the warmed water grown foetid? Or the goodly crop of class b drug fertilized by it? Could it be plastic bags in the gutter? No comic strips here, it's too dark. Maybe it's the small colonies of poor people the city needs for labour but cannot spare a numbered sector for.

The happiest group I see is a circle of security men having a seminar in a car-park on aim. They practice by shooting head-sized bags of rubbish hung under a tree. It's one way, I grant you, of tackling the rubbish problem.

Done with walking I hail a cab. Technically he's full but I squeeze in between the cargo - pounds and pounds of cakes and cookies. Someone, somewhere, is having a party.
"Why wasn't I invited?"
Too late I realise I've spoken the joke aloud. I forgot I was here. The driver puts his hand on his heart and bowing over the steering wheel, invites me. I protest I cannot, I'm leaving. "Take what you like," he says, sweeping his arm magisterially over his kingdom of confectionery, "Whatever your heart says."
My heart says pink macaroon.

One group really has gate-crashed the party though, and that's the trucks, dolled up like gypsies in a world of white and grey. No one told them the fancy dress was off. They seem embarrassed, having made an inappropriate joke in a serious city. They scuttle through, trying not to let their petticoats of chains make too much noise.

Not worried about the noise at all, our bus blasts its Bollywood good and loud. As we head to the hills, we all seem happy to leave and would have been happier yet had we known we left the City of Serenity just as fires of unrest flared, stoked by tyres and anger with politics.

Out of earshot of the palins, the driver switches cassettes for some mountain songs. A thin flute carves out some notes which the singer settles on again and again in a hypnotic cycle. It could have been dull but as that music plays, those few notes are the entire sound world and they are perfect then and there. Through the badlands by night, it's time for another tape yet again, this time a perky number whose only lyric is 'Inshallah'. I make it my prayer: 'Thy will be done'.

He answers by bringing us home safely, al Hamdullah, but my eyes are blinded by the sun on the snow, the air is thin and my breath is taken away.

Between the Kite Strings

I'm in a whitewashed space, as huge and silent as a Medieval Tughlugh tomb. I am all alone inside, as overwhelmed by the alone-ness as one might be by a crowd: an opposite but equal sensation. The absence of noise, people, motion and colour is almost tangible.
I am glad for an hour to be able to look at Lahore frame by frame. Sometimes at a single tree, sometimes a solitary face, sometimes whole bazaars, but here it is still and soundless; I am in the Al Hamra gallery.
Lahore is fragmented by a hundred kite-strings in one picture, one orange kite obscuring its centre. Yes, this is it. I have seen fun as bright as this kite here, hiding much behind it. Even the narrow streets around my home, otherwise muddy and poor, boast a pool table, table football, an arcade of old gaming machines, a trampoline and a mobile roundabout a doddery gent pushes around to children holding coins.

Fun can come from the sorriest sources. While there are not many beggars here, the hungriest know Lahore's appetite for fun and sell balloons, balls, teddies, masks and spider-men. When I buy from one I make three people happy: the two little boys at home who gain a toy and the sad-eyed boy who loses one. Here, the cakes are lurid, the music is loud and the driving is a game; "Death Game" as someone has stencilled onto one motor bike.
Ever since Kim sat "in defiance of municipal orders astride the great gun, Zam-Zamma on her brick platform," in Kipling's 1901 classic, Lahoris have had their fun atop platforms of danger. The canon is guarded with chains now, municipal orders having been so flagrantly defied, but children still play. On a sunny Sunday morning, they swung, climbed and laughed, astride equipment on a construction site. Parks are for sleeping, hard hats for the girls.

I envy the artists' abilities to capture Lahore's lovely light, the urban landscape of stacked clay cubes coloured with drying clothes and the markets crowded with merchandise. If each picture speaks a thousand words and each rickshaw ride is a thousand pictures of a thousand details I will need more than Sherazade's 1001 nights to tell the stories, but I get tired. I lie down for a rest in the afternoons.
Pursuing quiet, I go to a smart cafe and pick up a paper. The terror and the war upon it are in the local pages and I can not believe that the street filled with red heart balloons saying "Ich liebe Dich" outside, nor the promotions for candlelit dates are in this country US Ambassador Holbrooke calls a 'nightmare'. The iced coffee has a bitter aftertaste.

Like the artist's jagged shapes between the kite strings, Lahore is confused. I leave the gallery and there's a circle of men in tartan playing the bagpipes. No audience, mind, this is an undeveloped space behind the National Football Development offices.

Wearing tinsel and roses, sufi pilgrims have flocked to town this week, some on bikes decorated like X'mas trees. It is the Urs festival of Saint Data Ganj Baksh. My sightseeing trip to a dead emperor's tomb on the outskirts turns frenzied when the bus drives through the melee where the whole crowd shares a heart, one dhol drum that beats to make everyone jump together, like a giant organism pulsating. On the tops of buses they're jumping, dancing with death again.

The kite festival, on the other hand, has been cancelled this year. The sky will not fill with a jungle of colour, the children will stay off the roofs. Too many people had their heads cut off by kite strings last year.

The past is a foreign country

It was the first day back to work in London after Christmas, a frozen day. Light glistened on the frost and the plate-glass windows of the biggest fashion houses from which bouncers with sharp suits and cold eyes frowned. They were as still as the mannequins beside them.

Turning down a side street I came to where I needed to be, but it was not as I expected. The Pakistan High Commission was a wedding feast: a huge marquee filled the garden where families ate snacks from paper plates and drank tea bought from a van parked inside the gates. One side of the van photocopied passports, the other sold samosas for 70p. The tent was in fact the visa office in which people mingled instead of queuing and bureaucrats warmed themselves under gas fires. One told me not to go Pakistan as he rubbed his hands together on this day papers said London was colder than Antarctica, because it was too cold there. His point was made when two mountaineers entered, so well equipped they could exit Landsdowne Square and ascend K2.

But I have returned, to everything the marquee represented, leaving Belgravia behind, leaving England behind.

The past is a foreign country.

My flight was filled with a film of exile and farewells, asylum and unwelcome, a stark reminder that for every happy homecoming there's a prison sentence and for every duty-free purchase there's a deportation. But even these refugees made friends in the film. I focused on this.

The sun rose, I woke, I was in Lahore: the magic of flight had done it again and everything here seems touched by it. I wake to Superman as my family here has furnished me with his insignia on sheets, pillows, table-cloths and duvets. I zip around in rickshaws and I'm aware this is the closest to Quiddich I'll get this side of Hogwarts and even in a traffic jam I'm in a super-hero film where the backs of vehicles shout 'SALAM! RACE! DON! PANTHER! or MASTER! And when a trumpet - loud, heartfelt, soulful - piped up behind a mural of tin soldiers I stopped and gazed, a child in Disney Land. The white horse and carriage, bag-pipes and big bass drums only added power to my conviction: I'll hire the band for every wedding, bar-mitzvah or christening I ever have cause to arrange.

As in the marquee, people here know how to have a good time amidst the serious business of daily life when things are hard, and they are hard for so many. If the High Commission believes you can't copy a document without a pakora in Belgravia, the people they represent here certainly believe in the need for a good variety of snacks close to hand. There isn't a street I've been down without a bicycle-cart, table-top or tank-full of some funky variation on the chick-pea; industrial scenes are brightened by trays of oranges, tinsel-garnished; grown-men in serious colours are glad to stop for a sweet milky drink, barbie pink.

Tucking into a few tasty treats myself the other day, I overheard the following, 'But, yaar, it's so painful,' said a girl to her friend, 'having to inhale shisha while laughing.'

Unbearable happiness.

**********

The Imperial Fortress is visited by locals, like a foreign country is by tourists, without too much concern being given to its reality.
In its ruined state, the beauty of its proportions: the perfection of a curve here or an arrangement of alcoves there, is laid bare and it is attractive in almost the same austere way that the mountains in the north are. But any danger of the Moghuls who built it appearing desiccated - even skeletal - by this representation is removed by the visitors themselves who flesh it out and breathe life into the structure.
While the Moghul kitchens are now offices, and the scent of Mughalai cuisine over three-hundred years stale, families everywhere are picnicking, and the sense of feasting continues. Where the Ravi once flowed a road now roars, chasing away any chance of sleep from the khwab ghar (house of dreams, i.e bed-room), but it seems a hundred city-weary boys still find a place to sleep, perchance to dream, on the lawns inside the fort.
Where inlaid stones and fragments of glass in the shish-mehel once glittered, now it is the turn of the ladies' ample jewellery to illuminate the palace of mirrors. And behind bits of masonry even the romance that really lit the place up sparkles again. They may not be princes and courtesans entwined, but these couples must surely feel they are as they snatch a rare filmi moment. Or is it all a film?

Beyond the fortress walls, I look up to see history. It's upside-down archaeology, where the past is highest. I don't look up too long, lest the present catches me unawares and rolls over me in the shape of a rickshaw. When I do I'm far away. Sometimes a minaret soars and I'm there - just beyond the Middle Ages. Or I come to a time when buildings looked like ocean liners, white with hopeful modernist lines and I'm in cocktail-party town: Malibu, in fact, outside one with pineapple trees carved into the stucco. There are names, lots of names, written above the doors, sometimes in a foreign script: Lakshman, Taka Devi, Dinga Bakht Singh, Sir Ganga Ram and Munna Ram. That's not who lives there now. Wooden shutters on the highest precipices of fragile buildings are still boarded up, there are secrets inside.

And here I am sending this data down the information super-highway, a detour off this street so sooty and axle-greasy, so full of clanging and motor mechanics it could be the cradle of an industrial revolution. Opposite are the east-bound railway tracks. Maybe there are memories down them, across the border. The past is a foreign country.

The Zoo

I've arrived and checked-in. I've had breakfast and explored my hotel room: fiddled with hopeless TV controls; used the tiny toiletries; phoned room service and swiped the letter-paper. I had a woozy nap, drifting in and out of consciousness as my mind staggered to catch up with my body and realise I'm in Pakistan again.

Eventually, as it always does, the novelty of the hotel room wore thin and I wanted to see some Life. I looked out of the window. I think the woman opposite, gazing down at the street from her roof, wanted to see some Life too. She sat beside a screen cage full of pigeons flying in their tiny portion of sky. I wanted to get out, but felt too fragile to have much human interaction. I'd go to the zoo.

This had the added advantage of being a good walk down the Mall, a strip of urban brilliance. Even constructed from dusty red brick, the classical lines and Oriental curves of the great court house, university, museum and central post office, are perfect. Indeed, the humble building material shows just how beautiful the forms themselves are. These institutions give way to commercial buildings in bold art-deco stucco. Beneath them snacks are sold for copper coins while inside are shops selling only gold.

In the zoo, it took some time to locate any real animals. There were plenty made of fibreglass, so many in fact that I began to wonder whether this was the way they did zoos here. There's a lot to be said for it: no feeding or danger and you won't blink and miss the moment the dolphin balances a ball on the nose; it's always balancing it on the nose. Children were riding the electric models and there's another advantage to fake animals: no fear of being bitten or thrown off. Next to all this was a snack bar complex where families, happy with their riding, picnicked.

The first actual cage I saw housed a man mending a motorbike. Next to that was a makeshift mosque, reminding the Darwinian west that it doesn't have to be religion or biology, natural history displays replacing the contents of a cathedral in South Kensington, but religion can be bang in the middle of it.

At last, I came to the Bird Houses. They are Bird Houses in both senses: for birds and shaped like birds, out of concrete. However, concrete is not known for it's transparency and so there is no light with which to see the creatures.

The mammal section is more circus than science. Thumping music pumps from a distance. Pinky the chimp lives in a room decorated pink with a mural wishing her happy birthday every day of the year. Suzi the elephant is painted and gives rides. The lions roar when tickled by the zoo-keeper. I only hope that they've not been taught to read, lest the jacket someone's wearing irritates them too much. It says in white STOP AND FEEL FREE. I stop and feel free, but there's no way those big cats can. And as part of the whole circus set-up, there's a freak show and people stare at me. I only wish I could charge 10p. I smile instead.

"What a great place," I say to the lady I share a bench with, to make conversation. I sip a cappuccino-style frothed tea. ("Celebrate the moment" the label on the tea-bag tells us.) Apparently her children just decided they wanted to come this afternoon, like me. She seems surprised by my comment though.
"Why do like it?"
Good question. Do I like it? "The lions," I say. "The lions and tigers, especially that snow tiger!"
"Ha! Allah Miya made it so good!"
I tell her I've never see one before and that I loved its green eyes.
"Mashallah, you also have beautiful eyes."
"We were talking about animals," I say, and we laugh.
When I go to pay for my tea I find she's already paid.

I'm going to go back to the zoo. Maybe next time I'll look at the animals.