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.