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.