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.