The waters will not overwhelm

The sky seems strained with panic. A flag beats against its post with the wind, desperate to flee like a wild animal caught in a trap, willing to leave limbs for life. It is black; Ali has died on the fields of Karbala. Clouds grieve and intermittently weep. When the rain stops helicopters propel the sound of disaster across the valley. When night falls, it sounds like the muezzin is mourning.

I had a knock on my gate the other morning. Please could I go and give condolences to the family whose son died of a drug overdose yesterday?

The helicopters look as big, up there, as the cockroaches who stormed my house one night, copulated and colonised. I clear the counter to make dinner and who have we here? Somebody snacking. I look up from reading a novel and -hullo- who's that having sex on the carpet? Some stop embarrassed in the night when the lights go on, caught creeping round the skirting board en route to other such liaisons. One dirty beast even had designs on me and on a candlelit evening wormed his way into my shirt.

But this little old spinster will not have it. She will not. There is a powder in the shops whose name sounds like death in every language I know of: mortein. But the criminal creatures do not know those languages, can not heed the warning. They step upon it and oh, how lovely it must be, they realise for the first time in their crawling little lives, to lie back and rest awhile. A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest- and it is worse than poverty that comes upon them like a bandit.

Because that, friends, is how I find them when I flick on the light the next morning. They are mortified to be caught with their soft underbellies exposed. They try to flip back and slip away. Their feet, so sticky they can walk upside down, do not know air, that it offers no purchase. So they spend their final moments in a tantrum. Then their six kicking feet meet my one foot and our days have begun with death.

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High up in Hunza there is a lake, a sheet of shine between two craggy mountains with the tops of fruit trees growing out of it. In spring, submerged branches blossomed under water, vainly hoping bees would dive down and collect its pollen. And now, small water-logged fruits form for no one to farm, for the farmers have fled with their families and are staying in tents. Their homes are beneath those trees, beneath that shining surface that has risen higher and higher through spring as the river flowed and swelled with melting snow as it has always done. But there is a wall now, a whole new mountain in fact, that fell from another into the Indus. And so the river stops and waits till miles of it upstream rise higher than the mountain till it can once again be on its way.

A mountain of uncertainty has blocked the future. Everyone waits to see what the water will do, what the mountain will do. Still for centuries and constant in its flow respectively, rock and river push their tonnes against each other and eye-watering pressures build. Release will be so violent it will almost register on the Richter scale. 'The next 24 hours are critical,' the experts say. 'The next 24 hours,' they repeat, night after night.

But while the camera crews of the nations encircle the arena, just as the lake is level with the mountain, a small stream starts trickling over the ledge and winds its way down past boulders to the place the river once flowed. It's quite hard to make it out on the TV screen and so the story is replaced with storms in the capital and Karachi, political and meteorological. The next 24 hours will be critical.

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It rained hard one night and water flooded some classrooms, having gushed down the chimneys. The cleaning lady found a soggy dead kitten in a corner and left it out with the rubbish. It was fascinating to the children how like a rat it was and how parts moved if poked just so. They tried sticks, shoes and fingers. (You go and wash your hands, sunshine, then come and show me. I need to smell the soap.) It moved and moved until it came alive again. The guard took of his jacket and build it a house. That day he did double duty guarding the gate and the the kitten's life, alert to signs of danger and disease.

I have since heard that it has made an officer's daughter a wonderful pet.

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I have waited outside our office so many times: waited for meetings, waited for the postman, waited to go home. I find myself here again today, waiting, pacing. Then I am asked to sit down and talk. I face the mountains and we stare at each other blankly. I am told that due to circumstances we might have to leave any day now.

The month I envisaged dragging by is suddenly concentrated into a few days. I see what I am about to leave. Space intensifies with time and crystallises about me like a jewel. The next 24 hours could be critical. There is so much beauty that there is almost too much, as if about to swell and burst, overripe. There are flowers on the tree, red; there are flowers in the beds, pink; there's a bird's egg on the grass, blue; there are apricots on the tree, yellow. I'm not hungry but I go down to pick the fruit we've waited for all year. We watched as their blossom welcomed back spring and quickly fell. We watched the leaves bud and unfold and told off children for plucking their hard little knots of green fruit for weaponry. We've watched them soften and grow and today they are blushing. I eat a few but leave many more for seasons I will not see here. Friends will feast on them, slice and dry them, tire of them fresh and survive winter on them dry till those children, a year older, will climb again for their sour taste of a new year.

There's a hoopoe on the grass who appears to be two-faced, so beak-like is his pointed plume at the back. He's looking forwards and backwards; east and west; past and future.

The walnut tree is still preparing its nuts. I am surrounded by it, so stately, starting from its smooth white trunk and extending to dark boughs reaching out to fill space with wide leaves. I am humbled and suddenly feel apologetic, realising I have popped so many walnuts into my mouth this year without ever considering that these trees have poured so much nourishment into them and protected each one in its own little wooden case, padded about by fruit. Year after year these plants hold out their generous hands and say take, eat. I have been shown so much kindness.

Then a streak of yellow, a bird, describes a perfect parabola and is back up again in an instant. So steep and smooth is its dive, my own heart is in my mouth and my stomach lurches. Or maybe that's because I remember I'm leaving.

Season of kindness and cloud

It helps us to know we're alive when we see we are. We see our hands chop veg; our pen move at our impulse; the water wash over us and our feet tread paths. Our eyes remind us we're alive. Then the lights go out and what are we then? There is neither up nor down, right nor left; we have neither arms nor legs and can go neither forwards nor backwards when the power goes out. For a moment, on moonless nights, life bursts in our face and we fall into the darkness cursing ourselves for not carrying a light. (There are some dangers smokers don't face.)
We think very deeply about our lives. We are so profound, we have such depths. We think therefore we are. But what about a thought in the dark? I don't see that I am then. I need a lightbulb to know that.

Take Kevin and Harry, who were my small flatmates in Lahore. They are brothers aged 7 and 4 respectively with no access to a camera, a video camera or webcam, nor even the bathroom mirror, given their diminutive stature.
I was putting on my make-up (we see ourselves, remember) and I lowered the mirror for Harry. "Who's that, Harry?" I asked, as he looked at his reflection. "It's Kevin," he said.
He has not seen himself. He doesn't know he is.

Sometimes, before I light a light, I stumble to the door and step out into the night to see the stars and lose what's left of myself in the cosmos. The only real void is where the mountain was by day, no starlight shines through that. I contemplate distances and rootlessness, inter-planetary wandering and time-travel. Then I remember I quite like existence and don't need to add galactic loneliness to my lot so I go back in, light the lantern, rummage for a biscuit or make a chip butty - that'll weight me down some.
Tonight though, there is a moon, visible through a damp duvet of clouds so I am hemmed in, in a comforting, somewhat swaddled way and also orientated by this sky - the limit. There is up and there is down; here is east, there is west.

The cloud is also a comfort to the crops and fruit trees these days as it gently touches them with rain and makes them shine green all over. It is the season of kindness indeed. One neighbour brings me eggs, another clover; "fry and it's good" she tells me, and it is. Spring is lean on veg, but they found that. By the third bag of it, though, I'm being kind to my neighbour's pet rabbit.

A chap up the road is due to marry. His family had a foundation laying ceremony for the house he's preparing for his bride. The plans were drawn up. ("Should the windows really go behind the adjoining wall?" queried my friend.) The ground was cleared but then the work had to stop. "That peach tree-" the chap said kindly, "How can we chop it down in blossom so pink? Let's give it another year." And so his bride will wait.

The gardener in the office grounds loves creation too. You can see it in the way he handles plants and soil and splashes water. He found an ants' nest on Sunday. The pesky creatures swarmed out from under the flower pot he moved. The ground seethed with them and my skin crawled. All present leapt back horrified by the hidden fecundity of nature. Ant poison was unearthed and brandished over them. But was it a sin? Mali wanted to know. He was nervous about sprinkling it upon life. He was told it was not but felt in his heart it was, so he got a small duster and flicked some ants onto the lawn where they seemed to frolic with further abandon. "They're just like little children," he said.

I confess that though the chemist was kind and did not charge for the worm medicine, I will not be as affectionate to my parasites for a week, once a day before meals.

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There was glorious blue sky for some of our weekend trip, but only immediately overhead. All around, like a crown, there was thick cloud. "What a shame it's covering the view," I said to our boy-guide.
"What view?" he wondered.
"Of the mountains. My parents have come a long way to see them."
"Don't worry," he said, "they're the same at the top as they are at the bottom."

Now the cloud is total, pushing down heavy like a stone waiting to be rolled away. An elemental summit has been convened this evening, a meeting of earth and sky. They come together for fellowship, the clouds reaching downwards in their bulge and the mountains straining heavenwards. For weeks it has seemed something has been brewing, with cloud pouring out of craggy valleys in the high hills like steam from cauldrons. What mysteries do they communicate, what wonders do they work in their communion?
Sometimes, white reveals white as the cloud eases down or creeps to the side to reveal snow on rock behind. There is such sympathy between them as they reflect each other's colours and coldness and the attraction of weight to weight.

But mum and dad can and do see the clouds in England; we wait to see the crest of the Karakorum. Night falls and the curtain of cloud is torn in two to reveal what we've been hoping for: a display of strength and power and flashes of white from rock bottom to soaring spire.

A few hours later the sun rises and it is Easter Sunday.

Storeys

From an open warehouse, on plastic chairs, three workmen face the road. The radio is tuned to a minor key and the lovely Lata is lost, she sings, she always has been lost, not even her name is known but we will know her by her black eyes. 'Black eyes,' goes the chorus,'black, black eyes.' Their rough faces suggest they are waking up to the realisation that they have spent much of their lives waiting for deliveries of cement and the like but though the trucks have come and gone, delivered and left, do you know, a waiting remains, a longing.
They seem strengthened to have each other - an arm creeps round another's manly shoulders - and it is not long till namaz.
For this city was never meant to be just about concrete. So where the wealthy once carved lattice work into the upper portions of homes to mingle sky and stone or built airy pavilions atop palaces to imagine they sailed on the atmosphere, now ugly collections of storeys trail out into fanciful aviaries. Men still seem to want to possess some sky and so they have caged a portion in chicken wire and filled them with love birds and doves, the creatures that embody Lata's voice, refusing to be bound to earth, to be found. And so Lahore appears to have a floating extra storey, somewhere between architecture and air that will keep us all dreaming. Beyond that, the last wispy outposts of the city, forays into space, are paper kites.
At ground level, there were some birds on Thursday being taken for a ride. They were jungle green, caged in a hot-pink mesh and held aloft by a motorbike rider, steering with the other hand. The little pets thought they were flying, such was the thrill of speed and air, flying through crowded streets, the world a trap. And he, in turn, felt free as a bird.
On my street birds of a feather flock together. There are some bunnies in a tank, too, and some fish in bags, but mostly this bazaar is for the birds: pigeons, quails, sparrows (are not they sold two for a penny?) budgies, parrots, parakeets and fighting cocks. My little friend Harry, 4, is a true bon viveur. He lavishes equal love on these (not the cock, little man, fingers out) and the chickens at the poultry man's that his father might have killed for tea. There was Elephant Gate, Cavalry Gate and Camel Gate in the city's imperial fortress, but here is the Fine Feathered Friends Gate from where they are bought to make it a little easier for a struggling city to reach for the sky.

The animals here share their space with us.

To use public transport is to be farmed. Sheepdog conductors round us up, calling out to stray pedestrians, preying particularly on those of us who lack direction. They can spot us a mile off. We hear their cries and follow. One calls out, 'Yadgaar, yadgaar, yadgaar': 'Memorial, memorial, memorial' and reminds me where I want to be. We are herded and penned in and profits mean more than welfare in this industry. The conductor shuts the gate, as it were, and barks at the driver to leave. He slaps the side of the bus as if it's hide, whistles cajoling noises then enters traffic jams to negotiate paths through the jungle of vehicles. The driver jolts forward and stops. 'We're not leaving until you've filled this wagon,' he says, 'it's not worth it otherwise'. And so we wait.
Meanwhile a shepherd herds his sheep past the bus stop. It's a long way to meadow land from here but the little team of man and beasts look more purposeful than us lot, their curly hennaed heads bobbing forward methodically. They cannot be persuaded to go to Memorial - they have nothing to remember - nor to Regal Cinema, nor Race Course Park. Eyes down sheep, focus on pasture.

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There is much mirth in the city. One kebab man chops frying onions in a red-hot rhythm using two knives like drum sticks. A welder is making sparks fly in time to his disco radio station. A bagpiper in tartan embraces a man with tears, it's been so long. Drivers get given a free balloon with every petrol purchase. They end up looking like inflated emergency bags except everyone is laughing. It serves my bus driver well when he barters it for two cigarettes and a matchstick - maybe it had been quite a stressful drive with that between him and the wheel after all.
On the basis of all this, I could call it 'Lahore: City of Smiles' but I fear the insipid tourist board would hijack the phrase and I don't want to help them who have sold off the Grande Dame of hotels, Falettis, to someone who has boarded it up so selfishly. Or worse, some Batchelor of Arts, Punjab (fail) will add to the plethora of two storey Humpty Dumpty Academies of Science, Kids Gardens for Grooming, English Grammatical Schools and Scholars' Hutches (I kid you not). Spare us, O spare us the Happy Smiling College of Lahore, A-levels a speciality.

In the few hours between the Punjabi pop being switched off for the night and dawn's azan an absurd noise tears the quiet and with it, the sense of all being well. A donkey brays, trying with its rude and amusing voice to be eloquent. It is hoarse, squeeky and unsteady. But I do not laugh at it; it is gut wrenching. I am not yet so away with the fairies that I can understand the speech of animals but I hear in my mind that it is raging about its hunger and bone-tiredness, its wounds from traffic and cruelty, its fear of the city. They share the space - and some stories - with people. And I rejoice greatly about how our king came to us; righteous and having salvation, humble and mounted on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey. We can be sure he has heard our stories, he has shared our space. He has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows.