Transports of Joy

There are mountains in the mirror. I am mindful of what my driving instructor said about wing-mirrors: "Things appear closer than they actually are." That they appear at all is enough for me. I wonder what he would make of the luxuriant blooms of nylon flowers and swirls of prayer that bedeck the dashboard and obscure from the driver's view the more pedestrian side of life and, indeed, pedestrians.

As long as the drivers of these suzukis, small taxi-vans, are not too enthusiastic about gear changes and the second gear in particular, close, as it is, to the lady's upper-leg, I enjoy these Saturday rolls down the hill to town, ladies in the front.

The town boasts several good bus stops. A family in dire straits could shelter under one, with their sturdy steel roofs, cheerful colours and seats not half bad. I've never seen anyone wait in one though, except some foreigners once, lost. There aren't any buses, you see, except one to China and one to the capital. They don't stop at these.

So I am driven out of town to board the bus to the capital. Last time I made this journey I was in the front seated at the hand of the King of the Road, the Pathan driver, who told tales of where he's told various traffic policemen to get off. Like obsequious courtiers, his passengers laughed. His gear stick was his sceptre, his seat his throne.

This time I'm with an animated school girl with the look of the musical Oliver Twist. She calls me ma'am and asks many questions: 'Ma'am, what is the tradition of Christmas? Ma'am what is the Christmas tree and ma'am why is there a barbie on top?' We become what we are called. By midnight I am a Victorian school ma'am who believes children should, indeed, be seen and not heard.

I begin the mountain journey with a reading for fortification:

Lord, you have been our dwelling place in all generations.

Before the mountains were brought forth,

or ever you had formed the earth and the world,

from everlasting to everlasting you are God.

Psalm 90:1-2

The bus prowls along the river, a blue seam of gem-stone, guarding its treasure from the jealousy of a colourless landscape, stretching as wide and high as the eye can see. Eventually we ascend as the road winds higher over a pass. All is cloud now. We pass a sign pointing to Heaven. 'Nanga Parbat', it says, 'The Naked Peak'. Today, it's well wrapped up in a duffle coat of fog and a duvet of downy cloud. I don't blame her, I wouldn't want to be 'nanga' on a day this cold.

There are women on a hillside, swaying their hips, pouting and strutting who are half naked. Their hair flies free in the wind, like their diaphanous scarves no longer keeping them modest, but these are only on the laptop that a soldier in front of me is watching.

As the wheels crack over the rock of the road, we churn up the silence. The mountains behind us pass into the night. But round every corner, behold, a light shines in the darkness. Headlights bring one epiphany after another, hosts of angels all along the road.

I wake at two to find everyone asleep, including the driver and bus. A whisper goes round, 'There's a block.' The rain pounding on our roof has also pounded on the rock by the road. The rock is now on the road. I am glad we were not on the same bit of road.

And so we wait.

I sleep some, I wake some and wait.

Dawn, and we breakfast on peanuts. The women of the bus walk through mud to a village where we are shown great hospitality not with tea and cake but by the freely given use of their toilet. The horn of the bus sounds so we hurry back, but it is not signalling departure just making a joyful noise at the sight of a mighty machine approaching from round the mountain like something from the Book of Revelation. It comes to push away boulders big as buses. (It too sports a gay arrangement of foliage garlanding the space where once was a windscreen.)

Oliver Twist in a jaunty cap, her little sister and I wade through mud and pick our way through a military convoy whose wheels alone dwarf us, to join the spectators. The machine sets to work but it is not a streamlined service, quite unwieldy rather, and the task is not easy. And so we wait.

Boulders at last gone, the road too gives way. No block, but no road either now. We unload our bags and baggages, me lost in a fug of foreign language. A man who I hope is kind takes one of my bags. We walk to the place where earth joins with sky and rains rocks.

As if waiting for the clouds to part and the rain to stop, we wait for a lull in the rock-fall. Sometimes people move too soon and the cry goes out, 'Sabr karo! Be patient!' And they dash back, only impatient now to save their lives. The man with my bag makes it. Last time I made this journey Psalm 46 imprinted itself on my memory, and I think of it now before I dash across, telling myself

...we will not fear though the earth gives way,

though the mountains fall into the heart of the sea.

I run, and God is indeed 'a very present help in trouble'.

The man with my bag loads it onto a minibus so I consider it expedient to board it myself, along with Oliver and family and two dozen men. We drive through the day, stopping once to change vehicles. I buy a kilo of hot chips to share. The warmth of chip fat and human kindness helps to ease the chill. The whole bus smells of wet wool but buzzes with camaraderie.

'This, Oliver, is the tradition of Christmas', I think.

The Lord of hosts is with us.

Immanuel.

The Feast of Goats

"What with all that's going on in this country, this might be our last dance," the doting husband at the Eid party says, tipsy. It's his way of getting his wife to give him another dance. It's going to take more than the threat of the apocalypse to get her - sober, blushing, head-covered - to dance. It was easier to drag her to her feet when others were up and there was clapping and laughing.
We have had a jolly time tonight. It started sedate with a bowl of nuts and talk of early British exploration, the only hint of what was to come on the Neil Diamond tape.
We moved onto ABBA. The fire was stoked and something for the gents was passed round in a soft-drink bottle. Huge plates of meat and rice (for it is the festival of sacrifice) were brought through. For the kids there was some Bollywood pop and now it's the serious stuff, bhangra for grown-ups. You can't tell dancer from laugher.

In the advent of Eid, goats have been in festive mode. Brought down from remote passes ready for the big day, they are dazzled by the bright city litter, offering new flavours they nibble at, a guilty pleasure enjoyed with cheeky smiles. They hang out in groups trying to look local, in a mood to shop on Oxford street, down a few beers and hit the nightlife, should the opportunity arise. On TV, I've seen goats and cows this week have been dressing up in other cities here, in natty coats and hats - pompoms are In in a big way this season - worn with femme fatale eye make-up and high-heel hooves. Ah - has no one told them it's Bakri Eid not in the sense 'for goats' but 'of goats'? 'Of' not 'for', dears; of not for.

Speaking of fashion, here's a tip: avoid, ladies, the tailors before Eid. Two sisters are stamping their little feet and tossing their indignant heads at the tailor's protestations that he cannot, cannot promise to complete 2 more fancy suits before Eid. At his head is the reason, piles of cloth in bundles on shelves, all to be sewed up before Monday evening. He tells her, "make them yourself."
"Who has time, yaar?" she replies. Not these brothers.
"The electricity went of at 3:00 am last night," the 'ladies' department', as the other brother calls himself, tells me quietly, while the argument rages, "so we did get some sleep." They're grateful for small blessings. This sleep deprivation may account for why the nice coat I ordered is a lumpen salwaar-kameez of grey wool and the sample is screwed up in a ball in the corner. They're working on auto-pilot: "must make salwaar-kameez, must make salwaar kameez." The new garment is warm for the house and we are grateful for small blessings, afterall. He pushes a magenta trim under the needle and it's one down, who knows how many to go.

For many, Eid has been a washout. It never rains here but it did today. No one felt like going out so visits were off. The holiday has been a chance just to hibernate with full-fat foods. We hardly wanted to change out of our pajamas (or grey wool affair, in my case). Spangled nylon suits and high-heeled slippers didn't fool anyone with their insulating properties. My neighbours' sewing machine was broken so new clothes weren't even an option for them. The family I had lunch with talked of taking me to see the snow but by the time the baby had been changed after he wet himself on dad's new suit, no one felt much like it.

Outside something more dramatic has been taking place while we've been watching lacklustre Eid special talent shows spluttering on and off with the intermittent power supply. While it has rained here the clouds have finally transformed the bullwark rock that looms over me, blocks out our sunlight every afternoon and walls us in. The curtains have lifted, the moon shines down and tonight it glows bright with snow. No one was dreaming of a white Eid.

Eating

Friday night and we're having a cheese-tasting do. I've just got back from a village where the science of geology meets the art of cheese-making with a rock of metamorphic cheese. Place it in water, I was told by the man who sold it to me, and you'll get cheese-spread. Well it's not laughing cow but it sure is cheese, strong too. By morning it's dried out and is a rock again.
We've also got something from Karachi. We thought from the label, 'Karachi Butter', that it was indeed going to be butter but on smelling it, it transpires to be a ripe white stilton. So that's Christmas sorted.
Finally my friend has brought me some Tesco Mild. And oh how mild it is.

Whether something's from Tesco or from town it's 'foreign' to many of my neighbours here. Local food is what comes from the garden, and only local, desi, will do, I am told by the matriarch of a neighbour as she pours lassi into steel cups. "The thing is," she explains, "you don't know what they put in them cartons. It could be donkey's milk. Or dog's." I splutter on the sour milk. "No offence," she adds.
"And eggs - foreign chickens [in the small cages at the bottom of the track, ie, in town] eat only plain rice. I feed mine like my own children, with a little sabzi, little rice, little dal and a fresh roti - and such nice eggs we are getting." As if ready spiced on this curry-rich diet, the yolks of their eggs are bright orange. Fried up with more masala, seven of them feed a family of twice that number. Steel saucers of this scrambled-egg curry are placed on top of a carpet of rotis, spread across a sheet on the floor. We tear of bits nearest to us.
Every Thursday in this home is a mini-Eid and eggs will not do. Something must die in memory of the sacrifice. So we have chunks of goat (from the butcher's field this morning, its insides steaming in the cold morning air, I wonder) cooked in rice which Ammi-ji personally apportions. If honour is in anyway proportional to size of piece, I am honoured indeed, as is the favoured youngest son, but four-years-old, eating the portion of a grown man, sitting between mummy and daddy, looking in all regards just like a grown-man, except for his tiny size, with the serious expression of one on whom a weight of responsibility has fallen. His older brothers, sporting mustaches and capes, hunch in corners, glowering, watching TV gangsters so that the whole occasion is accompanied by sounds of gunfire. Oh, that his father may never give him a coat of many colours, and, if he has dreams, that he may never tell of them to his brethren.
I am in the bosom of family, feasting on meat in memory of Abraham.
The mantou man makes food into a different spiritual experience. He stands, silent as a mandarin, amidst the to-ing and fro-ing of town. Indeed, he is from China, Kashgar, but is angry with his government and has come here. He smiles seraphically at my request for six of his momos, (dim-sung, mantou, cholesterol dumplings, they go by different names) places his hand on the lid of his huge silver steamer and invokes God: "In the name of Allah, the most merciful, the most kind..." Then, with the flourish of a Parisian cartoon waiter, he lifts the lid and traces an arc through the air. He was right to pray, because we are transported into another realm where, in the billows of steam, nothing is as it seems. His arms remain aloft, as he shields his eyes from the heat -and visions too? Fortified by prayer, he defies the heat to count out seven pieces, one for luck. He wraps them in newspaper, bungs them in a bag and bob's your uncle we're back in the bazaar. He compliments me on my Urdu and I compliment him on his as his own language is one he calls Toorqi. We've both come a long way to be here, not least through this cloud.
While my neighbours are rooted in this place and suspicious of foreign food, I am not, but more like one who dreams, and it is often food that roots me, grounds me.
I try to locate myself on maps and get lost for the mountains and the jangle of political boundaries. What can such a place be like, so remote? I taste and know.
Mantou tells me I'm halfway to Tibet. Pomegranates stain my fingers with a juice fresh from Kabul. Early Mughals sang of the almonds from here, still nostalgic for their Central Asian home. I shell some on my doorstep and eating, sympathise.
A thin voiced azan threads its way into my waking dreams and disorients me nearly everytime. How good it is then to sink my teeth into the fatness of a chapli kebab. Here I stand, I can be nowhere else.
Twilight, and all is murky mauve. Then I see it: a golden crown half circling the sky. Peaks high enough catch the sunlight, long since fled west from us mortals in the valley, blaze. As if in another time zone, another zone altogether, I simply don't know if I really am in the Himalayas. I eat yak and the cloud of unknowing lifts.

Dust to dust, ashes to ashes

If 'dust to dust, ashes to ashes' is the story of our lives, then I live my life in a day.
My path to school begins as a desert road through that field where but a month ago I picnicked with harvesters. Had I not already seen it yield corn, and if I did not believe in miracles, I would laugh at anyone like Isaiah who prophesied in chapter 35 that,"The wilderness and dry land shall be glad,/The desert shall rejoice and blossom like the crocus;/It shall blossom abundantly and rejoice with joy and singing." This field is not looking glad.

Late for school, children and I kick our way through the sand and dust. Then we pass through an alley of shadows and emerge blinking onto the main road and into the sun, filtered through the smoke of every stove in every home trying to heat up the morning.
School is silver sand. A rim rings the infants' sandpit but it may as well not. It is dust inside and it is dust outside. I've stopped policing this boundary line and I've stopped insisting that they don't throw sand in each others' eyes; it's there already. "Blink often," I tell them.
We're all doing battle against the dust. We shake it off our shoes, brush it off our clothes, comb it from our hair. We clean it from rice, pick pebbles from dry fruit. And just when it's killed nearly all the colour from the town, men plant a profusion of plastic flowers everywhere: bouquets sprout from the middle of peanut carts; machinery for fixing cars and sawing wood are garlanded; tractor exhaust pipes are slender vases, each holding a single rose. I wonder the plastic doesn't melt.
The hero in the battle is the avuncular Chacha-ji, both gate- and goat-keeper to the school, who incidentally has something of the goat about him: cocked head, private smile and sad eyes, an earthy fixation with the ground and all that grows on it. Whenever the headmistress receives a dust-related complaint from the mother of an asthmatic child or another who has not yet discovered TV's washing powder that makes all things white, the cry goes out, "Oh Chacha-ji! Irrigation karo!"
Playtime is about to begin.
Chacha-ji diverts water from the gutter-stream running alongside the school onto our dust-bowl of a school yard. First there is a river. He sets to work on this shovelling dust banks here and cutting channels there then damming up streams when the dust is fully submerged. We are an island in a delta.
The bell rings and the children dive in. The sandpit's not so popular today. A hundred tiny wrappers from lunchboxes are launched upon the waters as toy boats. Some children lend Chacha-ji a less-than-helpful-hand making mini dams, ox-bow lakes and canal-ways. Some just run: wet feet, mud shoes, filthy trousers. Sodden sock-balls explode puddles onto girls' frocks. Confiscations, trouble.
To inaugurate a new classroom block a colleague and I put on a drama folk-tale festival. Parents have been invited but how will they see the stage for the dust? It's due to begin at two. Sand dunes are hardly fitting seats for our guests. And so the command is once again given: "Irrigate!"
One o'clock and the outdoor auditorium is wholly aqueous. The geography teacher rolls up his sleeves and leads the way in bringing dust from elsewhere to mop up the the water. Chacha-ji, now looking like a goat ready for sacrifice, joins in. There's still a worry that the chairs will sink in this quick sand, quickly laid. But the show must go on.
The production was muddier than expected, but no one drowned.
Home, hands white with chalk-dust, and I'm dealing with ash. I empty cinders from last night's fire into the stream to the sound of twilight azan. I pack the stove with sawdust and almond shells leaving a hollow core for air. Underneath I kindle a paper fire until the sawdust catches. It is silent, no crackling or spitting, so it is only when a warmth creeps round the steel that I know the work is done and it's time for a cup of tea. Or time to put water on for one, anyway.
This bukhari stove has turned my bedroom into barbeque, bonfire and bavachikhana (kitchen). I roast vegetables in it, fry onions on it, make tea and toast, stew fruit, prepare porridge. I've lost a few potatoes to the black abyss of carbon, but only had my fingers burned metaphorically. I've forgotten what my room used to smell like.
Finally, I wash soot from my hands and plaster them with vaseline to stop them desicatting completely in the dry.
We're all looking to the heavens and waiting for rain.

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

A soldier aged 25 came home last week to get married. At the bottom of our path he was killed by a tractor the next day.
I cannot tell you how many women there were mourning. But I can say I have never before seen a garden so covered with shoes respectfully removed, nor rooms so choked with feeling and so full of women, sitting so close their knees were on others' laps. All that showed were eyes, and eyes - red, full of tears - showed all. No one spoke and no one stirred. This silence and stillness was strained for when the preacher broke down - "Ya Ali!" his voice cracked, "Ya Hussain!" in anguish - there was a collective sob and the women, having waited, wept. In the next room, someone, having planned a wedding not a funeral, wailed and wailed. What they released, I, not knowing the man, took in, and I wept for them.
I'm looking to the heavens, waiting, wanting to give comfort.
I will not laugh at that prophecy.

The greatest sport ever to be played on embroidered cushion covers

"What a glorious land, so full of splendour and beauty."
This was the libretto for both the overture and the finale, broadcast across the stadium and surrounding valley from the tannoid, of the Game of Kings. What took place in between proved the truth of these words.

I was frying breakfast on Saturday when the chowkidar burst in. "Mem, aaj bulu hai, bulu!' (bulu being polo.) I had to go, he said. I agreed, I had to go.
Town was heaving with independence day festivities. The jovial expressions and easy chat among the police contrasted with the black of their uniforms, amount of weaponry they sported and the sheer size of their presence. Squeezing between their lines and the crowds they controlled, I made my way to the stadium gates and was ushered up a red carpeted staircase to the VIP block by one of their number, along with plenty of hoi-polloi for I was not in the tea-and-cake-and-serviette VVIP block I hasten to add.
Preceeding the action were twenty minutes of public safety announcements:
"Please no one has the permission to be upon pitch," it went, while crowds made merry on that very pitch. "Maintenance has been with much difficulties," it continued, while men whooped with laughter. "During match is strictly forbidden for entrance." Could they not hear? Finally, pomposity turning to exasperation, "Please gents, remember last year!" And he went on to describe how people had entered the pitch while battle between the two valleys' teams was raging. Apparently it wasn't very nice and ought never to be repeated.
It was only when horses sprung onto the pitch, possessed, that the men chose to take their seats. At the same time a local band piped up, its reedy sound a little feeble after the patriotic numbers. One doddery fellow entered the fray to do a wee highland fling of a dance in front of the bagpiper and drummer. He soon tired and another came on, fearless in the face of so much horse power being unleashed all around.
We were ordered to salaam the dignitaries: various ministers of sport; a brigadier and a veteran freedom fighter. We stood to attention during the solemn presentation of woolly hats. Our salutes were nothing compared to those of the polo players'. As each of the eight teams rode past the dais, the riders' bodies were nearly torn in two as they restrained their steeds with one arm: biceps bulging, veins throbbing; while with the other arm they expressed dignity, honour and respect amidst all the animal energy, with it raised in a steel-girded salute. Some weaker players could not do it; their horses were no respecters of personages and bound out of rank, thinking the game must surely have begun.
As the ball was at last thrown into the fray by the Most Important Person, dignity, honour and respect were also thrown to the wind, and caution too. Whips and mallets cracked and sliced through the air. Horses reared and showed their teeth. The ball flew and the race was on. They thundered down to the goal. The whole crowd of spectators craned their necks to see. Every muscle of every horse and every rider, every mallet and every movement was focussed on that same point. All strained in one horizontal direction. And then - with one thwack - back in the opposite direction. Riders bent over their animals as if eager to beat even their own horse to the ball.
A crowd of schoolboys sat - as in Lahore Kim sat, 'in defiance of municipal orders, atop the great gun Zam-zamar' - on the pitch, behind the goal posts. As the action neared them, they rose in terror and fled, momentarily, to the sides. There were others, too, defying both tanoid and death itself by running onto the pitch when their heroes' mallets fell, to pick them up and present them again to the players.
Meanwhile the horses streaked back and forth, showing the whites of their eyes and sweating profusely. I had never before heard the sound of two horses colliding at speed and hope never to hear that low gutteral thud resound again through the bodies of two such beasts. Unhindered, they continued in hot pursuit of that ball. All the while, the sound of the surundi pipe threaded through the action and the dudun and daman drums added yet another beat to the stampede of hooves.
Play was interupted several times. Questions about the referee's judgement were followed by those about other aspects of his morality and manhood. Other questions had to be resolved too: Was the rider who fell off fit to keep on playing? Yes, it seemed he was. If the ball injured a spectator did the game have to stop? No, it was decided not.
And then intermission. Pakistan has a mascot for its cricket teams and another for all polo matches: Chacha Cricket and Chacha Polo respectively. Chacha means uncle. So Uncle Polo did his own jig as crowds once again flocked onto the pitch and gathered round. Police circled him to give him room and turned a blind eye to the tiny lad who joined him, wonderfully replicating chacha's moves in miniature.
"Man, I love this country," said the chap sitting next to me.
"I do too, so much right now." I said in reply.
Eventually a more serious minded police officer escorted the child away, deciding he probably was a threat to the peace of the land.
By the final ten minutes of the game, there was a distinct diminuendo from the musicians. Equally, the horses could not keep it up and began to be sluggish when their masters steered them back down the pitch yet again.
The score was 10-2 to the police.
I left, exhausted from just watching, as the searing light turned dusty and faded. The mountains were as still as ever.

What a glorious land, so full of splendour and beauty.

Great game, too.

4 Haiku from Hunza

Friends, neither words nor mega pixels can do justice to where I went on Saturday. Forgive me for writing so sparsely, I will consider how better to put it. I do assure you, though, that these are not 'desk-haiku', which is why there aren't the 'correct' number of syllables per line and so on, but they are heart-felt, which is apparently real criteria fot haiku anyway.


tall mountains
poplars at their feet learn height
the heavenward stretch


stone power
avoiding an avalanche
cars creep round


white peak
silver lined in the sky
clouds close in


ice above
fire lines the roadside
the valley in fall

No-man's-land

"Miss Hannah, What is the difference between a tavern and a goblet?"
My other job is a grammarian and living Oxford English Dictionary.
The question prompts a discussuion of the drinking habits of Great Britain. While we don't have that particular brand of hostelry here, we do have tea houses, where I have glimpsed men gathering to drink well-brewed beverages in aged-oak cabins. Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment eeked out his living, I imagine, in just such places, shabby, perfect for profound if gloomy reflection.
But I am the one feeling guilty. I am a thief, stealing glances. My eyes have trespassed into territory not my own. The decree is that they stay down-ward, to the gutter, but they stray. They creep up above the pavement when I hope no-one is looking, to grab fragments of colour and life and then retreat behind the dupatta again. Mostly I get caught, if not red-handed, then at least wide-eyed, for I am the obvious intruder, a female, behind enemy lines and the men have got their eyes on me first. Worst of all, I sometimes look up at passing soldiers and policemen and see guns before faces and look away quick before my eyes make it beyond the boundaries of their helmets to see who knows what expressions.
So the lines between the sexes have been drawn, but there are breaches and some sunny stretches of no-man's-land. Well, there are men there, but it is not their land.

Cooking greens, my company has been solely girls. One chops, another kneads dough, one wires a hob into a dodgy socket, another paints my nails with henna. Then it is time for the huge rounds of bread to be baked in the hearth. A brother is sumoned to wield the paddle, beat and flip the roti. I am in Naples all of a sudden, at the pizza oven in an alcove. And for the first time it's ok that boy meets girl. The kitchen, it seems, is safe.

We unfurl pink cotton and two different polyesters in blue. We discuss necklines and hems. "What's a fashionable cut of trouser these days?" I ask, and am given pen and ink sketches in reply. Very fetching. Then, with deft wrists and flourishes of a tape-measure, my vital statistics are taken. Last time I had this done was in the underwear section of M&S, but that was by an old dear, not by a burly man with a black beard and no English. This particular bit of intimacy is completely normal and I wonder how it is that women defended by so much swathing ever allowed this breach to occur.

But it is school where not even rumours of a battle between the sexes have been heard. We are at peace and I am at peace. As I enter the gates in the morning, tiny children and boys on the brink of manhood all extend their hands to salaam me. Twice I have been offered apples the size of a grapefruit and this afternoon Abdullah shared a couplet of Shakespeare's with me. That's what happens to real teachers, I think. I keep my head covered - but only till the sun shines enough to warm my face. At school I can raise my head and my voice. My spirits rise in turn. I am a story-teller and singer of songs. I am a sportswoman, director of plays and mathematician. I lead discussion and enquiry. I cut, paste, play in the sand and edit poetry.
Every day is a family get-together where the children whoop and run between trees and the legs of us who are in locus parentis while we try and catch-up like brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles. Sharing a bench, a kettle of tea and a loaf of bread for lunch, we discuss: algebra; the merits of porridge v roti for breakfast; childcare; the soul's struggle for perfection; the teachings of Buddha, of whom there is a statue nearby.
We teach too, but sometimes even then on adjacent carpets trying to catch the last of the autumn sun between the trees. The spirit of picnicing pervades.
We had our Eid Milan party last week, with the help of a fuzzy cassette player. I was in a mood to celebrate. Strutting and twirling, clicking and flouncing, arms wide, the children from these mountains gave me all the colour and life I could wish for and not, this time, as a guiltily stolen snapshot, nor even as a paid-for souvenir, but as a generous gift one would share with family.

Animal Kingdom

Ready to make a good impression at school I step out onto the street in tailor-made suit, neat headscarf and polished shoes. The gutter beneath runs red. Upstream, in the neighbouring field a butcher washes his hands and knife and a goat with a bloody neck breathes his last, bismillah.
Later when the makeshift abatoir is finished for the day and the bones put away a cat reposes there, replete.
Animals dead or alive are prominent here. Members of the livestock community take their place among the good citizens of the town, going about whatever business they might have with a purposeful air, turning right here, left there, if you please. I wander down my friends' garden path and their cow comes out to greet me; my colleagues and I plan a lesson and are interrupted by a goat who needs to get between our chairs; a row of children in assembly is scattered when this same goat needs a path through it; a bull outside the chemist's keeps me waiting till he is finished and ready to clear a path from the doorway; I arrive home to a goat and her family waiting on my doorstep.
On Saturday we took a trip to the river. While a horse chilled out up to his neck in the glacier-melt, I gazed across to the other side, a land of barren rock - brown as far as the eye could see. Suddenly from the west came three men, the proudest and happiest I have seen here, bolt upright, on handsome horses. The land belongs to such as them.
A lady I know from local aristocracy pours the nicest tea and serves it with cake. She talks about the state of education in the area, her land and its produce and local gossip. All is overheard by two silent Himalayan ibexes, heads erect, fur glossy, with horns to make a stout heart faint. Her husband, a big-shot in the world of shikar, hunting, got them, and these are the only two trophies she allows in the drawing room. "One can't go on sweeping up the hairs that do tend to fall, after all," she explains, then after a pause adds in a quieter voice, "nor tolerate them staring at each other with their beady eyes."
No, nor can one tolerate being stared at by beady eyes in the kitchen. In a land apparently beset by violence it is rodents that have been my terror by night. Why do they torment me, I wonder. Is it because while these 4 walls encompass our women's world, our fears - of disease, violation and destruction - are similarly proscribed? They shrink down, focussed on these tiniest of bodies. Whether this is it or not, Oh how I would love to see the river run red with their blood or a hundred tiny winter coats made of their hides.

Signs of winter

These are the signs that winter is coming.
In the market there is a run on sawdust to burn in iron stoves. I joined in and have stockpiled 15 sacks, each as tall as a man.
The market is bright with cold-weather cast-offs from the west: jumpsuits, boiler suits, shell suits, anoraks. An elderly gent outside my house sources his winter wardrobe differently. He straddles a goat and neatly strips of its hide with a glinting knife. The underside, the leather, is bright white and the fur thicker than the man's beard. A head with a bloody stump on the ground beside him seems amused by the proceedings in that smiley way goats have.
There is a chill in the air and smoke curls around pine trees, each embossed with one of the 99 names of Allah on one path. It is the stuff of fairy tales, where to see a gingerbread cottage or meet a big bad wolf would seem quite normal.
And with no apparent concern for buffering anyone against any cold, a platoon of soldiers have been commanded to work on the borders - by which I mean the herbaceous borders of the mess. The have dug up whole sides of the road and are planting rose bushes, proving the truth of their banner, 'Pakistan Army, Men at their Best.' They follow up Project Pot-Plant with Project Papier-Mache: there's a replica mountain under construction on the lawn. It's likeness looms overhead.
Gentle rain fell the other night. In the morning, solid rock soaring above us had turned to glitter and dairy cream; the first snow of the season. I was surprised, but then I have woken with wonder every day for two weeks now. New mountains reveal and hide themselves constantly as veils of cloud are lifted and draped again. Sometimes a misty purdah remains and transforms a high valley into a distant dreamland. I am reluctant to go indoors for too long and miss the show. I sometimes stop mid-sentence when I see a new peak.
"Because it's there," said Sir Edmund Hillary to explain why he climbed Mount Everest, and you can't argue. They are there. Close, sometimes too close, are the barren rock mountains walling us in all around, heavy and hung with gravity. Further off and elusive are the high peaks, which through their snow, strive against the serious substance of geology to sublimate into some spiritual state. No one will ever hear their silence, for climbers are always accompanied by oxygen tanks and kerosene stoves, hissing away.
Nevertheless a good walk to one of their base camps from here may help me to connect up the three worlds I see but which do not hang together in my mind. Here I am in that vortex of humanity and activity in the bazaar which hammers metal, greases axles, hews wood, fries pastries, spits and splatters blood from butchering, imports-exports, pushes cart-loads of fruit, shouts into mobiles, banks money and arranges packets on shelves. I am in Anywhereabad, South Asia.
Above all this is a terrace of corn fields, exhausted after bearing a crop in such a cruel climate, withering leaves on orchard trees and, where channels flow down to the Indus, green.

And then those mountains.

Awe has become the tenor of my life.

Provisions

Dusk is turning to dark and my room is lit with candles, strewn with roses. Soft music mingles with a distant call to prayer.
I should explain.
The electricity is off and the entertainment for the night is provided by small speakers. I have also been shopping for bedding. I picked the reddest rose velvet bedcover - and there were plenty to choose from - and the pinkest rose sheets. Had the plastic-flower seller's story been as sad and sweet as the linen man's I'd have ended up with armfuls of his roses too.
"You are like me, sister," he began, "far from home and all alone."
They know too much this bedding wallahs. You answer their simple question, "Single ya double ma'am?" and they know all your secrets. He told me his secrets too.
His family are from Lahore, a city he loves, for when I praised its architecture and food his eyes misted over. They had fought over land and he and his brother lost everything. He fled here and his brother to Germany. They doubt they will ever see each other again.
This shopping trip had become more than just about furnishing a house with carpets, cushions and covers but about making this town home with conversations and cups of tea.
"Oh, and I forgot to ask," I say as I leave, "Is it ok to handwash the velvet?"
"So we really are the same! Far from home, all alone and even washing by hand."

I catch a public taxi home and walk the last stretch up the path home. A lady ahead paused for breath and to let me catch up. We salaam and she invites me in for a cup of tea. Across the corn field outside my room, she is my nearest neighbour. Hungry, I am glad when a cup of tea turns into meat and swede stew, naan, yogurt to drink and milk tea with a choice of sugar or salt to taste (mine's white no salt, they know for next time).
Her daughters' hands are red with Eid henna. Less than a week ago I was with my neighbours in Bradford celebrating this same festival, recent enough that their henna is still dark, fresh. What's more, tea is served with left-overs from Eid, shrikar. "What's it made of?" I ask as I chew. "Flour, milk, oil..." the daughter begins. There's still a flavour I can't quite place. The mother interrupted. "And the hard part of the fat of a sheep."
Next morning I am stopped at the same place on the path by another lady, weighed down by a thermos and a basket. Again, we salaam and chat. She turns to join her sisters-in-law and cousin-sisters at the far side of the field. They are beckoning with wild arms that I should come too. Pharmuk points to a safe place to cross and we walk through freshly plucked stalks of corn.
We squat on a stack of these and husks. I am introduced as the ladies finish their gleaning. Ammi from yesterday's visit is there and is proud she knows me.
The thermos is unstopped and the basket is opened. The picnic begins. I am poured the first bowl of tea (bowls for friends, cups for guests, they apologise) and offered the first snack. The tea is salty and the snack is shrikar.

I am Ruth among the gleaners, being provided for. My kinsman-redeemer is good to me.

Sunday

How is it that an aeroplane window can contain such a scene? Below and around is all murky darkness. Above is light, streaming from behind this mighty butress of a mountain, Nanga Parbat, in whose shadow we fly, on and on until we are clear of its bulk and back in the blue. "He wraps himself in light, and darkness tries to hide" we sing later that morning, and this is the image that comes to me again.
We arose before dawn on the first day of the week and proceeded to the airport. We ascended as light broke across the foothills. The sky is bright by the time we land in what appears to be an English country garden at the end of a runway with neatly laid out flower beds in bloom. We are walled in by mountains so high you have to tilt your head right back to see where they end. Passengers amble through the garden to the potting-shed of a terminal. Some light cigarettes. I see a girl I've never met looking at me through mesh in the waiting area. We smile and smile at each other as if it's me she's been waiting for and as if it's her I've come to see.
It seems almost natural for such a relaxed airport that the person due to meet me in is still asleep when I call. No matter, for I go with my travelling companions and am dropped off later.
After the third breakfast of the day - the first was served by waiters in the departure lounge, the second on the flight - my friends and I have a time of singing. It is a fitting end for a Sunday morning spent gazing from above on God's mighty creative power, his ancient forceful moulding of solid rock on the vast scale.

My heart bursts its banks,
Spilling beauty and goodness.
I pour it out into a poem for the king,
Shaping the river into words.

Psalm 45 from The Message

Flight

My days have started and ended with goodbyes for some time now. The postman has been bringing goodbye cards, school children I’ve seen in the street and supermarket have said goodbye, the phone has been ringing with goodbyes, the e-mail inbox is full of them. I have hijacked a baby shower, a birthday, several Eid parties and many lunches with friends and made them, at least for a moment, goodbye parties. I’m looking forward to another greeting.

Having said goodbye to some friends the other day I was sitting in the autumn sunshine, sad. The weather was indeed noteworthy for its loveliness, so it was not totally banal to comment on it to a stranger, making the only permissible conversation with strangers in England. I don’t know why, but I went a bit further,
“I’ll have left before these leaves fall.”
“Oh, where are you going?”
“Pakistan.”
She had grown up in Africa, and was able to relate a cautionary tale from Khartoum that I am mindful of as I approach customs and immigration. It was hot when she disembarked and her eyes had turned green. They change from blue to green according to heat, the colour of clothing or, like beauty, the eye of the beholder. In her passport photo, they were clearly blue. She fluttered her lashes, and though she is old now, I can imagine the effect this could have had.
“A lady is allowed to change her mind, is she not?”
She was arrested and put in jail for that. Her father, a diplomat, was furious.
I lower my eyes and am simple-sadhi-si, as they say of modest women.

A Gandharan Buddha, the neat millennia-old streets of Mohendojaro and the slogan, ‘Travel Through Time’ is how the screen on this jumbo jet promotes Pakistan as a place of historical interest. A hundred years ago, adventurers maybe did Travel Through Time - 3 months anyway - by sea, to reach Pakistan. Right now I like the idea of arriving rested, without the immediate business of home buzzing into jetlagged sleeping and waking, possibly even having mastered the language and met the love of my life.

‘Heaven on Earth’ is the next advert for Pakistan, on a background of happy faces, glorious mountain scenery and...apricots. These same voyagers maybe took their coffins, too, knowing that working here was indeed their calling from and en route to Heaven.

Whether or not that is how I’m travelling, I am accompanied by near-angelic fellow travellers. On the way to the airport I was joined by two new friends, who, because of an Eid cancellation of my flight, I am now able to fly with. Just when it seemed hard to leave, one of them, whose name means splendour, sang favourite old Bollywood songs as he looked me in the eyes over the huge mound of luggage between us on the back seat. Even better, he told me his life story of miracles and transformation. I remembered with a thrill why I was going. A glance outside at snarled up traffic on the M62 served as another reminder.

We three ‘hamsafars’ (fellow travellers) switch into and out of Urdu. My friend carries my violin for me and we walk like Raj Kapoor, Bollywood’s Charlie Chaplin, onto the flight singing, ‘Jonny Joker, wiolin bajao’. The boarding-card collector asks if he will be providing in-flight entertainment and he kind of does, as he sings songs he makes up with a heart full of praise while others try to settle for sleep. Some stare. Our tall English friend who speaks Urdu curries favour with the steward so we have carte blanche to ask for seconds. I have indeed received a double portion, and not just of the korma.

The Unbearable Lightness of Baggage

Pakistan International Airlines lets me take 47 kg of wordly goods. It's generous but now that I'm packing I judge everything by what it weighs. The papier mache comes, the gold stays. Fancy jars of face-cream, bad; squeezy tubes, good. Even literature is weighed and if there aren't enough words per page, the paper is not worth carrying, no matter the meaning. Poetry, I have calculated, has the worst word to page ratio. It's worse than being mercenary; I'm greedy for grammes.
Well, sometimes the better part of me overrules. I have, for instance, packed a pair of tiny glass vases wrapped in clothing and placed in a jewellry box simply for the possible wonder of seeing them again, maybe, high through the rockiest roads, with a different light shining through them.
I decorate my emptying rooms with another goodbye card.

Journeying North

I am traveling north, home. My train was canceled, so I caught another and got late for the bus connection. Now, trying to catch up with the bus on a train going the other way, I am confronted by an official who is angry because my bag touched her. She fines me for traveling on this train, and I am humiliated. I'm angry with a train company whose name I have already forgotten, bland as it is. To quibble is to waste time, more precious than the money right now.
How bleak travel in England can be. On the coach, passing places whose names I have never learned, I wonder how I'll be feeling next time I travel north, home, this time in Pakistan. This motorway with its traffic neat as graphics will give way to roads blasted from mountains with buses owned by men as horses were owned by their fathers: beasts of burden to be goaded and beaten up hills; protesting, thirsting, striving then, on arrival, hosed down, fixed up and decorated with fantasy paintings and silver chains to the ground.
Last summer on such a bus, far from being fined and flustered, I was served tea, bread and meat personally by the driver, who refused payment.
"England will not have roads this bad," he apologised.
"Neither does it have mountains this high," I replied.
In his driver's seat, he visibly swelled with pride.