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.

Between the Kite Strings

I'm in a whitewashed space, as huge and silent as a Medieval Tughlugh tomb. I am all alone inside, as overwhelmed by the alone-ness as one might be by a crowd: an opposite but equal sensation. The absence of noise, people, motion and colour is almost tangible.
I am glad for an hour to be able to look at Lahore frame by frame. Sometimes at a single tree, sometimes a solitary face, sometimes whole bazaars, but here it is still and soundless; I am in the Al Hamra gallery.
Lahore is fragmented by a hundred kite-strings in one picture, one orange kite obscuring its centre. Yes, this is it. I have seen fun as bright as this kite here, hiding much behind it. Even the narrow streets around my home, otherwise muddy and poor, boast a pool table, table football, an arcade of old gaming machines, a trampoline and a mobile roundabout a doddery gent pushes around to children holding coins.

Fun can come from the sorriest sources. While there are not many beggars here, the hungriest know Lahore's appetite for fun and sell balloons, balls, teddies, masks and spider-men. When I buy from one I make three people happy: the two little boys at home who gain a toy and the sad-eyed boy who loses one. Here, the cakes are lurid, the music is loud and the driving is a game; "Death Game" as someone has stencilled onto one motor bike.
Ever since Kim sat "in defiance of municipal orders astride the great gun, Zam-Zamma on her brick platform," in Kipling's 1901 classic, Lahoris have had their fun atop platforms of danger. The canon is guarded with chains now, municipal orders having been so flagrantly defied, but children still play. On a sunny Sunday morning, they swung, climbed and laughed, astride equipment on a construction site. Parks are for sleeping, hard hats for the girls.

I envy the artists' abilities to capture Lahore's lovely light, the urban landscape of stacked clay cubes coloured with drying clothes and the markets crowded with merchandise. If each picture speaks a thousand words and each rickshaw ride is a thousand pictures of a thousand details I will need more than Sherazade's 1001 nights to tell the stories, but I get tired. I lie down for a rest in the afternoons.
Pursuing quiet, I go to a smart cafe and pick up a paper. The terror and the war upon it are in the local pages and I can not believe that the street filled with red heart balloons saying "Ich liebe Dich" outside, nor the promotions for candlelit dates are in this country US Ambassador Holbrooke calls a 'nightmare'. The iced coffee has a bitter aftertaste.

Like the artist's jagged shapes between the kite strings, Lahore is confused. I leave the gallery and there's a circle of men in tartan playing the bagpipes. No audience, mind, this is an undeveloped space behind the National Football Development offices.

Wearing tinsel and roses, sufi pilgrims have flocked to town this week, some on bikes decorated like X'mas trees. It is the Urs festival of Saint Data Ganj Baksh. My sightseeing trip to a dead emperor's tomb on the outskirts turns frenzied when the bus drives through the melee where the whole crowd shares a heart, one dhol drum that beats to make everyone jump together, like a giant organism pulsating. On the tops of buses they're jumping, dancing with death again.

The kite festival, on the other hand, has been cancelled this year. The sky will not fill with a jungle of colour, the children will stay off the roofs. Too many people had their heads cut off by kite strings last year.

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.

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.