Well, a slight exaggeration. In the morning my host and I drove down to Chakwal to the ancestral (my great-great grandmother’s) village where there is a family farm. It came into the family about 20 years ago as part of a settlement of a decades old property dispute and since then we have been trying to get something out of it. The orchards are quite mature now, and most of the thorns are gone, instead there is deep fertile bhal, alluvial soil. It is a bit of flat land in a craggy, hilly place, one that would have been largely pastoral a couple of centuries ago. The landscape is beautiful in the winter – less flat and featureless than more fertile areas of Punjab, and greener than in the summer except for bright yellow mustard fields. It was rather chilly, with occasional rolls of thunder, and a very cold but fresh breeze. I would not mind settling there, except for the unavoidable part of village life, which is other people. In cities one can ignore them, but not in a village.
A nephew arrived and was terrified by the cows. He is very much a city child and his parents are also not particularly interested in the country, so he was relieved to get back to cars and smooth tarmac. We took him off to a neighbour’s farm, where they keep two dancing horses which are brought out at weddings and saint days. One of the horses was brought out and did it little tripping dance, bowing and kneeling, with a man marking time in short, sharps bellows. The nephew seemed unimpressed, though later he did an impression of it so perhaps it was of moderate interest. I thought it was quite interesting, and I would like to go to the next saint’s day at the local shrine. The owner of the farm is quite a common type in northern Punjab, where large landholdings are rare and generally there is more wealth and education than in other parts. So he looked like a proper salt of the earth type, but was clearly quite wealthy and interested in things, whether in dancing horses, his flock of white pigeons, or solar power. It’s very different in southern Punjab, where an ugly feudal regime is common. Here they are more like kulaks.
After a little while in the farm, we drove off to Balkassar where there is a trucker’s stop. Here we had lunch, consisting almost entirely of meat: one namkeen, unspiced, karhai made of sheep (with chunks of the fat rump), and another more Punjabi style karhai. The latter was quite tasty, the former less so.
Then we returned to Islamabad bringing with us a visitor who recounted, along the way, the drama that engulfed a wedding she had recently attended. It made me feel very old and out of touch, but even when I was young I was never interested in that sort of thing, so maybe it’s just me and not my age. At the wedding the visitor had a little fling with another guest, but his sister had an anxiety attack, and then the visitor’s friend berated her for taking the guest’s attention away from the sister, and the guest was informed and said others should keep out of it. Meanwhile it was revealed that he had once hired Russian escorts for a party, but the visitor was ok with this as it was his business if he wanted to pay for sex, and I couldn’t help but point out that they were probably trafficked, which made it less ok it seemed. It all felt like melodrama of the highest order, and honestly, this whole Bridget Jones business just passed me by even when I was of the age for it, and I can’t help but find it rather crass. But it’s a different world than mine.
From London more bad news – a friend with cancer that is not curable. My first thought, unsurprisingly, was of her daughter.
And speaking of which I dreamt of my mother, a fairly quiet sort of dream in which I was riding a bicycle and taking people around Gulberg in Lahore, including my mother, and we drove through a quiet green bit that I think doesn’t actually exist, a narrow road joining two parts of the neighbourhood, but which I’ve dreamt about before.
And since then I’ve been working and working. I am really quite worried about finishing this up on time, but at least there is decent momentum in between breaks to write a lengthy blog post, watch an episode of The Good Place, or noodle around online.