The weather here has been strange. The first week of June was unseasonably cool, in the low twenties, and in the teens in Multan, which the sun approaches closer than anywhere on earth because of the saint who invited it down to cook his fish. But now it’s as hot as June should be with a hot, dry looh blowing, from which there is little escape.
Karachi, meanwhile, is bracing for a cyclone. There was one due to hit when I was aged four or five and we were evacuated inland, but then it veered off course and devastated somewhere else. That was attributed to Abdullah Shah Ghazi, the patron saint of Karachi, fishermen and prostitutes, whose shrine was on the sea, and my nanny, a Protestant Christian but always up for a saint, would sometimes sneak me there (not that my mother minded, but both my grandmothers did – one for reasons of class, the other for reasons of religion). Now, however, the Taliban blew it up, and a giant mall is blocking the shrine from the sea, so the protection might have been lifted. Maybe all the saints are losing their power in this turning of the age.