Last night there was a mighty storm, an andhi that blew dust and tree branches every where and brought the temperature down by several degrees. Something crashed mightily, bringing three of the four people in the dashing out into the cold wind, but it was too dark and windy to see. I suspected, we all suspected or feared that it was the solar panels, but it was too dark to tell so we went back to our respective rooms, jumping at every clang and crash as the andhi blew itself out.
The morning was much cooler than it has been, and I hope it means that we’re finally getting out of the heat late summer/ early autumn.
In the mid-morning I went off to Defence, stopping first at the bookshop to buy some books for my grandmother (these later turned out to be a failure, as I should have predicted they would be). In Defence my first stop was a promise to brainstorm with someone applying to university about his essays. His mother was off her head with anxiety, he himself was calmer but also nervous and uncertain. The expensive counsellor they’d engaged had been little use and was suspected of having passed on his essay to others. I think I was helpful in thinking through the essays but it’s such a sad, difficult business these days. In my day, when we had no idea what we were doing, was much, much easier.
Then to another bit of Defence to have lunch with the Doyenne and agree on the defects of the biennale. Among them, the complete disinterest in opening to others outside the art circles (the Intellectual Art Circle, the Establishment Art Circle and the Art Collector Art Circle, all of which merge and separate like slime moulds), the rather shocking dismissal of Pakistani art, the lightweight cargo-cult concept (Ecology, where one installation is a pile of styrofoam in a country where proper garbage disposal is non-existent), and the frankly stupid, like dismissing one application because it was ‘craft not art’.
The Doyenne then took me to the house she is building, with great love and care and an artistic eye that her contractors and architects must experience as the third eye of Shiva. It was a nice house, and I was envious. She had to battle a great deal to get it, with the dismissal that women get in this country and in so many places. But she is admirably pigheaded and it is paying off, from the moment they dug the foundations where she was the only one to notice they had dug them backwards (!).
A return home via a trendy little cluster of food shops in Cantt, in an old tree-lined market area. One is a bakery that sells foods by home bakers, and is generally of a high quality; then, there are a couple of cake shops, a deli, etc.
What has really changed in Lahore since I was last here – I noticed it particularly on flyovers – the sheer number of solar panels on houses and shopping plazas. Such a shift. It has been perhaps the most important year in the country’s energy history (maybe big talk considering I wasn’t around for when Mangla dam went into operation, but I don’t think so).