I met a very old friend after very many years last night. We had been friends when we were about nine, now it is 28 years later. We were at school together in Karachi, and then I moved to Lahore. She came once and visited, but then we drifted apart as children do. We reconnected using Facebook a few years ago and she wrote to me when my mother died.
(I dreamt of my mother last night, a rare dream in which she was happy and laughing, with a good joke to tell, but other than that I struggle to remember anything. I felt happy with the dream when I woke in the night, but this morning it has cast me down.)
We met at Pavilion where she wanted to look at shops, then had a very bad cup of tea at Paul’s, and finally went for a Japanese meal.
We got along well after all these years, but it was odd to meet someone as an adult, in circumstances where one would be feeling one’s way as strangers, but with a shared if distant history that meant one had to feel and act as though we were not strangers at all.
She is a specialist in neonatal medicine, but hasn’t practiced since having children a few years ago, and is intending to move to KL in the coming year.
I finished Alias Grace and really enjoyed it, despite my disinterest verging on dislike for Victorians. That it was Canadian and I knew it not at all was refreshing, at least. It lacked the relentless terror and absorption of the Handmaid’s Tale, but I enjoyed the ways in which presumed perpetrator is regarded – with fear, loathing, mad, innocent, a victim, a goddess etc – if she is a woman. For the first time I found quilts interesting.
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