That was the best meal in Islamabd: a trip to a Shinwari restaurant on the Kashmir highway with a Pathan friend who selected the meat himself, chatted up the cooks, and arranged for a delicious platter of namkeen mutton tikkas, a pound of sheep rump fat and some mutton karhai. Westerners – and many Pakistanis – find the solid fat inedible, but I think it’s delicious, grilled with nothing but salt and its native flavour.
We are now back in Lahore where everyone except me is down with a viral infection: fever, headache, sore throat, weakness.