Yesterday, as I was sitting glumly staring at my computer, my father decided to have harmal done. This is a hallucinogenic plant that is burned as a folk remedy for allergies. A small brazier was taken from room to room, and the ground seeds cast upon it to fill the house with a pall of burning smoke. I’m a sceptic, but am always up for a bit of folk wisdom, so I really only objected to the fact that my shawl smelled of smoke for the remainder of the day and there was a scattering of ash on the floor of every room. My other siblings, who suffer from allergies rather more than I do, swear by it, so who am I to say anything.
In the evening I went for dinner with a couple of friends and we ended up lingering for a surprisingly long time, over three hours. It was a very pleasant evening, relaxed and chatty and not consumed by the woes of work or marriage. I did hear some rather unfortunate things about my old school, where one now works – of music piped into the classrooms constantly to dampen the sound of children or to make them more cultured or both, and of being berated for explaining a difficult concept in Urdu. We had quite a tough academic time at school but it is no comparison to what the children of ambitious parents, at these top tier schools, have to face today.