Another day without posting. Travelling has turned this fragile still-new routine upside down.
On Saturday I went to visit an old friend and her mother. The friend and I were very close at school. We were almost neighbours and had a long-running carpool. Then something happened and for some reason we were no longer close friends. I have my suspicions – I think there was a certain amount of resentment on one side, irritation on the other, our families and family values were different and we clung to them. Then a few years ago she came to stay with me in London for a couple of days and that started a slow, careful rapprochment. But I never went to see her mother, who had been widowed many years previously, until she came to my mother’s janaza. I had planned to go visit her on my last trip but was too busy, and finally went.
There was a rush of memories at getting off at their gate, where we had come every afternoon after school to play kho in the sun. It was the same but smaller and the dog was dead. Then a pleasant couple of hours in their cool, dark living room chatting and drinking tea. My friend’s mother is less hard-edged than she used to be; she was almost cruel, and at the time we didn’t know how she was treated by family and strangers for being a young widow from a conservative family who dared to set up her own household in Lahore, living alone and sending her children to the best schools.