Please excuse the lack of postings recently, dear readers.  I'll claim the "It's the holidays" excuse -- don't look so grieved, you know you used that yourself once or twice in the last couple months.  There's too much time to cover, and I'm not always that into exhaustive this-is-what-I-did accounts anyway, but I'll tell some stories at least, both from Pakistan and from the "vacation" (gone awry) that Jules and I had in India.

First though, some of you have written asking if I'm keeping safe in that wild and hairy place known as Pakistan.  I actually feel quite safe here, certainly safer than I did during some periods in Kenilworth.  I've seen no evidence of crime, except for one man beating another over some disagreement or insult.  (I'll tell that story below.)  For instance, most times I lock my bike when I park it somewhere but only to itself, not to a solid post like I would in the US.  And unlike DC, even when I leave it unlocked in some public place I come back fully expecting the bike to be there.  Some parts of living in an Islamic state I find strange, but this strong religion-driven prohibition against stealing is quite nice.  So the fear of ordinary crime - getting robbed or assaulted, etc. - is way down compared to the US.

There is one thing though that sometimes drives US expats here to keep one hand on their passports and the other on their stash of emergency cash and airline phone numbers, and that's the strong anti-Western, anti-US sentiment that's an undercurrent to life in this part of the world.  It can flare up at any provocation (recent comments by the Pope, Saddam's hanging), and can mean days here in Islamabad when we're advised not to wander far from home.  Things don't usually get too out of hand, though, in this relatively moderate and well-off city.  There might be some demonstrations close to the government buildings or in Aabpara, a gritty market area where those with less money find better bargains.  You just stay away from those areas for a time, though, and avoid wandering the city on holy day afternoons when a mullah's Friday sermon might spark a street protest.

There are areas of the country, however, that aren't so safe.  Karachi, a coastal city in the south, has a reputation as one of the more dangerous cities of the world.  The NGO that Jules works for would have a fit if one of its staff went there just to visit and walk the streets.  The western desert areas also hold danger.  Ruled more by tribal interests than by any command from the central government, Westerners there have to watch their step.  Staff in Quetta, a town in one of these areas that is something like the Old West, don't really go out of the house much except to ride in a vehicle from one place to the next.  Though there are some areas where a Westerner might risk being kidnapped, in Quetta, as in most places, it's more a fear of getting caught in random internecine violence that prompts the security measures and not so much a fear of violence specifically directed against you.

So be happy for me, and for Jules, we've ended up in a pretty benign, even friendly, manifestation of the Pakistan you read about in the papers.  All that crazy stuff happens in the border areas, and we're safely ensconced in the middle of the country in one of its most moderate cities.

More than queries about safety, though, a lot of you have written me after reading my recent article in the City Paper, DC's alternative weekly (posted on this website if you haven't seen it yet).  I met one of their reporters during community activism work in DC, and so it was a natural paper in which to place an article.  I was pretty sure they'd bite at the sorta-zany stories of street-craziness that I had to tell.  I was less sure they'd be interested in the way I wove my family's story in with the UUV stuff in the first draft I sent to them.  Sure enough, the word came back, "Cut out everything that sounds like memoir and focus on the street-level action."  I wasn't completely happy about that, but knew that every editor inevitably spins things their way, and so the piece went from 12,000 words (too long anyway) to just over 5,000.  Besides, what writer can turn away a genuine publishing opportunity, and I needed the money.  A story as long as the history of Kenilworth has to come out in bits and pieces anyway.

Some of you have asked what my parents thought of the article, especially the illustrations.  They read the original 12,000 word draft, which has more family story and neighborhood background in it, so they knew that my overall intent was not completely represented by what ended up in the paper.  They were philosophical about the illustrations -- they've been around awhile, after all, and know a caricature when they see one.  Perhaps their biggest grievance came from looking through the rest of the paper and seeing the fringe cultures the CP sometimes promotes.  Think gay sex columns and pages of phone sex ads and you get the idea.

The story of how they discovered the article is actually kind of crazy.  I had meant to warn them about the edited nature of the piece and about the illustrations, and never expected them to get a copy of the paper in its entirety.  As it turns out, though, my parents made a trip to DC (one they had not told me about) the Saturday after publication, and though they knew the piece was pending, the final publication push happened pretty quickly and I hadn't had a chance to tell them the article was actually in print.

My dad says they went to the Denny's on Benning Road (that famous sole sit down restaurant east of the Anacostia River) for brunch.  When they walked in he saw a man standing at the counter with a City Paper folded under his arm -- he only saw the name and not the rest of the cover.  He decided to check this paper out and asked the man where he could get a copy for himself.  The man said, "There's a box just out front."  My dad went out to the box and was fishing for a quarter he realized he didn't have when he saw that it was free.  Opening the box, he took out a paper and looked the front cover over.  It took a few glances, he said, to realize he was looking at a caricature of himself!

Despite the surprise, my parents took it well, I think, with their usual good humor.  Dad grabbed five or six copies then and gave them to folks in Kenilworth and to other family members.  The phone conversation we had after this surprise discovery was a good way to introduce them to the idea that, if I continue to write and publish, not everything I have to say will be rosy and the published version will not always match my intents exactly.

I'm curious now if many people who actually live in Kenilworth or have connections there have seen the article and what they think.  It's not exactly an upbeat piece, and I can imagine people saying, "When are you going to write something positive about our neighborhood?"  Since I'm not in regular contact with anyone from there right now (public housing communities lag on internet/email access, my primary means of communication these days, as they so sadly lag on many other things), I guess I'll have to wait till I return in person to hear reactions.  And if you're wondering, I plan to return to DC for a time in mid or late April.

So on to a few stories from Pakistan, first the man and the shoe.  A few months back when I went to the Passport Office to renew my tourist visa (a procedure with many steps, but in the end less trouble than one might expect), as I stood in the hallway I heard angry voices from the room I wanted to go into.  A bit wary, I waited in the hall for awhile to the tune of phrases like "F*****g s**t!" from inside.  I was a bit shocked by the news from my ears.  Conservative Muslim country that this is, I hadn't heard real cursing for months.

Soon a small tussle of men spilled out into the hallway; everyone stopped and stared.  It seemed like the loud cussing man had insulted another man with his language, and the insulted one was bent on bodily revenge.  A guard appeared about then, with the usual old-style rifle slung over his shoulder, summoned from the gate to intervene.  His attempts to step between the two main antagonists were ineffectual, however.  As the small knot of shouting and grabbing men migrated down the hallway I left the building and stood out front at a safe distance, waiting for the storm to pass so I could get my passport business done.

It wasn't long, then, till the quarreling knot of men burst out of the door I had just walked through into the entryway courtyard.  Rubberneckers came out through other doors and windows opened above as office workers peered down on the excitement.  The moment I remember the most is when the insulted man broke free from those holding him back and, wrenching a brown shoe off of his foot, beat the insulter a good many slaps to the head with its sole.  The insulters cell phone went skittering across the pavement as he crouched down under the blows and tried to wrench himself around for a countering punch.  But by that time more men were on them both, and he had to sit between two rifle-slung guards and bear the ignominy of having been beaten with a shoe while getting in no licks in return.

Of course I had heard that hitting someone with the sole of a shoe is a great insult in countries such as Pakistan, but I never expected to see it actually carried out nor think I would witness such focused anger and physical abuse coming from men in the typical light brown shalwar kameezes worn by Pakistani men.  Neither did I expect to see a shoe wielded so devastatingly as a weapon, the offending head cowering from the blows less from shame and more from physical hurt; the sound of those loud slaps still echo in my own head, and mine was not the skull that suffered the noise-making contact.
 

(An example of men and their shalwar kameezes.) 

The second story has as its subject my Macintosh laptop, my most expensive and, arguably, my most prized possession.  I hoped dearly that I would have no problems with it here in Pakistan, knowing that I couldn't just hop on a subway and show up at an Apple store for service if something went wrong.  When I bought the very latest model in April, I didn't quite understand that I now owned a copy cranked out of the factory in week 10 of production when they hadn't quite gotten everything right.  I felt like I had dodged a bullet then when my battery went bad this past July and I was able to get Apple to replace it for free before I flew out.  But even the second battery turned out to be a dud after a month or two here in Pakistan.  I spent hours on the phone with Apple customer care folks in the US trying to convince them it was their moral duty to DHL me a new battery ASAP.  In the end the man on the phone said he simply had no way to ship a battery to Pakistan (how lame is that!).  He did send a new battery to my cousin in the States along with an iPod Shuffle as compensation for the $80 I had to spend for the DHL fees.

Anybody out there want an iPod Shuffle?  I'll sell it to you for $80.

In that whole process I discovered that while there are no genuine Apple stores in Pakistan (I really hadn't expected to find one), there is an approved (supposedly) service provider in Islamabad only a ten minute bike ride away.  Thus, while I was soon cursing Apple again when a pirated DVD I tried to watch got stuck in my laptop's CD drive (who decided to make a slot-loading drive with no manual eject options!?), I knew I at least had an authorized (supposedly) service place to go to for help.

You have to imagine a little, now, the trepidation with which I approached the encounter with the proposed service provider.  Nothing is as spiffy here as in the US, nor is the idea of customer service quite the same.  I knew that, if they screwed something up trying to get that DVD out, they could easily say they had no responsibility for it, and Apple in the US would claim I had violated my warranty by letting someone other than them open up the computer.  Or, even if Apple said they'd fix it, I'd still be stuck shipping my laptop to the US and waiting for weeks for it to return.

My initial experience with said service provider didn't ease my anxieties.  Their office is on a second floor approached through a dark stairwell more evocative of a horror movie than of a state-of-the-art computer facility, but in the end that fit because it was not a state-of-the-art computer facility that I entered.  Instead, a cramped warren of jumbled offices confronted me, with computer parts piled in corners and a general air of dust and wear pervading the place.  I had some trouble finding someone who spoke good English.  When I did manage to communicate my problem to a worker, he directed me to one of the more jumbled nooks where three or four Pakistani men followed the latest internet cricket scores on ancient monitors.

It cheered me to see that at least they had a couple of Mac laptops around that were just like mine.  My anxiety came back, however, when the "laptop expert" sent to repair my computer spoke no English and spent ten minutes poking around in the mess till he found his set of tools.  Unceremoniously, he dumped my baby over onto it's back and started taking it apart.  I wanted to say, "Wait, can't you get the dang DVD out without disemboweling the thing?" or some other protest, but communication wasn't really an option, so I had to just sit back and watch.

It was a bit like an out-of-body experience, then, with my physical self feeling fear while my ethereal self drifted above the scene with a detached fascination as he exposed the inner workings of my computer.  Luckily the detachment stayed in place while the man with the bushy black mustache and backwards baseball cap dropped small screws and then fished them out of his shalwar (luckily the shalwar shirt has a long piece of fabric that hangs down to cover the groin, which acted as a natural apron and caught the screws), balanced the now-detached keyboard precariously on top of a mound of books and loose equipment behind him, and (the piece de resistance) took a break to drink his sloshing cup of hot afternoon chai right over my open laptop.

Thankfully he knew what he was doing, though, because soon enough he gingerly pried open the CD drive, took out the offending disc, and had everything back together with all screws and parts accounted for.  The laptop works as well after as it did before.  The charge?  Eight hundred Pakistani rupees, or about fourteen dollars.  I imagine any place in the US would have charged fifty bucks or more just for walking in the door.  So I saved some money, I suppose, though perhaps my stomach lining is a bit thinner from the worry acid it had to survive.

Here's a quick sub-story to the Mac one.  When I first went to the computer place they told me to come back in an hour because their "laptop expert" was out.  During that hour I sat at a little outdoor "restaurant" for lunch.  I'm pasting in below what I wrote there while waiting for food, to give you a flavor of daily life here.

"Sitting down in the middle of the Blue Area [an office/business strip several kilometers long] eating at a storefront restaurant place, fried egg sandwich and a veg. samosa [a crispy fried dough triangle with savory stuff inside] -- good, with cabbage and peas instead of the usual alloo [potato].  As I write, my pen-press shows through on the plastic table, neat strokes like hieroglyphics on its surface, the echo of my paper thoughts.

No women in sight here anywhere.  The boy who serves the tables is aggressive about getting folks to sit down at his place, calling to them and pointing to empty chairs.  His father, I assume, behind the grill spoke some words of English to me when I ordered.  Sounded fluent, but you can never tell [it's a bad sign when they start saying "Yes, yes," to everything you say].

I see a man ladleing streams of milk-brown masala chai (spiced and sweetened tea) in rhythmic swoops.  He strains it through a sieve into a small beige, flowered tea cup.  I decide to risk the stomach for my first cup off the street [no ill effects after, thankfully].

The chai and the food sit in beat-up aluminum pots on waist-high blue metal boxes that do for front counters to the dingy concrete stalls on the first floor fronts of these two to four story buildings.  Underneath the metal boxes sit the burners, gas piped from portable tanks, that keep the steam rolling.  Above are hand-painted signs, white with red calligraphy, that announce shop names and offerings in Urdu.  I sit at a dirty, plastic folding table on a dirty, plastic patio chair in a dirt and stone courtyard between drab and weather-stained concrete buildings.  My chai arrives steaming, with small flecks of tea on the surface.  It is sweet and good.  I stick out my pinky when I drink it like a lady at a tea party.

Perhaps it is strange that I, a white man, sit here where few white men ever show.  Perhaps it is strange that I sit alone.  Perhaps that I sit and write.  And yet no one seems to mind me, I intercept no stares, no one calls me out except the beggar who stands and speaks to me and then to the men at the next table in a long soliloquy.  The men at the table next to me give him some money.  I ignore him on the pretext of not knowing Urdu.  I did not even sense the men next to me paying me any attention until after they had finished their meal and they were looking around anyway."

The third story is about language, and a little bit about something called the diplomatic enclave.  (Here Jules reminds me that I should make it clear, if I haven't already, that English is the official language of Pakistan but that only the educated can speak it well, with many people one encounters not really knowing it at all -- Urdu is the common language.)

Anyone familiar with my Kenilworth experience knows that, as a whiteboy in an urban 'hood, I've consciously and unconsciously sought to adopt African-American speech patterns as a way to belong there.  It's been the same in Pakistan, where my English pretty quickly became inflected in an amalgam of my usual speech and the new language patterns that I heard around me.  While I haven't been here long enough to analyze or describe the change for you, one of the things that is different is the rhythm of your voice, the spots where you put emphasis.  When Jules and I were in India recently -- which has a similar, though somewhat different (don't ever insinuate the two places are exactly the same!) pattern -- taxi drivers didn't understand me when I said "Sansar Chandra Road," the street our hotel lived on.  Of course, my natural reaction was to slow the pronunciation down and be very plain about the emphasis, which just made it worse.  I finally learned to say it all sped up and singsongy, like I had heard others say it, and then the taxi men understood me.

To get my Indian visa I had to go to the diplomatic enclave in Islamabad, a walled zone several square kilometers in size that houses foreign embassies.  It's supposed to be a super-secure area, though if you are white, have a vehicle, and say you have to go to the bank inside you can usually get in.  Having no vehicle, I had to use the shuttle buses, a cumbersome process of going to an off-site parking lot, buying a ticket, dropping off your mobile phone and any bags, getting frisked, waiting in line, then squeezing onto a bus that would finally take you into this purported holy of holies.  I finally got wise, though, and decided to ride my bike there, figuring that, since I was white, they might just let me ride straight in.  Which is what happened, the guard stopping me then clapping me on the shoulder and laughingly telling me I had to go to another entrance for the Indian consulate.  The guard at the other entrance did not move a muscle as I breezed past him.

While I was in the enclave I figured I'd have a look-see around and went down to the Canadian Club to find out what one had to do to become a member.  It's a desirable thing to be a member of an embassy club.  The British and US clubs are the best, giving you access to a swimming pool, gymnasium, weight rooms, and a restaurant and bar fully stocked with Western food and drinks.  They're expensive though, and you have to know someone in the embassy to even apply.  The Canadian Club doesn't include quite as many amenities, but it's cheaper, and hey, it's always good to be allied with Canada here where they regularly wonder what screw-ups the US and England will perpetuate next onto the Islamic world.

While I stood at the entrance of the Canada Club waiting for someone to bring me an application, the guard engaged me in conversation.  His English was pretty good, and we chatted back and forth for awhile.  Though he didn't sound all that Pakistani to me, he said that he had been turned down for a job at a call center that makes sales calls to the US because he did not have enough of an American accent.  He asked what he should do to make his English sound more American.  "You should talk to Americans," I said.  "Or watch American movies, but talking would be better."

Then I realized that I should be talking to him like I was talking to an American and not like I was talking to a Pakistani, so that he could start his training.  It was hard.  I had to consciously make myself relax into my 'real,' non-inflected English.  I even demonstrated for him, then, as a lesson in how we pick up speech patterns based on what we hear, the difference between me talking as if talking to a Pakistani and me talking as if I was in the US.  He appreciated the lesson, and I think got the idea that you have to hear the accent to learn to speak it.

Riding away, I was half-amused, half-concerned at how hard it was for me to talk 'normally.'  I wonder if Pakistanis notice that I am trying to talk like them, and if they do whether they think it's funny or they appreciate the effort.  Maybe both.  I think it really does help me be understood, especially when talking to those with limited English.  I don't want to go overboard with it, though.  Periodically Jules has to tell me to "stop talking to me like I'm a Pakistani!"

Ok, one last story from Pakistan before I tell about our "vacation" to India.

On a Sunday night in early December Jules and I, along with some friends, went bowling here in Islamabad.  It was an impressive place, a small entertainment center reminiscent of a mall back home.  There's shops, a work-out gym, laser tag (which we got to play later with folks from Jules' organization), and of course the bowling lanes.  Contrary to our expectations (remember, nothing -- well, few things -- are as spiffy here as in the US), it was a fully modern bowling alley with shiny wood lanes, automatic pins, and electronic scoring.  It was like we were transported somewhere else for an hour or so as we happily sent the little three-holed balls whizzing down to crash into as many pins as possible.  They even had the proper slippy, retro-looking shoes for us to wear.

Even in that modern haven, though, there were reminders that we were still in Pakistan.  We all marveled at the family to our left, which included Pakistani looking women in fully western dress, i.e. jeans and tight-fitting sweaters with no wraps or shawls or anything.  (Here, "tight-fitting" means what would be a normal sweater in the US, since anything that's not baggy and form-hiding you immediately consider "tight" once you've been here a couple weeks.)  To our right sat a woman fully draped in black, with just her shoes showing at the bottom and only her eyes showing at the top.  She didn't bowl, though; that would have been a sight.  Otherwise it was an all male house, and a group of them sat watching us for our first few frames.  "Look at the white women bowl," we imagined them chortling to each other.  Thankfully they got up and bowled soon themselves, a rowdy group that threw their balls in high arcs to thud down on the wooden lanes, sent two balls down the lane at once, and all stood around on the bowling apron watching and laughing instead of staying back by the seats and waiting to take a turn like you're supposed to.

In another encounter emblematic of Pakistan, as we were fitting shoes a group of men started smoking even though "No Smoking" signs were posted everywhere.    The bowling alley staff didn't look like they were going to do anything, so Jules, who likes to breathe clean air, made eye contact with the smokers and pointed to the sign.  They slunk out.  Looking back, I hypothesize that, since the smoking men were dressed pretty stylishly, they were probably well-off guys who felt they could do whatever they wanted.  By contrast, the bowling alley staff appeared to be not so well-off, and so might not have challenged the higher-class men about the cigarettes at all.  It took a white woman's complaint to enforce the law.

I bowled abysmally (though I had good form, everyone said).  It was still fun, though, and felt good to be doing something completely different.  Walking out I felt like I had made a quick trip to the States, and now I was coming back to Pakistan again.

The next day I got sick and was in bed for a couple of days, which kind of sums up the first couple weeks of December - chilly, rainy, both Jules and I fighting colds.  The houses here do not have central heat, nor are they insulated very well.  And, they're made of concrete, which holds the cold like ice cubes hold frozen water.  The two options then are electric heaters that you plug into the wall, or gas heaters that hook up to gas lines like a stove -- in these parts every room has a gas connection.  Because of a slow procurement process, we didn't get heaters till a few weeks after we needed them, so I spent days huddled under blankets or sitting outside in the sun for warmth.

Jules had a business meeting in Jaipur, India, the third week of December.  We decided that I should tag along, and that we would then take a couple weeks to travel in India, since both the Christmas holiday (for the Westerners) and the Muslim Eid festivals (around New Years) meant that her office would essentially be closed for most of that time.  No need to sit in Pakistan when you can be exploring India, we thought.  As it turned out, our "vacation" included a week-long hospital stay for Jules as we unexpectedly switched from experiencing India as a sight-seeing destination to experiencing it as a "medical tourism" destination, an idea that even the government there has started to promote (you should see the TV commercials).

We flew out on Sunday the 17th, through Karachi, that dangerous city, and arrived in Jaipur the next day.  Jules had three days of hard work in meetings with her Indian counterparts; they are jointly running a cross-border project.  (And the cross-border stuff is no easy matter, given the hard feelings between Pakistan and India -- snail mail between the countries almost never gets through and even emails regularly bounce back.)  I took the opportunity to explore Jaipur a bit.

I walked narrow lanes to find the path that climbs up a tall rocky outcrop to the Nahar Garh, or Tiger Fort, overlooking the city, which a maharajah built in the early 1800's as a palace for his nine wives.  I peered through the fine stone latticework of the Hawa Mahal, built in the town of Jaipur itself by the same maharajah, basically a several-story screen designed so the women of the court could be properly hidden while watching processions on the street below.  I gave my shoes to the shoe minder and strolled the courtyard of the Birla Temple, a modern Hindi worship site built by the rich Birla's who made their money selling cement; I took delight in noticing with my feet the temperature difference between the marble that had been in afternoon sun and the marble that had been in shade.  I snapped close-ups of the monkeys that swarm unmolested on the path up to the Sun Temple east of the city, then received a red and yellow string bracelet from the temple-keeper when I got to the top.

Jules felt sick the day we got to India and was sick again the day after her work meetings, so we did not get to sight-see together in Jaipur as we had planned.  She was barely well enough to get on the overnight train to Mumbai (Bombay), a crowded affair which we barely got tickets for since it was Christmas and many Indians were traveling for the holidays.  We planned to continue south to the Tamil Nadu area and explore the hills there, but could not get immediate train tickets and so decided to have Christmas in Mumbai.

Jules convalesced on the train ride and felt well enough to sit through an hour of phone calls at the train station till we found a hotel (no one in their right minds, we learned, would show up on Christmas Eve in Mumbai without pre-booking a hotel -- everyone in India seemed to be converging there).  Though I felt like the Biblical Joseph at times, a traveler with a sick companion confronted with a city already stuffed full of people, there was luckily room enough at an inn for us.  Jules felt sick again that afternoon, though, and we knew something was up.  If we hadn't been traveling she probably would have seen a doctor at that point, but she felt well enough again to go out on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, and we were reassured.

Christmas Eve we walked the streets of Colaba, an upscale tourist district, found a good restaurant for dinner, and went to see a movie.  We figured we ought to see a Bollywood movie while we're in Mumbai, the center of Indian film-making, and chose to see "Kabul Express."  It wasn't a full-on Bollywood flick -- not much singing and dancing -- but it was entertaining.  Though the characters spoke mostly in Hindi, we could follow the plot well enough.  See it yourself if you can find it showing or on DVD with subtitles.

Sadly there was only one day before the very end of the trip when Jules wasn't either working or feeling ill, but if there was only going to be one day at least it was the 25th.  We had a good Christmas Day walking the streets of Mumbai, eating a good dinner, having drinks at one of the city's trendiest haunts.

On Tuesday, the day after Christmas, we had plans to ride another overnight train south, then stay in a national forest area and go on to a hill station town for New Years before heading to Chennai (Madras) on the southeastern coast to meet up with two friends of Jules who were attending a wedding there.  Tuesday morning we checked out of the hotel but, since our train didn't leave till evening, boarded a boat for a quick jaunt to Elephanta Island, famous for its ancient Hindu sculptures.  Jules started feeling ill again on the boat ride, with chills, nausea and fever having set in by the time we made it to the pier at Elephanta.  Luckily the men who worked there took good care of us, offering her a couch in a small shack to lie down on.

Already weaker than we both realized from days of traveling and sickness, it quickly became apparent we needed to take a boat back to the city as soon as possible and find a doctor.  The nice men stepped in again and let me use their cell phone to contact someone from her organization's office in Mumbai.  The person I contacted was herself sick, however, and so could only recommend a few hospitals to try.  By the time we got Jules off the couch and onto a boat, she was so lightheaded and spent from vomiting and fever that two of us had to help her walk.

The boat ride back, nearly an hour long, seemed an eternity, and I recruited some college kids on vacation to help me get her to a taxi at the other end.  By that time I knew I had to get her to a hospital right away -- we had no hotel to go back to, and I realized that I could no longer take care of her myself anyway.

Docking at the pier by the Gateway to India, a concrete monstrosity left by the British to memorialize their presence there, the Indian college guys kicked in and together we walked Jules off the boat, then carried her several hundred yards to the taxi stand through throngs of Indian holidayers when she could no longer walk.  I think the day they helped carry the sick white woman through the crowds is a day they will not soon forget.

We ended up at a somewhat seedy government hospital, where no one really seemed to pay attention to me until, trying to get Jules inside, she collapsed in the hospital foyer.  Nurses sprung into action then and a doctor showed up, and suddenly she was on a stretcher, on oxygen, and had an IV in her arm dripping saline.  In the commotion I didn't quite know what to do and tried to keep myself from yelling at the doctors asking what in the world they were doing.  I didn't like the looks of the place, but they were at least using clean needles, and I soon figured out the doctors and nurses were decently competent.

(The little figure, by the way, is a travel gnome given to Jules by one of her sisters.  I've taken on the task of occasionally including it in pictures, as is the intent.  That's the Gateway of India behind him, and the Taj Mahal Hotel on the far left, famous India-wide.)

Once she revived a bit, Jules, who couldn't move without pain, suffered the indignities of what seemed like World War II era X-ray and ECG equipment, then was admitted in the general ward since there was no private room available.  I wish I could describe the place to you.  Imagine a once grand building with high ceilings, long corridors, and large rooms.  Then realize that this place, built by a Catholic mission, had deteriorated over the years and become a government run hospital where the poor go for free medical care, and you might begin to imagine the worry I felt when I had to leave her there to go find a hotel for myself for the night.  Nothing will make you feel like claiming your full Westerner privileges like having someone you love sick in a sketchy hospital in some foreign place.  Moving her right away didn't seem like a good idea, though, but neither did staying there, and so it was a long night for both of us -- her trying to sleep in between repeated examinations by student doctors and the periodic retching of a woman a few beds down, and me trying to sleep in a closet of a hotel room several blocks away.

Thankfully the next morning Jules was still alive and conscious.  Two people from the Mumbai office soon came, and after that things got much better.  They arranged transfer to a private hospital close to the office, with a private room and medical care and facilities comparable to what you would find in a run-of-the-mill hospital in the US.  Seeing the place in the daylight on her way out to the better hospital, Jules remarked that she was glad she was so out of it the night before that she had no energy to notice what kind of a place she was being admitted to.  I carry memories of human feces in the stairwell, dogs prowling the hallways, unsanitized stretchers and tables, stained and dirty bedsheets, rusty equipment, arguments over how much to bribe the X-ray guy before he would take the X-rays, no orderlies, kitchen sized rooms with a thin puddle of pee over the floor that they called bathrooms, a complete absence of hand-washing facilities, nurses stitching a man's bloody foot without gloves, and floating over all the intake process the face of a skinny, middle-aged Indian man who guided me with sometimes obsequious earnestness through the vagaries of procedures at Indian government hospitals then, after I had paid the X-ray man, said, "But when are you going to take care of me?"

The rest of Jules' stay in hospital, which would last a week, was thankfully much less eventful.  I was able to sleep on a cot in her room and spent time trying to find ways to entertain us both while our "vacation" slipped away in unexpected fashion.  Mornings were punctuated by a visit from the doctor, a jolly, graying man who, as I remember it, walked with a slight limp.  He could have easily played Santa Claus.  Afternoons we watched BBC or read.  Evenings we watched movies or Friends episodes on Jules' laptop or, as Jules began to feel better, played cards.  I slipped out at least once a day to spend a few hours outside and to get some food for myself.  As Jules tired of the hospital cuisine I also made several trips to find her bland Western-style comfort food from parts of town that served such things.

New Years Eve was not a particularly happy occasion, stuck as we were in a hospital in Mumbai rather than toasting the new year in the hill town of Ooty as we had planned.  Even our small attempt to enjoy the festivities -- a trip to the roof to take in the neighborhood fireworks -- was thwarted by the nurses.

We cheered ourselves, though, throughout the stay by imagining how things could have been worse.  And we really were well taken care of, with the Mumbai office staff making all the arrangements and visiting every day to see if we needed anything.  If Jules had to get malaria while traveling, Mumbai was a good place for it to happen.  And medical care is cheap in India, the essential benefit behind the "medical tourism" promotion.  Occasionally I had to go to the on-site pharmacy to buy necessary drugs and supplies, and I paid maybe two dollars for things that I'm sure would have started at fifty bucks or more in the States.

(Masina Hospital, the "good" one.)

After various tests the doctor said Jules had a rare form of malaria, probably picked up during her time in Sindh (in the south of Pakistan) a few weeks earlier.  Things move slowly in hospitals, it seems, and Jules really did need a good dose of time to recuperate, so between one thing and another we didn't get out of there until the Tuesday after New Years, almost exactly a week since we made that first mad taxi-dash for a hospital after the disastrous boat trip to Elephanta Island.  We had one more night in Mumbai then out of hospital, managing dinner at a nice Italian restaurant and a little shopping.  With tickets to fly out of Delhi to Islamabad on Saturday, all we could do in the two days we had left was go back to Delhi for more shopping, good food at little cafes, and an evening showing of the American movie "Babel."  We returned to Pakistan truly in need of a vacation after our vacation, but thankful that Jules felt well enough to go back to work that Monday as planned.

Well, after that tale, I thought I'd leave you with a few more quirks of Pakistan that I've been saving up.  A month or so back I started a list of things that an expat here thinks about that wouldn't even cross one's mind in the States.  Here's what I've got so far.

-How to take off a sweatshirt in public.  If you're a woman, you don't take an outer shirt off over your head in a public area.  This is almost like stripping.  If you're a guy you do it, but it feels funny and you try to make sure the shirt underneath doesn't ride up to show your skin.  Jules has been shopping for an outerwear fleece with a full zipper simply for this reason.

-How to get away from all the guys staring at you (if you're a woman, at least).  Jules likes to stay away from even small crowds of Pakistani men, and will cross the road just to avoid the sort of gathering that happens at popular bus stops.  I've learned to spot gazers and try to walk between them and her when I can.

-Where are all the women?  I mean, where are they?  (Oh, right, they're in the house where they belong.)

-Not stopping to watch the hubbub outside a girls school letting out for the afternoon.  I once bought an egg sandwich on the street for a quick lunch.  Looking for a good place to eat it, I leaned against a pillar and began to watch the busy street scene across the road as a girls school let out and cars and buses came to whisk them away to their houses.  I had taken a bite or two when I realized I should move along; Pakistan is not the place for a white man to even appear to be watching a girls school.  It was odd enough that I was eating in a random place on the sidewalk -- public eating is done in defined areas, and it's unusual to even see someone walking down the sidewalk eating a snack.

-Thinking about what you put in your trash can before you put it there.  Trash gets sorted through, all of it, sometimes by people who know you, so it's essential to think twice before you throw something away.  It makes for great on-the-spot recycling, but one's privacy can suffer.  Friends recently told a story of having to sneak some gifted but un-tasty holiday edibles out of the house to a remote dumpster since they knew that their guard, who gave them the edibles to begin with, would go through their trash and see that they had not wanted to eat the gift.

Ok, one last uniquely Pakistani, or at least uniquely Muslim, thing, and that will be all for now.  The other day I bought a mosque-shaped alarm clock from one of the many clock stalls in Super Market, one of the nicer markets in Islamabad.  A friend had shown me one a month or so ago and I knew immediately I had to have one.  I chose light purple from the four options, including ivory, light blue, and light green.

The clock itself is a plastic box with a couple of arches and columns molded into the front, two round medallions of Urdu script, and some decorative scrollwork around the top to imitate a typical mosque's architecture.  On the roof three golden domes glisten, a big one in the middle and two smaller ones on either side.  At the back corners rise two golden towers crowned with an upward facing crescent moon, the symbol of Islam.  The clock face is an ordinary one with glo-at-night numbers and hands.

This clock's most endearing feature is not its mosque shape, however, but the fact that it's alarm is a tinny, electronic voice that, at the time you set, cries forth its best imitation of a full-throated mullah issuing the call to prayer.  "Allah akbar," it begins, "Oh Allah!" (peace be upon him) and continues in Urdu words that I do not yet understand.  Push the small golden dome on the right and the voice stops.

In a place where religion is taken so seriously that blasphemy can land you in prison, it's a bit of a shock to find a piece of Islamic kitsch.  It's a delightful shock, though, especially for a kitsch-lover like me, and it makes me laugh.  I keep my laughter private however, or if I let others in on the joke it's only other expats.  It's a bit unnerving, and a touch scandalous, to laugh at the symbol of something that most here hold sacred.  If feels like the hand of God, or of the state, could come down and smack you at any moment for your audacity.

Jules was with me when I bought it, and later she told me she half expected the clock seller to refuse me my sought after purchase.  "It's like he would think, 'I'm not going to sell this to you, you're just going to laugh at it'," she said.  Clock sellers, I guess, like any other businessmen are just trying to make some money, and besides, that particular guy didn't seem so devout.  He was wearing Western clothes and even joked with us a bit during the transaction.  I should have asked him what the Urdu script on the front means and what the tinny mullah's voice says when he issues the call to prayer -- I'm scared to ask anyone else for fear they'll take offense.