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Thursday, September 21, 2006, from Islamabad |
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A week later and I'm sitting in a cafe again - seems to be a pattern, though no American movie posters this time - sipping a mango lassi and reading the news. It helps to get out of the house when I want to write my posts.
I've been wanting to get some real pictures of Islamabad to put in along with these words, but I haven't yet gotten up courage enough to wield the camera in public. And besides, Jules is using it this week as she does some traveling for work, so I'll have to get y'all some pics later.
With Jules away, I've been mostly holing up and trying to get a lot of writing done. Some writers go away to a hotel for a week to get the peace and quiet they need to write; some go to Pakistan. It feels at times like I've been spending more of my hours in Kenilworth than in Islamabad as I begin to comb back through my experiences there and find ways to put them down on the computer.
I have been getting out now and then, though, at least for little things like earphones for talking on Skype and for vegetables to put in the big pot of red lentil stew I made last night. And speaking of Skype, it's a free download that will let your computer call my computer and we can talk absolutely free of charge, so get on it! (at least if you have DSL).
The big news in Pakistan these days is the women's protection bill that is currently stalled in the legislature. Pakistani women activists and international human rights organizations have been anticipating the passing of the bill as a means of increasing the freedom of women in Pakistan and taking some discriminatory laws, especially relating to rape and adultery, off of the books. It seems that the government, after consulting with certain religious organizations, has proposed changes to the bill that has the activists and international organizations up in arms. Honor killings still happen here, with women killed by male family members if they suspect any untoward activity; the Daily Times had a small blurb about one today.
The other thing that's consistently been on front pages is reaction to the Pope's perceived anti-Islamic comments. Being an Islamic country, this is understandably important news that's sparked a certain amount of public debate and a certain amount of increased caution on the part of the international community here. Moderate Muslims, however, are deploring the reactionary violence evident in parts of the world, calling on other moderates to "speak clearly, today more than ever, about upholding a semblance of balance" (the Daily Times again).
And the holy month of Ramazan begins in the next day or two. The government has announced its latest Ramazan subsidy package, designed to keep commodities prices down during this festival time. Apparently shopkeepers tend to inflate the prices of popular Ramazan items like sugar for the month, and the government is pledging to punish this practice where they find it. It will be interesting to see how things change around here for the next weeks.
I have been getting out of the house for more major excursions from time to time, though, even with Jules gone. On Sunday Jim and Christina, friends of Jules, called me up and took me out dining room table shopping with them. They are having quite a time of it, as everything is either super-fancy with a correspondingly high price and aimed at the wealthy elite of Islamabad, or else is completely subpar. What they need is a good Amish craftsman. Anybody know of any over here?
During that trip we were talking about some Pakistani customs, one of the most fun being the habit of putting elaborate decorations on their lorries (that's "trucks," for you non-British types) and tractors. Typically the sides of the truck will be covered with a gaudy, repeating decorative pattern, with perhaps some additional pictures around the edges. Yesterday I saw a large and brightly painted fish welded across the side of one. The fronts of tractors, and the lorries too, will often have some kind of a bar or other protrusion from which hang small, jangly metal and plastic baubles. Anyone who has seen my recent artwork, with its emphasis on brightly colored plastic things, will quickly understand that I love this custom, and I promise to get some pictures to post soon.
(And here I have to tell you about the goats I saw, a whole flock of them, all their heads poking out of the top of a high-sided lorry as it trundled down the highway; they were riding in a sort of second-story platform built into the truck bed. It'd be like seeing a bunch of goat heads poking out of the top of a dump truck in the US, quite a funny sight, but it fits right in here.)
Another custom we talked about is the practice of putting all the same type of shops in one place. So we went to some furniture shops, which are all clustered in a particular spot beside each other. Then we went to what is apparently the place to get plants in Islamabad, a long row of greenhouses, all owned by different proprietors, all right beside each other. Different from the usual Western practice of physical separation between businesses of the same type (would you start a hardware store beside another one?), this practice creates go-to item centers and perhaps hints at an emphasis on the collective rather than the West's emphasis on the individual (that's a tentative hypothesis).
And then there's the men hanging out in the broad, tree-lined, grassy strips that separate the going and the coming lane on major avenues. It'd be like packing up your picnic and blanket and camping out beneath the trees in the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue SE on Capitol Hill in DC. Which is actually something I've considered doing; it's nice under those trees.
On Monday I had my breakout day. I didn't quite know what to do with myself with Jules away, so I decided to finally do what I had been knowing I needed to do - go out for a long, long walk. While being in Sierra Leone made me want to stare and stare into the sun, being in Pakistan makes me want to walk and walk for miles on a small canteen of water and a bit of flatbread at midday and just before sundown, tightening my belt as I walk. So that's what I did, though I confess I substituted sweets for the flatbread.
Walking out the front door and heading south soon took me out of my quiet residential neighborhood into the hubbub of the Blue Area, a line of businesses that stretches, unbroken, for about two and a half miles through the middle of the city. Think one of those garish commercial strips, sporting all those chain stores and faceless strip malls, that haunt the edges of US cities and suburbs. The Blue Area here is at least more densely packed and infinitely more full of character. The architecture is mostly plain cement walls, with the building facades reaching up two to four stories above the street and small storefront signs crowding the sidewalk-level entrances. There's a Citibank there, with a reliable ATM machine (no stories of the card being spit back out then finding that your account records an eighty dollar deduction from an ATM in Karachi, hundreds of miles away), some other international businesses, a Subway and a KFC. But mostly there's just a couple miles of universities, mosques, finance centers, cell phone businesses, travel agencies, money changers, housewares stores, pharmacies, and small food stalls jammed end to end, all together, with a north-facing strip and a south-facing strip, plus sometimes a back alley of stalls down the middle.
Walking east, with the hills on one's left, after the clamor of the Blue Area comes an open avenue/parade ground leading up to the broad vistas and sweeping modern architecture of the government area. I swear one of the Parliament Houses looks just like the Kennedy Center. I walked there for awhile, basically the equivalent of walking the Mall in downtown DC, past the Prime Minister's house and the Parliament and the Supreme Court and countless other small government buildings.
At the south end of the government strip is the Diplomatic Enclave, a large fenced and closely guarded compound that houses UN and embassy offices and personnel assigned to Pakistan. I think that Pakistan is still technically an unaccompanied post for official US envoys, meaning it's supposed to be dangerous enough that you come without your family. Judging by the tight security around the enclave, somebody's feeling the need for protection anyway. Ah, but they're just missing out on all the fun, I say, back there behind those guarded gates.
I stopped at the National Library then for a couple hours, walking through the front door and through a metal detector that beeped insistently, as I knew it would from the coins in my pocket, but no one really seemed to care. After filling out a slip of paper, I was allowed to peruse the rows of bookshelves in the Pakistan room with books all about the history and culture and geography and flora and fauna and religion of Pakistan. I will go back there occasionally, I think, to sit and read and learn.
By this time it was getting late in the day, but I did take the chance yet to walk down to the nearby sports complex with its gymnasium, squash courts, and cricket/soccer stadium. Then I walked through the lowering evening (somewhat quickly, I'll admit, on account of the coming dark) past a bustling market area, then past a lower income area of Islamabad, what might be called "tenements" in the US, back to my house. I think it was while walking past those closely-packed, one story cement apartments, with their crowded interior life spilling out into the narrow sidewalks and alleys, that I first began to feel at home here.
As I walked back through my quiet neighborhood I thought back over my day. I realized that I had seen two other white people the whole day - one in a shirt and tie riding a blue scooter and waiting at a traffic light, and another walking from business to car in the Blue Area, with the dressed-down look and long, scruffy beard of an aid worker trying to fit in but insistent on still wearing his flannel-patterned shirts.
I realized also that exactly two people had spoken to me all day without me first speaking to them. One was a guard at the Ministry of the Interior who, when I looked confused at the entrance, pointed out where I needed to go to get visa information. The other was a young girl, maybe around eight, who walked with her friend or sister, both dressed in orange Western-style clothes, who said "Hello" to me then giggled as I walked past. I said "Hello" back and realised how nice it was to not be singled out all the time for one's difference, and yet how I somehow missed it too.
In the cafe here, a group of Western-dressed guys sitting in a corner are talking about revealing pics of Kate Moss in Vogue and occasionally cussing in loud English voices, a bit incongruous for Islamabad. The speakers pipe in a sappy instrumental version of "Some Say Love." It takes me back to my childhood days in Kenilworth when my sisters would sing the song in beautiful acapella harmony with their friends from the neighborhood, and we'd all feel sentimental, knowing that life was capable of bringing unutterable sorrow (we lived in Kenilworth, after all), yet believing against all odds that it also held the capacity for inexpressible joy.
"I believe humanity wants to love each other; sometimes difference gets in the way," I wrote in my journal shortly after getting here. It's the heart afraid of breaking, you know, the nation that's soaked in fear of the other, that needs love the most.
"Just remember in the winter, far beneath the bitter snow, lies a seed that with the sun's love in spring becomes a rose."
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