Friday, June 22, 2007

Random

I'm in Lahore these days, spending some time with my grandparents. It's been a while since I was last here and almost nothing seems to have changed. The streets are swimming with mangoes, the walls with geckoes. The heat is exactly as I remember it, precise and severe, hanging in thick swathes of humidity. Two days into my arrival and friends started coming in with gifts of food. A neighbour sent over my favorite sandwiches. A pair of cousins dropped by with an ice-cream cake. Going for a drive in the evening reveals familiar scenes, an entropy of mules and buses, beggars and rickshaws and the still night air embroidered by friable Punjabi tempers. Lahore lahore hai.

The Adversary

Mothers are hardest to forgive.
Life is the fruit they long to hand you,
Ripe on a plate. And while you live,
Relentlessly they understand you.

- Phyllis McGinley

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