Oh, just some notes
"Is it a story?"
Not really, it's an experiment by some scientist.
"Tell me the story!"
Once upon a time...there was a man who wanted to find out what made human beings sad or happy. So, he asked a baby monkey: you can either go to this fake "mummy" and get milk (but not a hug) or you can go to another fake "mummy" and get a hug (but not milk).
"Why can't the monkey go to the daddy"
Well, let's forget that. So, what do you think the baby monkey did?
"I think he went for the milk and then when he was tired he went for a hug."
~~~
Driving around the streets of Lahore on Saturday morning, the fog dense and dirty, grimy and grainy, your '70's Addidas blue and gold jacket only slightly crumpled, tossed on the back seat. The road has darkened overnight with rain but the day hasn't cleared and the light is still murky, as if blown in from the sea. It is overcast and soulless, the grey buildings are so dull that this could be a run-down part of London, or Rumania. Then, all of a sudden, while listening to some Bach, it suddenly struck you that your life is right here, right now, in these confined streets. There seemed to be some great revelatory quality to this singular thought (which will seem banal on reflection and/or to other people, no doubt). This very moment you are alive in the world and that is all that counts.
But then a second thought: you only feel this way because the light, the cement, the colour of the road, even, the time of day, all of that reminds you of so many other Saturdays in a previous life: walking to the station to get the Saturday Guardian, a packet of minstrels in your deep pocket, the wind on your face, the bark of the trees gloriously given additional weight by the overnight rain, the freedom from time taken up in your stride, the Roding hemming us in to this little world, an old man shrugging his shoulders, a woman walking her dogs;there is a timelessness in these gestures, a timelessness to this loss.
Roxana once wrote: there is no redemption of time. But it seems to me that time is always repeating itself, so that if you wait long enough the same characters and faces will reappear, the same November light that you saw in childhood will come around again, as will the same magic of the first snow of the season, the first green of spring. The only difference being that we will be older, greyer, slightly less coherent and maybe less wiser, but our eyes will recognize this familiar moment of life and death.
~~~
Looking for a black woolen hat you stumbled across a very curious looking sign that pointed down to a mysterious basement shop. 'The gift shop' or something like that. You're sure that if you look for it again it will have disappeared and that you will never find it again. You walked down the steep stairs with their plush carpets, and the dim, hazy orange light gave a rich glow to everything you saw. In this large room, which was a lot warmer than you expected, you found an old piano, lots of dark-wood chairs and tables and on the walls were, amazingly, lots of old plates, the kind of central European or Swiss memorabilia that only a very peculiar person would bother to collect. On one shelf there were small wooden puppets of clowns and angels and next to that large Bavarian tankards with their ornate designs. For a moment I forgot I was in Lahore or in 2013. This could have been anywhere: Berlin in 1970, say.
The shopkeeper (I say shopkeeper but I wonder if he really wasn't a djinn, a Lahori version of Mr. Benn) seemed totally nonplussed and sat meditatively in his wicker chair, eagerly waiting to switch the light off as soon as I tumbled out of the shop.
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