Somewhere Punjabi blood? That food and chai in life is inexorably entwined with harmony. The teatime ritual that always marks an interlude of peace, irrational as the elephants themselves and dining at the table. Perhaps because one happens so rarely and when it does draws out memories of “trains rushing faster than fairies walks by the canal in crackling winter one trickle river”, of the generation gap between the two who met but the same books, that one learnt from and the other taught and of the inklings of that time when land mattered so much that one insisted "meray nana key podinay key bagh thay aur hum un mein sheron ka shikar kertay thay" of the story of the fall and the wound. An insistence “I also want a hilltop”. It is unseasonably cold in Karachi this winter. The hot plates and working the hilltop are warming.