Waining

Everyone just wants kolapurees from Lahore. Why why why:? It’s needlessly irritating me. I left a sky as gray and limpid as the eyes of a geisha and neurotic rain that lashed the city cold. Driving to the airport was like having your car attacked by screaming karate-chop elves who exploded themselves on your windscreen and the rain strokes made the glass panes of the car look out into a Microsoft photo edited world. The flight was gorgeous. We broke through the clouds in the middle of the rain and entered a winter wonderland with vanilla sorbet clouds everywhere. I could see little patches of the city through cloud cover but I swear I felt like I was in a high altitude Tolkein castle looking down on my fiefdom. A castle so high and so huge that walking across one room to another meant crossing provinces. We were twenty miles off course, zigzagging to avoid pillars of cloud black tumor clouds crackling with lightning. I held on possessively to my tray of food. I love PIA food and I was scared the stewards would take it away because it wasn’t safe to eat it at that point and spoil my perfect ambience for eating and reading.

Chris from Vilayat is here and living in this place we all decided to call The Hole though privately we call it Chris’s Hole. It’s near the Regal Chowk and is so sordid and as Munchie and I walked through the alley and up a dank, subway of a stairwell to get him we kept on hoping no one would mistake us for whores because we were the only girls fraternizing with foreigners. Poor Chris sounded totally overwhelmed on the phone and I don’t blame him, living there in the middle of all the rickshaws and the lights and donkey carts is like getting hit by the real Lahore all at once and no man, Pakistani or otherwise is ready for that without some priming. Apparently it’s the only place some guidebook in London advertises so they all end up here. It is cheap though, one bed for one pound a night. We took him out for coffee to Gelato and he found it fascinating that I could polish off a Waffle Deluxe with a cup of Diablo so he took and picture of me and my food. Then we compared our Indian clubbing experiences with him and Indian and Pakistani accents. Some Indian thought Chris was American (he is as British as British can get. Maybe a bit of Essex in him also) and kept on insisting that the only reason they didn’t understand each other was because he (the Indian) spoke Queen’s English. I could not stop laughing. As usual Munchie made much of how she and I became best of friends only because I “lost” my passport at the Indian border. It was STOLEN. Repeat after me- STOH-LUUHN. Chris like all other giraffes found my stranded situation and final arrival with a P.O.W (prisoner of war) hilarious.

I have a crush on one of my directors. He is suave, urbane, intellectual sex bomb and has an apostrophe in his name which is the closest I will get to a hyphenated man. And he falls in the slightly older man profile I date. Fantastic. I just have to find out if he’s married of not so I can have his divorce papers drawn up by my lawyer abba.