This city by the sea

Rolled bed sheets are easier to pack than flattened ones. One on each side of the suitcase and they definitely need some fabric softener when you get there. Plus the whorl of the sheets has room in the center for toothbrushes that are cheaper than those in Boston. I don’t know where and when she will wear the shalwar kamizes but she was determined to pack them anyway over a copy of Kaliat-e-Iqbal. This is where she will live

She found it on CraigsList, that surprisingly also has a Karachi page but no display for it. Apparently on another such site, someone for Islamabad had posted that the wanted “a temporary plot in exchange for two goats.”

There was also
“So much underwear yaar, such few occasions to wear it” (General female obsession with expensive, funky lingerie especially thongs and especially amongst my friends. My mother gingerly refers to the stuff as “Hollywood crap”.)
&
It was mildly like packing for a siege. Pouches of ketchup, tea bags (she doesn’t like the Boston taste), medicines, biscuits, vitamins, yaddih yaddih yah. Everything imaginable. I should have suggested a Catholic Archbishop for good measure. Or an armed militia. They come in so handy nowadays.
&
Ever since our occasionally pooled driver hired his own driver, he’s become crankier. Habib is one those mavericks who is into everything, he was introduced to the household as a “lab boy” (borrowed from the university’s chemistry lab for chauffeuring purposes), had that maddening, stubborn look to him so unique to the peddlers of our informal economy who know you may have fuckloads of money but also children who can’t drive. Was not a boy from anywhere. Perhaps an ex-kabadi wrestler. Speaks still in grunts, drives excrutiatingly slowly after you tell him this century would be a good destination. Instance: Saturday classes, we are going to school from a sleepover, piled pell mell in the car, heart-thumpingly late and he trundles along Shahra-e-Faisal. Outside the glass, we can see motocyclists, scooters and occassionally cyclists flying past us on Shahra-e-Faisal. The car never recovered from the humiliation and had to be sold.

Great conversations, cups of tea, pedicures and identity thefts.

And then she tells ME, that Karachi has lost me. Her departure does not this time have the reassuring tag of “college term.” She will start work. The route planned is Boston via Cyprus right through Monogolia “because it lies on the way”.

(For those who may be having problems with blogger postings, Teeth Maestro has given me the life saving link to kproxy.com)