Someone stole the manhole cover outside Sana's house. It cracked me up. I seem to attract a lot of friends with a repertoire of "aur phir hamara gutter ka dhakna chori ho gaya" stories. First up is Amena who now has a padlock on the manhole cover outside her house because the last time someone stole it, Mona's brother stepped straight out the driving seat of his car and down the manhole. Then there are our neighbours, who tired of the repeated thefts have stuck a plant of massively asymmetric proportions into it as a warning to all drivers and pedestrians.
Over iftar Sana's father said he had been to all the hardware/service shops in the neighbourhood but apparently 16 inch lids are very last season. You need an 18inch by 18inch manhole to be considered. Sana's mum contested the urban myth that charsees steal it to sell it for drugs. Given that the thief took the manhole cover and a water hose (plus as her aggrieved husband noted there was a much bigger and hence expensive cover two houses down), the sheer lack of strategy made us insist it was a charsi for shizzles and her father decided in the end to stalk the peddlers who come by the street because they will definitely have bought it.
Anyway after iftar Sana and I walked down the street (passing 6 schools-built-in-houses on the way, can you imagine with no residential house gaps) on to the main road to the newest Liberty store and it just blew my mind away with the incredible discounts. Books wouldn't be this cheap even at Sunday bazaar or Frere Hall. I made an absolute steal of a find with "The Architecture of Happiness" by Alain de Botton. Whose work on architecture I've been intrigued by since I found out about his Living Architecture project which funds architects to create oddly balanced and shaped retreats for holiday goers. The one pictured below won the RIBA award for 2011.
So very excited about going through that. The other find was a book on Mughal Miniatures which I wouldn't usually get (particularly since Pamuk's "My name is Red" bored me to death) except for an artist who has made me uber excited about how miniature art can be played around with. Introducing Soody Sharifi who inserts figures from her photographs into digital compositions of miniatures to produce a fantastic and yet seamless medley.
And a few other books, including Ashfaq Ahmed's Zaavia, the second volume of his collection of essays. On the walk back home from Sana's house to mine I realized that the plant had walked out of the manhole in front of our neighbour's house and been replaced by a locked dakhna. Our street has won the war on Gross Misconduct with Gutters.
Over iftar Sana's father said he had been to all the hardware/service shops in the neighbourhood but apparently 16 inch lids are very last season. You need an 18inch by 18inch manhole to be considered. Sana's mum contested the urban myth that charsees steal it to sell it for drugs. Given that the thief took the manhole cover and a water hose (plus as her aggrieved husband noted there was a much bigger and hence expensive cover two houses down), the sheer lack of strategy made us insist it was a charsi for shizzles and her father decided in the end to stalk the peddlers who come by the street because they will definitely have bought it.
Anyway after iftar Sana and I walked down the street (passing 6 schools-built-in-houses on the way, can you imagine with no residential house gaps) on to the main road to the newest Liberty store and it just blew my mind away with the incredible discounts. Books wouldn't be this cheap even at Sunday bazaar or Frere Hall. I made an absolute steal of a find with "The Architecture of Happiness" by Alain de Botton. Whose work on architecture I've been intrigued by since I found out about his Living Architecture project which funds architects to create oddly balanced and shaped retreats for holiday goers. The one pictured below won the RIBA award for 2011.
And a few other books, including Ashfaq Ahmed's Zaavia, the second volume of his collection of essays. On the walk back home from Sana's house to mine I realized that the plant had walked out of the manhole in front of our neighbour's house and been replaced by a locked dakhna. Our street has won the war on Gross Misconduct with Gutters.
2 comments:
Why is it that Subcontinental languages don't need translating?
Because waaayyy back before things went awry in the world, most countries were part of Greater Pakistan so there is a great biological memory of Urdu in most people.
Is truth.
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