Landing in Pakistan at five in the morning, I was all too relieved to touch ground after a sleepless night. A book kept my ever buzzing brain in order during the two and a half hours. Rain drops streamed down the windows and I wrapped a shawl to prepare for a cooler climate outdoors. Half asleep crew and immigration personnel let the passengers pass through but waiting for the luggage was excruciating; a stiff battle to keep both the eyelids separate whilst keeping an eye on the porters rushing to and fro like midgets. It was eerie, this contrast between the agile porters and the yawning passengers in the early hours of the day.

As my trolley was pushed out of the passenger restricted area, thousands of faces morphed into a single entity. Bone chilling gusts of air pummelled me and I tried to recall if the month really was March. A white head bobbed in the crowd and I was overcome with love for my father who stood in the dark. Mum was there too, neatly sealed in a light coloured shawl like a big, white, round teddy. The two crinkly faced, droopy eyed people stood with a halo over them in that dark crowd. My world was that and then. Dark with nothing but these two beautiful, old, bent figures radiating love.

Dawn was breaking as we headed home and the sweet smell of morning refreshed me. The rain had stopped and I had forgotten how green everything was here. My country is so magical, how could I have forgotten. The trees with their lush manes, shuddering in excitement by the roads, the planes of slopping hues of every imaginable green and the smell of soil. It was heady. I did not mind the rickshaws with their migraine inducing noise or the puffs of polluted smoke they let out in exorbitant quantities.

I have been away for a long time from my blog. I usually don't believe in a very long hiatus, so much so that only wheels under me can pull me away from something I like doing. Simply because even if I am lazy as a bone I do crawl up to the few, little, routine things in my life and attempt to keep them running. But as I said, I was literally wheeled out of my house, by a car! Hyuk. Yes, I do have a license to drive in Dubai. I am sure it would come as a surprise to a lot of people who know mel. Even I was pleasantly surprised when they handed me the golden card! I could hear angels singing 'Halleluiahaa' (I know I spelled it wrong but hey that's the way they were singing).

Khair, for one month, I was on the road, getting lost and well, getting lost again. Not to worry, each day I wound up home. It was fun though. According to my hubby, I have no 'sense of direction'. In fact it was quite a plus. I got to places he had not heard of, though he had been driving for more than a year now in Dubai. He'd give me wierd looks when I told him at night about some vague detour or dhabba tucked away somewhere or smile whimsically at a tree on some green belt, recognizing it by the number of times I had circled around it, trying to find the main road.

My second big preoccupation was 'Anna Karenina' by Leo Tolstoy. I had wanted to read 'War and Peace' but the latter caught my attention so I decided to give it a go.

llicit affairs, quesitons of morality and spirituality, Russain peasantry, sprouting new 'isms', decadent bureaucracy, handsome men with side whiskers and beautiful Anna with lace on her forehead. My silent life would reverberate with the noise of teeming characters the minute I would open the book. I also finished the first book of Alexander Mcgall which was like having a lightest of Tiramisu after a Anna Karenina, which should be allowed to qualify as Biryani or Haleem of the literary word. What a comparison, desi food and English Literature!!! Grotesque. (Scratching head) Well that's me.