sidewalk scribbling

The thunder woke us up.   The sky outside glowed blue, purple, white and the light and thunder poured in from our bedroom windows and the open door across, shadows jumping all the way from the adjacent room windows, across the short corridor, toppling onto the carpet into our room. Our pale curtains billowed out and then sunk back into the window alcoves, a giant practicing deep breathing – we could hear the rain falling in waves, the drunken trees dancing without abandon and see the lightning glow in the distance, rapid, short lapses in between, just long enough to let the clouds clang their response. The thunderstorm (the very first I’ve seen in England since we moved here almost three years ago) took me back home – the sheer life of the rain was just like the storms we have in Pakistan.   The rain in England, as I have droned on many times, is terribly mundane routine wet boring.   The rain in Pakistan – much like the country – is chaos and madness with ro...

It’s hard for other people to understand what a victory in cricket means to us.  Why there will be hundreds of thousands of people out in the streets of our cities and in the dirt lanes of our villages, dancing, celebrating, causing traffic jams and shouting their hearts out, why fans across the world glued to their 52 inch TVs or their cracked 14 inch laptops vacillated between high pitched screaming and cheering, and crying (tears of joy, of course) – I mean, great match and all, you might say, but aren’t these Pakistanis kind of going a bit overboard? And I’ll tell you, after I’ve wiped my red sniffling nose on my sleeve, that no, we are not.  This victory (in the ICC Champions Trophy FINAL, against INDIA who we never beat in finals, INDIA a team much better and more experienced than our fledgling one ranked the lowest at the start of the tournament) is not just about cricket.  Don’t get me wrong.  Pakistanis love cricket.  There are many things ...