by Brown Girl

Created on: February 12, 2008   Last Updated: April 23, 2010

AN IMMIGRANT REMEMBERS

I suppose we cannot blame our friends for associating Pakistan with endless angry mustached mobs and the pervading image of a tortured Daniel Pearl. When one thinks of Pakistan, one thinks of burning effigies, corrupt army officials and of nukes.

A truly informed outsider might even venture to say something about the cricket team or about the female face of Pakistan, Benazir Bhutto.

But behind the oblong shadow cast by the media's coverage of a rotting political situation is a nation teeming with undiscovered potential. After all, how does one explain the fragrance of the orange blossoms that line the roads between Lahore and Islamabad? Trees clutch wearily to the weighty burden of their citrus offspring, hesitant to let go, stooping against a backdrop of aurous sarson fields.

It is the smile of the old chawkidar that haunts me. Lines as thick as miners' fingers making every wrinkle on his face seem like an undiscovered path, a face that no amount of cosmetic alteration could ever make conventional. The turban on his head is not the threatening turban of the Taliban, but a faded rag that celebrates a life of simple, honest poverty, a shield from dust and mosquitoes those banes of a hot clime.

I can see again the mustard yellow cross-dressing drummers who show up at every wedding, their eerily beautiful insistent pantomimes ushered away by the donation of some rupees and perhaps some dinner. In a land obsessed with religion, the juxtaposition of their existence is remarkable in itself.

My aunt would take us to a remote beach in the desert province of Sindh where she jealously guarded endangered tortoise species. Then there was the little mountain girl who spun a perfect tea set from the mud that clung to the edges of a verdant ravine, her only toys in that forgotten wilderness.

And how does one describe the stunning blue lakes that dot the pebbled moonscape of the north? We caught fish there, and sometimes shot partridges for dinner. There was a tattered rope bridge that spanned the gorge and swayed with the winds that a nimble footed Alexander-eyed boy lightly ran across, the sound of his laughter echoing in the barrenness.

Beneath almond groves, deer witnessed unabashedly the dance of the gleaming peacocks outside my grandparents' home in the Baloch city of Quetta. Ladies wrapped in rainbows carried hand-woven straw baskets and misshapen clay pots on their daily treks to the wells for water.

Further north in Peshawar, my father led us

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