Wanderlust in the Time of Coronavirus (A GeoEx eBook)

Wanderlust in the Time of Coronavirus

A Passage to Pakistan: My First Adventure with GeoEx

oranges, or grapefruit; men sat in storefront shops selling electric fans, shoes, underwear, sewing machines. Alleyways twisted past stalls displaying jewelry, bright bolts of cloth, fantastic colored mounds of spices.

comprise 99 percent of the population of Pakistan—to prayer. Now raucous crows’ caws fill the air, and the rising-falling song of another muezzin braids with the first. Suddenly sirens blare. What’s going on, I wonder. A fire somewhere? Or maybe just the impending sunrise—for we have arrived during the holy month of Ramadan, when Muslims are not supposed to eat or drink between sunrise and sunset. The dull cacophony continues, muezzins and sirens and crows wailing and blaring and cawing until it seems as if the whole country is speaking with one voice, and the just-waking day soars and swells and echoes with the sound of it. Then a solitary soul, much closer, begins his plaintive call. The voice rises, holds, and falls. The words are clear and strong and imbue the air with a strange and powerful fervency and mystery. I think it’s a song of supplication and hope—but who am I to say? I know nothing, understand nothing; everything is unfamiliar. I am a blank map, onto which Pakistan has just begun its artful scrawl. * * * Now it is the end of my first full day in Pakistan, and already I am bursting with images of this new world. This morning, after an orientation session in the hotel lobby, our group set out to visit downtown Rawalpindi. My first impressions were of dusty streets loud with horns and crammed with buses, cars, carts, and bicycles. And people! Bearded, fierce-eyed men in turbans and shalwar kameez (the light and loose Pakistani suit that combines a knee-length shirt with drawstring pants); little children in dusty clothes, all big eyes and quick smiles; women wrapped in gorgeous veils and scarves and shalwar kameez , some covered completely from head to toe, others with only their faces exposed. Children stood behind carts piled with pyramids of figs,

As we wandered, I quickly realized that my fundamental preconception of Pakistan was wrong: I had expected a miniature version of India, but unlike the Indian cities I had visited, here there were no beggars, and none of the vaguely menacing atmosphere of poverty, decay, and hopelessness I remembered from Calcutta and New Delhi. Wherever we went, we were either ignored or greeted with hearty smiles and hellos. And even in that chaos and cacophony, there was a sense of order and purposefulness; the shops seemed well maintained, and the adults seemed markedly attentive to the cleanliness of their clothes and the neatness of their appearance. Already the map is being filled in. April 3, Pearl Continental Hotel, Peshawar: We flew this morning to Peshawar, the capital of Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province. Peshawar has been in the international spotlight because it is the headquarters-in-exile

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