Nabbing a terror

He registered his presence days after we moved into our current house, skulking around the doors and windows and loitering in the backyard or the terrace. Often he would just come to the door and glower at me or my wife through the wire mesh.

It wasn’t long before he was terrorising our cats, giving them looks as though he would make ‘keema’ out of them if they ever stepped out of the house. And then he began urinating on our doors and windows.

“He” was a huge rust-coloured tom cat, and one that loved bullying all the cats in the neighbourhood, as we soon found out. His favourite pastime seemed to be to lounge in the vicinity of our home and try to provoke one of our cats. “Here I am and I don’t give a damn about you,” he seemed to be saying to them.

I would often be disturbed in the mornings and afternoons as our cats indulged in yowling matches with him when he marched right up to our front and back doors.

My wife decided to call the bully “Mota”, considering his size. Not really helpful when one of our cats is Motu, and I would often get confused about which cat she was talking about.

Matters came to a head when General, our largest cat, slipped out of a door left open by our maid and got into a fight with the tom cat. By the time I reached the door, there was fur flying and claws tearing into flesh.

I chased Mota away but General suffered several major cuts and bites. That was it for my wife – Mota had to go and any and all measures were to be taken to get rid of him.

Now that war had been declared, planning began in earnest. My wife convinced our incredulous vet to give her a syringe full of anaesthetic which would be injected into Mota so that he could be relocated to some part of Islamabad far from our home.

Great plan. But how do we get close enough to Mota to jab him? “No problem. We’ll just lure him into the house with food,” said my wife as I rolled my eyes in disbelief.

So several bowls with the best cuts of meat and cat food were placed in a line, leading to a corner of our backyard where our maid’s tomboy niece Saba volunteered to hide and trap Mota with a blanket. Mota came, ate, saw Saba and backed off. The plan wasn’t going to work.

Time to modify the plan, I thought. Mota was now in a corner of our backyard that was close to a corridor within our house which could easily be closed off at both ends. I decided to shift the bowls of food in a line leading to the corridor, the bowls with the choicest morsels placed within the door, in the hope that they would tempt Mota into the home.

Saba and I waited at opposite ends of the corridors in the dark as all lights had been put out. Just as I was reaching the end of my patience, Mota stirred. He began working his way along the bowls. He came to the door and stopped. But the lure of the cat chow was too much and he stepped in.

Within a second the door was flung shut and Mota was trapped in the corridor. As I held him down, my wife jabbed him with the hypodermic with a dexterity that would have impressed even our vet.

A blanket was thrown on Mota and he was bundled into a basket. I summoned a taxi and my wife and I decided to dump Mota at a market several sectors away from our home. By the time we reached the market, it was pretty late at night.

But our problems were far over. As I opened the basket to let out Mota, he took off – running right into the middle of traffic on the road. As I ran behind Mota, two cops decided to take an interest in the matter and my wife was left to explain as best as she could why exactly we were dumping a groggy cat in the market.

The two cops left, satisfied with my wife’s lengthy explanation, as I caught up with Mota. We left him in an area with a lot of restaurants, in the hope that he would be able to scrounge for food.

But our vet does keep warning us that cats have a knack for finding their way back to their favourite haunts, even from hundreds of kilometres away. Ah well, that would probably give me an excuse to write about Mota part II! 

Isloo the beautiful

At a recent dinner, my wife asked an inscrutable Pakistani diplomat who had done two stints in the Indian capital if he ever missed Delhi. He took a bite of pulao, thought for a long while and said something to the effect that he liked Delhi but did not miss it.

When I leave Islamabad, if anyone were to ask me a similar question, I will have no qualms in saying that I will miss the city. Immensely.

Islamabad has been described as a purpose built capital, a city that has nothing to offer on the same scale as Lahore or Karachi – bustling, colourful metropolises that are closer to their cousins on the other side of the Wagah.

But even before you realise it, Islamabad grows on you. The calm atmosphere, the unhurried pace of life that often reminds me how my hometown of Shillong in northeast India used to be in the good old days, the well laid-out roads and avenues, orderly residential sectors and public utilities that actually deliver.

When an employee of the Capital Development Authority refused to collect my garbage while performing the same duties for my British neighbours, a message left on the CDA’s website sorted out things within two days – just an email message, no phone calls, no sifarish (try doing that in Delhi).

The taxi drivers are unfailingly courteous and helpful, and I have had my misplaced phone returned by cabbies on three occasions (only once did I have to hint that I knew the cabbie’s number and could take up the matter with authorities). What are the odds of that happening in any Indian city?

And I only have to tune into one of Islamabad’s many FM channels to get my daily fix of the great Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, one of my favourite voices of all time. (In fact, I am listening to him on the radio as I write this).

A trek along the many trails in the Margalla Hills is great for rejuvenating the spirit and communing with nature. The vistas from the hill-tops are picture-perfect, and even the cheerful trekkers who greet you with a whispered “As-salam-alaikum” seem to be aware that they shouldn’t intrude too deeply into your thoughts.

Do I worry at times about security issues? I do, especially since the Talibs and their compadres moved closer to Islamabad with their attacks but not to the extent as some of our friends from other countries, who hardly ever stir out of their homes except for a night out at the staid and boring Islamabad Club or a dinner at someone’s home.

Not that everything is perfect about Islamabad. My wife began nagging me one evening to take her out “somewhere, anywhere” because she was bored out of her mind and had nothing to do. Just then a diplomat friend from the Indian mission phoned me. As we chatted, I told him about my wife’s plans.

My friend, who was known for his laconic ways, drawled: “Kahan jaoge? Super? Jinnah Super? Daman-e-Koh ya Pir Sohawa (two viewpoints overlooking Islamabad)?"

Well, my wife and I never went out that evening after my chat with my oh-so-eloquent friend. Not for nothing is there an urban legend that an American diplomat once claimed that Islamabad was half the size of Arlington cemetery (a huge military graveyard in Washington) and twice as dead.

A good video on Islamabad

Saba and Sidra...

To read about Saba and Sidra, click here.

Tryst with Mashallah

It didn’t take us long to catch up with the ways of polite society and we always remember to suffix or prefix our sentences with Mashallah.

“You’re wearing a lovely suit, Mashallah,” is a great ice-breaker at parties where often the only other person you know is your partner.

The host and fellow guests will promptly say “Mashallah” when you are introduced as so-and-so’s “begum” or so-and-so’s “shohar”. Sometimes the odd man out will check you out and remark: “Maaashaaaallah – so this is your Begum!”

More often than not the term is employed to ward off the evil eye. So if you’ve got a beautiful house, beautiful children and beautiful currency sitting in a beautiful Swiss account, I’d pray and pray that you figure in the NRO list, but I’d disguise my real feelings by beautifully lacing my sentence with “Mashallah, what a beautiful house/lawn/children/.”

Another widely most-used "Mashallah" is when one spots a beauty on two legs. The sudden without-batting-an-eyelid Mashallah could safely be translated into a “wow” of colloquial English.

Then there are the party-people always on a high (no pun intended). Even though your existence never mattered or will ever matter to them, yet they are always happy to see you and greet you with a dramatic “Mashallah! Mashallah! Now look who’s here.”

Sometimes the Mashallahs that come our way, except, of course, from our dear, dear friends, hardly seem like compliments. When late for a party the host greets: “Mashallah, you are on time!”; the cook  complains: “Mashallah your guests have a good appetite”; the fund collector from a mosque: “But…Mashallah, Allah has given you so much”. How is that for sarcasm?

We’ve seen the term take on a totally different connotation even with others. When a child flunks, the mother gets told: “Mashallah – your son has failed!”; teenager asking for money: “So your pocket money is already over? Mashallah!”; when the cricket team loses: “Mashallah, phir haar gaye” or worse “Mashallah India se phir haar gaye!”

Etymology of Inshallah

We are truly, truly scared of the word "Inshallah".We’ve heard our share of Inshallahs from electricians, plumbers, shopkeepers, domestic helps, well almost everyone we have had to contact in times of crises and we’ve learnt the hard way that Inshallah almost always never means the obvious -- “God willing”. 

When our generator crashed, a major crisis as sometimes we have to brave power cuts of up to eight hours, the technician responded to our SOS call with Inshallah; when we faced acute water shortage for over six months last summer and had to call in tankers, the guy at the helpline politely quenched our inquiries with Inshallah; we’ve often splurged and sealed bad deals falling for the shop-help’s Inshallah; when we decided to leave our cats at the vet’s for a few days and asked if they would be comfortable, he cheerily assured us with an Inshallah as he shoved them into a cage near a German Shepherd’s. (It's another matter that one of the cats had a huge scar on his face when we picked them up.)

We’ve finally figured that Inshallah doesn’t always mean that things will get done asap. More often than not, the term is thrown to buy time, defer or indefinitely postpone things that can be taken care of in the here and now. Alternatively, the term can be employed beautifully to shirk responsibility or make an empty promise.

Like everything else we’ve learnt to take the Inshallahs, a term which is used liberally throughout the Muslim world, in our stride. We often narrate our encounters with the word to our friends.  So when a Pakistani designer friend texted to say “we must meet Inshallah”, he remembered to add “not your plumber-wallah Inshallah”. Some other friends have caught on to our “Inshallah-tala (lock)” usage.

Today we were at the receiving end of yet another Inshallah. Our newly hired help (she’s been with us a fortnight) is in the family way and her Mamu broke the news to us smilingly: “You will have to adjust with her and Inshallah there won’t be a problem,” he told me. Having mastered conversations peppered with Inshallahs, this is what I have decoded: (a) the girl is unapologetic that she hid her status when she was being hired; (b) “adjusting” by extended logic means she can call it a day anytime she pleases and that I would have to fill in for her; (c) we’d feel guilty if we asked her to vacate her quarter; (d) my life is *****.

A day out in Isloo...

As we live in arguably the “most dangerous country in the world” (thank you, Newsweek!), we’ve all gotten into the habit of checking out security forecasts, issued by various diplomatic missions, before stepping out of our homes. While the very important among us get SMS alerts, or emails, warning us about the day-to-day “skority” situation, the less important -- like my husband and I -- have to make do with tid-bits which are passed on to us much like in a game of Chinese Whispers.

Often my husband and I end up giving our friends goose-bumps when we tell them about our escapades of the night before; and often, we suspect, they just cry wolf because they are plain jealous!

Today, I decided to ignore the “skority” forecast yet again and hit a perpetually out-of-bound area. My partner-in-crime was not my husband, but two friends, whose presence made the “skority” situation even more interesting.

The three of us decided to venture to Peshawar More (no, not of the Nishtar Hall or Kissa-Kwhani bazaar or, more recently the bomb blast, fame) but a weekly market in Islamabad which is famous for its “Landa bazaar” (that’s flea market in Punjabi) and which I am sure none of our high-society friends would ever approve of.

Peshawar More is a completely out-of-bound area for foreigners, even foreigners like us who have brown skins and who have to pinch ourselves to remind ourselves that we are indeed in a foreign land.

The weekly market is neat, organised and very well-stocked. Perhaps, the only market in Islamabad where you can spend up to three “ghentas” (hours) and still feel you haven’t seen it all.

Though it wasn’t my first trip to the market, I was just as much taken in by the glory of the bazaar as my two friends. Behaving like starved shopaholics, we stuffed things hungrily into our “shoppers” (polythene bags, as they are called in this part of the world), mostly loading items we could have done without.

We traversed the many acres of the bazaar, trying to strike bargains and good deals – and at each success giggling like high-school girls.  

In between we took time out to respond to our husbands’ worried SMSs and phone calls asking: “Are you guys doing okay?”

Sure we did okay. But since all good things must come to an end, we headed towards the exit promising to do a “skority" breach yet again. 

Saba and Sidra...

Meet Saba and Sidra.

Saba at 10 is quite a tomboy. She can scale walls, climb trees, ride a bicycle and is a little terror on the road.

Sidra at 11 is all girly. She likes to stay indoors, cook and put on make-up when she has access to her khalas’ lipsticks and mascara.

My husband and I grew quite fond of them when they moved in last January with their khalas (aunts), who worked as our domestic help. We would ask them in during evenings and talk to them about their school, their friends, their relatives, about their favourite channel – Star TV. Their accounts would have us in splits.

We knew that Saba and Sidra’s parents had died in an accident when they were toddlers, but one day when their khalas revealed the real story we were shocked. “Their father killed their mother and then shot himself dead. They also have an elder brother who lives with their father’s family,” one of them said.

We promised never to tell the girls this.

Over the months, we grew close to the girls. They started sharing their “school secrets” with me. I was quite amused. Once they asked me if I could take them to the park. I agreed. It was such a pleasure seeing them run and have fun without having to worry about their ‘dupattas’ slipping off their heads. We snacked at a coffee shop with Sidra scolding Saba for making me waste money on her.

Our trips to the park, zoo and eateries soon became a routine. Often they felt shy eating in public – “How can we eat – the waiter is looking at us.” The biggest high for them was to have their pictures taken and then seeing themselves on a television screen!

On their part, Saba and Sidra would show their love for us by making lovely cards: “I love you Baji”, “I love you Bhaijaan”, “Happy Birthday Baji”, “Happy anniversary” and one for one of our cats too “Happy Birthday Kitten”. The cards have all been preserved by us.

Saba and Sidra would break their fast with us during Ramzan and most evenings Sidra would make a “surprise” for us. She loved sweets and often the surprise would be “gulab jamuns” or “kheer” or “custard”.

One day during Ramzan they told my husband that they wanted to eat pizza for ‘iftar’. By 5 pm both the girls were dressed in their “good clothes” and were all excited about breaking their fast at Pizza Hut. My husband and I were surprised at how confidently they filled their salad bowls and tried to speak to the waiter in English.

They even wanted us to show India to them. It was difficult to explain to them why it was not possible.  

Two weeks ago, Saba and Sidra’s khalas decided to move out. We were sad to see Saba and Sidra go. There was talk of their nani sending them both to a madrassa. We tried to talk her out of it and we thought we had succeeded.

Last year on Valentine’s Day, Saba and Sidra decided to give my husband and me a card. Two hearts with a lot of glitter sprinkled on it: “We love you,” it said.  

I pulled out the cards today and was showing them to my husband when we saw Saba at our door. We were very happy to see her. She was in her school uniform.

“Where’s Sidra?” we asked. “She has dropped out. She now works in our teacher’s house,” she said. Saba’s reply stunned us.

The same teacher some months ago had told Sidra’s nani to send her home in the evenings and that she would give her free tuitions. Often when we went past that teacher’s home, Sidra would tell me: “This is where my teacher lives.” And now that is where Sidra lives, I thought to myself.

We told Saba to drop in whenever she could and to bring Sidra along and that we would take them to the park. She said she would try and disappeared. 

When life isn't a blast...

Lest anyone reading this post thinks I have embellished the event described in the first few paragraphs, let me assure you that I haven’t. It occurred exactly as I have recounted it.

An Indian diplomat had invited some journalists over to his home for a night of good music and food. The music courtesy an up-and-coming singer from Lahore.

It was March 2008 and the winter was yet to relax its grip on Islamabad. Most of the journalists had helped themselves to the diplomat’s well-stocked bar and settled in the comfortable sofas as the ‘tabalchi’ tuned his drums.

The singer, after being introduced to the guests, went to his harmonium, cleared his voice with a flourish and put a finger on the keyboard. What followed next was not the melodious strains of the harmonium but a loud blast that reverberated around the room.

All thoughts of music and food were forgotten as we gathered round a television to find out where exactly the terrorists had struck. The red tickers crawling across the screen said the bombing had occurred at the Luna Caprese restaurant in the bustling Super Market, once a popular hangout for westerners and journalists.

We had then been in Islamabad for about six months, and as more time passed suicide attacks and bombings became almost a routine. Initially the terror attacks were in the country’s northwest, but they slowly crept closer to Islamabad and Rawalpindi.

The day a suicide car bomber blew himself up outside the Danish embassy, located a stone’s throw from the Indian High Commissioner’s residence, in June 2008, my wife rushed into my room and said: “There was thunder but it’s strange as I can’t see any clouds in the sky.”

Having heard my share of bomb blasts and explosions over the years, I assured her that what she had heard was most definitely not thunder.

As the months passed, we became almost blasé about the bombings and suicide attacks since they occurred so frequently. That was till the day a suicide bomber drove up to the gate of Islamabad’s wildly popular Marriott Hotel in September 2008 and blew himself up along with some 600 kg of explosives.

We live about three kilometres from the Marriott and yet the blast was so powerful that it blew out all the windows in the home of one of our neighbours. I remember standing at the rim of the 60-foot wide crater caused by the blast and thinking I will probably never see a sight like this.

And as the attacks increased, it was hard not to come across people who had in some way or the other been affected by the terrorist attacks. A week before the bombing of the Marriott, my wife spent almost the whole of a dinner hosted by a diplomat chatting with the soft-spoken Czech Ambassador Ivo Zdarek.

Zdarek told my wife of his love for Indian food and sought tips on buying ‘dupattas’. At the end of the end of the dinner, he came up to me and said: “I spent the evening talking to your wife. The next time I want to talk to you.”

We made plans to meet but it was not to be – Zdarek was one of the nearly 60 people who died in the bombing of the Marriott. 

Indian or Pakistani?

My husband and I love cats. We decided to keep one when we shifted to Islamabad. 

Within a fortnight, we had a litter of three meowing all over our house and a month later, my husband further upped the tally by “kidnapping” a three-month-old who was being kicked around at Melody Food Park near the infamous Lal Masjid.

It was a challenge keeping the original trio alive because they came in without their ‘Ammi’. Thanks to my husband’s time-tested trick of feeding kittens with droppers, we now have the second generation of the feline family running our house!

During our first winter in Islamabad, it would not be unusual to see my husband with four cats firmly ensconced on his lap while he struggled to file a report on some breaking news story. Soon he got so used to it that he could report on a terrorist attack, give a beeper to a TV channel and maybe even take care of something else, all with the four cats on his lap.

The number has gone up to six since. We live with General, Motu, Chutku, Mohtarma, her daughter Kitu Singh, and the latest addition – a Black Beauty who walked into our compound one evening some months ago and decided rather single-mindedly that she would live with us henceforth.

Even though our six cats drive us mad – actually my husband more by sleeping atop the TV covering half the screen with their tails, using his chair as a scratching post, sleeping on his laptop or worse spraying on his blinds – yet we cannot imagine a life without them.

We often surprise our Pakistani friends by telling them that our cats are not “Indian” but “Pakistanis”. Pakistanis, who were born and raised in an Indian’s house. Motu particularly likes meeting all new guests and will sit and cry at the drawing room door till he is let into the room and allowed to brush himself against our visitors.

My husband and I often ask Kitu Singh, our most talkative cat, in jest: “Are you Indian or Pakistani?” Her answer always is a long “meeeooww”. So we tell her that she is an “honorary Indian” who will be bestowed Indian citizenship when she returns to India with us and we both have a good laugh.


The truth is they are six lives we truly, truly cannot do without.

To ride or not to ride a scooty in Isloo…

For the past two months I’ve been eyeing a Chinese look-alike of a Kinetic Honda scooter put up for sale by the owner of a swank leather showroom at Jinnah Super. He brought it all the way from China for his kid who refused to ride it and ever since the black electric scooter has been stylishly parked between racks of bright red and electric blue leather bags.

The salesman was happy when I made inquiries. “It can go up to 7 km,” he said.

I sulked. Even if Islamabad is half the size of a New York cemetery, as an American diplomat once famously remarked, I wouldn’t be able to traverse God’s acre without recharging the scooty battery at least once, I said to myself.

But the thought of riding the scooty on the unpolluted and smooth-as-butter roads of Islamabad was tempting. Okay, so maybe I could go over to friends, recharge the battery, and then ride back home, I sold the idea to myself.

Seeing my enthusiasm, the salesman slashed the price 20 per cent. I was ecstatic. The salesman was not in a mood to give up on me either. He shoved his card in my hand and took my number, promising to lower the price even further.

If 7 km was not bad enough, I wondered how much I would stand out on the roads where even men don’t ride scooters (except for the odd blue Vespa we see once in a blue moon), women don’t sit pillion – and definitely not cross-legged. I also tried to dismiss simultaneous thoughts of creating a scene on the road as and when one of our shadows decided to tail me on a red Yamaha.

It didn’t take long for my husband and friends to shoot down the idea. “Just 7 km?” or “It’s Chinese – it’ll fall apart before you know it!” That evening I ignored the call from the salesman.

Some years ago, I was a proud owner of a Kinetic Honda scooter. I rode it all over Delhi, sometimes even at 2 am after my weekly night shift, racing a senior colleague who lived in my neighbourhood. The colleague would let me show off my skills and graciously slow down to let me win.

The routine continued for about a year, with me giving rides to everyone in office, including my editor, and then my scooty was stolen and like everyone else, I decided to upgrade to a four-wheeler. But I missed my scooter and the sense of freedom that it gave me.

I was at Jinnah Super market again three days ago and saw the scooty still parked within the shop. I walked in and said, “Not sold yet?” A middle-aged looking salesman smiled: “Yeh aap hi ka intizaar kar rahee hai.” I smiled back, “But 7 km is too less.”

The salesman’s reply froze me, “Not 7, it can go up to 41 km. If you want you can take a test ride.” I took his number and stepped out. I have been postponing the call to him ever since.

Anyone for a drink?

As the muezzin’s call to prayer cuts through the muggy air hanging over Islamabad, a black sedan glides to a halt at a home in my neighbourhood in the heart of Islamabad, a few hundred metres from the mosque. There is a hurried transaction, something cylindrical wrapped in a newspaper is thrust through the window, some money changes hands and the car glides away.

Just another sale for my friendly neighbourhood bootlegger, a man who keeps a lot of people in Islamabad in high spirits. God knows they need it too.

The house looks like any other in our upmarket neighbourhood, a two-storey structure with a small lawn and a low wall running round it. No indication whatsoever of what goes on within. There’s nothing even disreputable about it.

When my wife and I first moved into the neighbourhood in September last year, I had often been struck by the young men who hung around the house – some clad in the trademark shalwar-kameez, others in bright T-shirts and jeans, and almost all wearing well-groomed long hair. All fiddling with expensive mobile phones, lounging on the road the day long, doing very little.

I often wondered what they did for a living – they never seemed strapped for cash, and yet never seemed to do anything.

It was our maid Nargis who dropped the ball several months later – “Don’t you know? They’re bootleggers (Yeh toh sharabein bechte hain).”

It was then that my wife and I began noticing the SUVs and cars that would drive up, especially in the evenings. Some with excited young couples clearly looking like they were getting up to mischief, others with bored-looking middle men. The same furtive exchanges every time, but at the same time, no real effort to hide the liquor being sold.

I had heard somewhere that bootlegging in Pakistan was usually handled by non-Muslim minorities but a taxi driver I regularly use exploded even that myth. I once asked him about the bootleggers in my neighbourhood and he quipped with a smile: “Saare Kalma-padhne waale Musalmaan hain.”

Of course, I often have my wife in splits when I remark as I pass the bootleggers: “Aaj toh, Mashallah, bumper sale hui hai.”

For a country that has officially been “dry” since 1977, alcohol isn’t very difficult to come by in Pakistan. Under the law, alcohol can’t be drunk by 97 per cent of the country’s population.

The famous Murree Brewery caters to the remaining three per cent, comprising Christians, Hindus and Parsis. Besides bootleggers, some of the well-heeled depend on friends in the diplomatic circuit.

The late Minoo Bhandara, whose family owns and operates the Murree Brewery, once remarked, “I think 99 percent of my customers are Muslims.” Just not very openly of course.

(Footnote: Interesting thoughts by Nadeem F Paracha on the alcohol ban here.)

Safed dupatta malmal ka...

Last week when I walked over to my neighbour’s wearing legwarmers over a pair of track pants, I realised how much I had changed in the two years that I had been in Pakistan.

I spent my very first week in the “markeeets of Slamabad” (that’s how most locals pronounce it) shopping for clothes that would make me look holy. I was told that my longish kurtis worn over denims were not good enough. I needed to do more to “merge with locals”, “not stand out and invite trouble” and to “respect Pakistani culture”.

When I frowned and fretted, I was given examples of foreigners who had taken to wearing shalwar-kurtas. I was even introduced to this nice-looking sexagenarian who visited India regularly to shop for shalwar-kurtas. “I don’t get my size here,” she told me.

I didn’t either. I had to go through the painful exercise of getting clothes stitched and then buying humongous white dupattas to cover myself knee-up.

When my husband first saw me in my new attire, he remarked: “You look like a Pakistani!” I sulked, because that didn’t quite sound like a compliment.

I found a role model in my domestic help, and I would step out of the house, just like her, with my head covered with a white dupatta, sometimes just my eyes showing. I would ignore the whistling/singing of private guards posted on our street and take the insistent honking/sudden sharp U-turns by men on Yamahas in my stride.

I remember once I forgot to wear the dupatta and my husband and I returned home in a rush to collect it. Soon I got so used to wearing the 2.5-yard cloth that I would grab it before answering the door and felt strange when friends asked me to take it off in their homes.

Over the months, as I settled in I noticed that hardly any Pakistani woman I met was wrapped knee-up in a dupatta. The only people who were wearing shalwar-kurtas were foreigners (Indians included) or domestic helps. So did I have to cover myself up?

On my first trip back to India, my sister got goose-bumps when she received me at the airport all wrapped up in white. My sister hated the “white thing” and would not let me wear it in Delhi.

When I returned, I felt quite a fake donning the dupatta again. So I decided to dump it for good. I still get stares, I still get jokingly told that the Taliban will come and get me, but I don’t care. For now, it’s fun being my unholy self in Slamabad.

Masla hi masla...

In the two years that we've spent in Pakistan, our Urdu vocabulary has improved considerably. We can differentiate between "wukla" and "khokhla"; we know that "masaail" is the plural form of "masla" and therefore we should not confuse it with "missile" and get worked up unnecessarily; and that when anything that can go wrong, does go wrong, its called a "bohran".

We've been witness to dozens of bohrans, including the bijli-paani-gas-aata-cheeni bohran, which we've learnt to take in our stride quite cheerfully.

When we came in we were sometimes tempted to pat our backs when we managed to decode Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi's high-flown and dramatic Urdu in speeches delivered with a flourish that would make a veteran thespian go green with envy. Now, it’s a breeze to understand his flowery speeches, even when he is referring to "Bharat ke vazeer-e-khaarja" or “Bharat ke vazeer-e-daakhla" or speaking of the need for the two countries to respect each other's "tawwaqwaat" and increase scope for "tawwun".

Sadly, we can’t say the same about our Hindi. Simple words like “sundar”, “kasht” or “krodh” sometimes sound so alien to our biological listening apparatus.

Ironically, the only time we get to hear good Hindi is when we meet Pakistan’s BBC Hindi correspondent Hafeez Chachar or a Japanese diplomat friend – both of whom speak our official language so well.

When I saw Hafeez’s “bhabhiji pranam” on my Facebook chat box some days ago, I almost fell off my chair. It was great fun chatting with him in Hindi for the next 10 minutes or so. He even encouraged me to download the Hindi font, but much to my embarrassment I fumbled with the akshars. So I stuck to the more familiar Roman script.

Hafeez’s account of his reportage of the terrorist attack at the GHQ in Rawalpindi, which he insisted on calling “Sena Mukhayalaya”, sounded so cute to all of us who were listening to him between bites of idlis and dosas at a friend’s home.

It was another matter that a Pakistani soldier who heard Hafeez recording his piece on the street in Rawalpindi wanted to know how an “Indian” had managed to enter a restricted area. Hafeez says he was able convince the soldier that he belongs to Sindh with great difficulty.

Hafeez told us that sometimes, when he is doing phonos in Hindi for the BBC on the streets, people mistake him for an Indian and ask him how he feels to be in Pakistan.

"Bharat sarkar ne Pakistan ke saath samagr vaarta phir se shuru karne ka prastav diya hai..." or "Amriki drone vimanon ne Waziristan par chaar prakshepastra fire kiye..." – how is that for good Hindi?

When Hafeez asked me the meaning of prakshepastra I drew a blank. "Missile," he said. Now that's a word I should have known.

Similarly, our Japanese friend was so endearing when he referred to leading Urdu newspaper “Jang” as a “samachar patra” and on how he enrolled to learn Hindi at Allahabad “Vishvidyalaya”, and ended up learning not in the “kaksha”, not from an “adhyapika or adhyapak” but “swayam prayas kar ke”!

Our James Bond...

Like all Indians in Pakistan, we have learnt to live with our shalwar-kurta clad, Yamaha-riding shadows. We quite like them because they follow us around town faithfully, making us feel what we are not -- IMPORTANT.

In the two years we have spent on this side of the Wagah border, we've had very little trouble with them. We've perfected the art of stealing glances at them when they are not looking, or when we think they are not, and concluded that they are all chips off the same block.

So we were pleasantly surprised when we discovered that a baseball cap and denim-wearing chubby-cheeked guy, broiling in the May sun, was our new shadow. We would often see him parked under a tree opposite our house, chatting with private security guards from other homes or playing cricket with kids.

He would sometimes follow me as I went to the market to buy veggies and peer at me through his Aviator glasses, always from the same spot -- almost apologetically. He would follow me back home and then take up his turn to bat.

My husband and I decided to call him James Bond. Soon we got used to having him around us. Often we would feel sorry that he had to spend long hours in the sweltering heat to keep an eye on us as we did nothing more than sit in the comfort of our home.

One July afternoon, it was unusually hot, and we saw James Bond wearing his trademark pink shirt and fanning himself with a newspaper. My husband and I decided to send him and the guards a drink. We saw him accept the drink from our maid with some reluctance.

We sent word to him that he could ask for a chilled glass of water or anything else whenever he wanted. We were happy that he accepted our offer.

Sadly, that was the last time we saw James Bond. His heart stopped beating the next day -- some security guards told my husband that he had died of a sudden heart attack. But when I stand on the terrace of our home and look across the street, I sometimes think I can still see him sitting on his motorcycle, baseball cap on his head and keeping a watchful eye from behind his sunglasses.

Dating in Isloo...

So I am guilty of helping my 22-year-old Pushtu cook date her fiance!

When: Holy month of Ramzan, 2009
Where: Super Market, Islamabad
Why: She wanted to give him an Eid gift

Nargis wanted to gift the gray-colour shalwar suit that she'd picked up on her weekly trip to the Jumma Bazaar at Peshawar More to her fiance Sagheer. She didn't know how because good Pathan girls don't date, not even soon-to-be Mehrams. She, of course, didn't agree with most Pathan pearls of wisdom, having lived most of her life in good old Isloo.

On her day three with us, she sweet-talked us into buying her a phone (to be fair it was her money), but without her family's consent. Soon our six cats were witness to endless phone conversations held in our kitchen, in our living room, on the terrace, in the backyard, well everywhere except perhaps the cats' cage -- as at 5.7 feet she couldn't quite fit in.

One Ramzan afternoon, she showed up at the door with an urgent request: "Can you come with me to Super?"

I had entertained such requests in the past, but that day I turned it down because I was fasting and was, therefore, (psychologically) low on energy.

She persisted. And I gave in. We took a cab, with me holding a bouquet which I had passed on to her earlier in the day, and she the gift.

I noticed Nargis, who usually wore a chador before stepping out, was covered from head to toe in a figure-hugging black burqa, the veil neatly held up on both sides with two safety pins.

Her one hand stuck to her ear taking instructions from her half-Mehram on the mobile, we got off at Super and then started walking towards a jewellery stall. She stopped, muttered something in Pushtu, and handed over the bouquet and the gift to the man at the stall. The guy refused to accept the goodies, saying he had no instructions to receive bouquets/gifts!!

It was obvious that we had stopped at the wrong stall. We strolled around some more, eyeing all jewellery-wallahs, and by now, all jewellery-wallahs, potato chip-wallahs, pirated CD-wallahs eyeing us and showering us (actually me more as I was the non-burqa, jean-clad, unholy type) with the horrified "buri aurats that too in Ramzan look".

With my companion all covered up, and her hand still glued to her ear, she was blissfully unaware of the goings-on.

It was time to act. I told her I was leaving and that she could continue with her wild goose chase. The threat worked and within minutes the fiance decided to show up at one of the stalls. He slid into a corner because good Pathan boys and girls not only don't date but also don't make eye contact before marriage.

We dropped the gift like a bomb and vanished -- with me swearing never to visit Super again without a shuttlecock burqa.