Side by Side

Sunday morning, we are sitting in a cafe staring at breakfast (black coffee, fruit-and-muesli, eggs) - when someone outside stops the traffic and three trucks pass by, to loud jumbled up percussion. The trucks contain people: crowds of them crammed together in ceremonial whites - and I look up for a moment then just keep crunching my granola, half asleep.

What?

This is when I am having the following thought: here, now, everything is normal to me. It is the only possible world.. A year ago today, in Pakistan, things were also normal, no: more than normal: they were only way they could be.

But put the two worlds together and you see how barmy the whole lot truly is - well, let's! Why not? What can happen?

In Pakistan, the third day of Eid: the slaughter of sacrificial animals continues.  Placid goats tethered to trees, panicked bleating from the back yard, blood in the dust.

Bali:  muesli with coconut shavings and tropical fruit. Three yoga teachers having breakfast, two women and a man. They wear sun-faded, minimal clothing and talk about their parents’ new lovers. They sit in a half-lotus position and use words like 'chakra', 'spiritual' and ‘being in a good place'. The man has long hair, a ponytail, sand in his beard.

In my deranged morning moment, I kidnap them from their green-gloop power smoothies and beam them to a courtyard in the Punjab, which is after all under the same relentless sun. There I dump them in a gathering of bearded men sweating in their shalwar kameez. Goats, a cow, a camel even, are held to the ground, an imam is praying over their heaving flanks. Long knives catch the sunlight and burn into flesh.

Is that the beasts screaming, or the yoga teachers?

The Guardian

There must be lots of them around, we see them occasionally darting across the walls. In fact, they replace the three garish pictures quite beautifully (the ones that came with the house and we couldn't bear; the ones we grabbed and stashed behind the wall) - well now instead we have a perpetually-changing gecko mosaic - much better. Call it 'Geckorama'.

Kira and I agreed that we are not afraid. There are much, much worse, unmentionable critters (shhh...  cockroaches, especially the flying ones).  No, geckos we like, especially since they will eat any of the unmentionable others.

Sometimes they hunt and when they do we turn off the TV and watch THEM instead. We saw a little guy take out a dozy wasp twice its size. It leapt and got it mid-air and dragged it under the TV table. I would love to say that fierce buzzing was followed by crunching sounds but no, we heard nothing. We just sat there in eerie silence, pointing at each other and the dark undertable.

Then there are the noisy ones I was telling you about earlier, the ones that use the family lamps for their propaganda.

And finally there is the Big One, the one we know as The Guardian. He can be found in the highest corner, under the roof - but only at nightfall. There he sits, and here I sit, looking up but not quite underneath; if he falls - which I know he won't! unless we consider a monumental paw-glue collapse, or paw-er failure - I wouldn't want him to plop onto my head.

So, where was I? Yes, we sit together companionably, with me telling him stuff and him doing that statue thing, those eyes wide and alert, that make me think Either he knows exactly what I'm on about Or he's wondering if he can stretch his jaw enough to swallow my head.

Except two nights ago, when - after some wind and black clouds and rising pressure and rustlings in the rice field - a booming rain pummeled the ground. And guess who scuttled indoors straight away, to hide behind the curtain?

Wimp.

A Scarecrow Soliloqui

Bali scarecrows, what can I say? A parallel nation of plastic and cloth, garish and divine. Perched high above a sea of green they rule, they raise a finger at the wingful sky. An army of avatars, almost-alive, almost-a-lie.

They flap their sleeves and make me shout 'PAGI, PAGI!' as I run by, on my more myopic mornings, dragging school bags, trailed by one barking dog and three calves even more confused than me.

Raising the pulse of the entire winged population with some Darth Vader head gear, are we? Magnificent, I say, although, although....

I'm yet to see. The Greatest. The Scariest. Scarecrow. Of All.

Simple in appearance. Little white T-shirt, no hat. And yet, look at the patch in his care. Birds, bugs? Not a flutter. Grain won't grow. Look how those sun rays only touch the edges. And see that stream turn the corner and slink away.