We left the library and kept walking around the outside of the building. At another entrance, with no apparent connection to the library, is a museum with an exhibition about the history of Pakistan. The ceiling of the main hall was spectacular with icons and script, painted by a well-known Pakistani artist whose name isn't coming to me. The exhibition itself wasn't that interesting. Point to remember: Mohammed Ali Jinnah was consumptively thin. I mean, the man was wasting away.
After that we walked back across the street to the hotel. I was feeling a headache come on and Ahsan wanted to do some work, so we went back to our rooms to wait out the rest of the time until our airport transfer came.
Ahsan is an affable and game guide and I don't know what I would have done without him. But he has an oddly limited grasp of English, which at the end of the day (literally) drove me nuts. On the one hand, his mannerisms are endearing. Sample sentence: "The departure lounge has a McDonald's outlet and several other outlets for sandwiches and things which are not very much costly." On the other hand, when asked a question he doesn't understand, he tends to zero in on the one snippet he does and to explain what that thing is. Sample exchange:
Luke: Hey, why are the license plates on those cars black?
Ahsan: I'm sorry?
Luke: Most of the cars have yellow license plates, but those are black. [Points to the cars in question.] Why is that?
Ahsan: Yes, those are the registration tags of the cars. The government has just recently started keeping electronic records of registration numbers. Previously all records were kept by hand.
That's actually a terrific example because not only did he not comprehend my question at all, he attempted to answer it and also added a little tidbit of interesting information on the end. Took a couple more rounds to learn that black license plates are purely for vanity and aren't technically legal. Our van had black plates. Also, I've finally learned, first from Yousef, then Ahsan and Youshey, never to tell a native of the country I'm visiting that I want something out of the ordinary. Whether it be a cheeseburger in Kabul or handicrafts in Karachi, the likelihood of them not understanding what the bleep I'm talking about outweighs the possibility that I'll end up getting what I'm looking for.
The flight back was utterly uneventful except that I was seated in an exit row and I made good headway into Michael Chabon's Maps and Legends (thanks Claire!), a collection of essays on literature and culture. The first essay irritated me, gave me the impression that this was a vanity project and that these would just be Chabon's masturbatory expositions of his own thoughts on things. Of course, seems to me that masturbatory exposition on one's on thoughts is the heart of all criticism (along with its positive obverse, the desire to share those thoughts with anyone who may find them worthwhile). But it can be done well and it can be done cloyingly, and the first essay fell in the cloying category. The ones that followed, however, were and are much stronger and more engaging.
While I'm on a book-related tangent, I really enjoyed The Master and Margarita, I recognize that it's a masterpiece and if nothing else it was a joy to read, but I don't think I get it. I need to read Dead Souls and Faust and Solzhenitsyn and Rabelais and so on. In other words, my theory at the beginning of the year that reading classics will enhance my understanding and enjoyment of the world is correct.
Anyway, now I'm back in the Serena. Tomorrow is Sunday but I will probably try to catch up on emails and any other work that I neglected while in Sindh, and to prepare a little bit better -- lessons learned from Karachi -- for my remaining meetings. But first, some dinner.
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