Beyond the Bathroom

As much as I prefer assessing our bathrooms, posing in flak jackets, and making dandelion necklaces for my dogs, I feel obligated to offer up the lay of the land here. I am pretty sure, after writing this, that I shouldn't ever write non-fiction. And, I need a disclaimer: In novelty, there is often, if not outright deception, than dangerous over-simplification. In a few months I expect to blanch at this first attempt at an aerial view.

Anyway, with presumption and reduction and bias, here is Islamabad:

In the 1960s, a Greek architectural firm designed Islamabad with the explicit purpose of creating a new capital for Pakistan (the capital had been Karachi). Imposed onto an unrelenting grid, Islamabad makes Greenbelt, Maryland, (a New Deal planned city), seem the organic evolution of meandering antebellum wagon roads. Longitudinal letters and latitudinal numbers organize the city, so that instead of Hell's Kitchen and the Gold Coast and Foggy Bottom, we have F-6 and G-7. Ah, there is romance in this Soviet-style nomenclature. I temper my feeling that I am living on a map and not in a city (this seems like it should be a metaphor for living a representation of a life instead of a life?) by calling our sector, F-8, Fate (F8 if you're txting!).

In general, the recreational, the diplomatic, the governmental, the commercial, and the residential have each been consolidated. Jinnah Park, Islamabad's answer to Central Park, occupies its own sector of jogging tracks, tennis courts, cricket pitches and green cover. The city's architects neatly drew the federal government and the diplomatic enclaves into the eastern sectors. Stores are either in the Blue Area, a commercial district that runs along a major thoroughfare, or confined to markets -- reminiscient of strip malls, but without oceanic parking lots -- imbedded at the heart of each sector. The rest is residential: in many sectors, walled-off mansions line green-canopied roads. The residential areas, in their grace and stateliness, remind me of Embassy Row in Washington, D.C.

Insulated Islamabad -- in its cleanliness, its order, and its affluence -- resembles neither the rest of South Asia nor the Pakistan of the popular American imagination. I’m very excited, when the rest of the country calms down, to visit Lahore, the cultural capital.

It is very hot -- I think it was a very dry 107 F yesterday. We have fans and air conditioning, and so it's not bad -- I'd take this over Siberia any day. We even went running quite comfortably yesterday at dusk.

Below is a picture of our house and a picture of the house across the street: