Introduction Every morning in Lahore, as we drove to school, there came a point when I''d quieten and coil into myself. Jammed together with me in the back seat, my sisters went on quarrelling, poking one another with elbows, voices raised in jeers or protest. But I stared out of the window, holding myself taut as we passed the carpet seller, his rugs spread over the grass embankment on the side of the road and pinned up on the trees with long nails. My favourite moment of the day was coming, and I had to be ready. If I wasn''t prepared - if a kick broke my concentration, or wrestling siblings knocked my head out of its line of sight - I''d miss the miracle. Because when we reached the end of that cramped road, our car dodging donkey carts and street sellers and dashing children, and turned the corner - in that instant, the world opened out. Lahore vanished around me. All I could see, stretching out for miles, were huge empty fields.
We''d crossed from city into fairy tale. And, every morning, no one noticed but me. I''ve forgotten so much of my early life, but those fields have stayed with me. How could there be so much empty land in the middle of crowded, parched, shouting Lahore? How could anything be so deeply, achingly green? I felt that green on my skin and in my dry throat. The school playground never kept its grass more than a few days. Every year it was resown, optimistically, the seeds sending up dark dusty tufts, as though Lahore might decide to change its climate. But within days the ground had baked solid and brown, under the blasting sun and the thousands of small feet in shiny black shoes. Not those fields.
Through summer sun, monsoon downpour and winter mists, and the spring whose creeping heat I experienced like the sound of a distant, sinister drum, they stayed lush. I kept my stare fixed on that beautiful alien colour as the trees flicked past the window: a long row of trunks, lining the road, which measured out my journey to school as rhythmically as a heartbeat. The fields were perfectly, shimmeringly flat. No people crossed them. No hills, no valleys, no machinery. There was nothing for the eye to light on. Good, I thought. My gaze didn''t want to be distracted.
It wanted to fly and fly, like a bird skimming the grass, without stopping. I imagined picking up every inch of ground and storing that expanse inside me for when I needed it. Later - standing on the edge of the school playground, watching the flies cluster by my feet, or staring blankly at my teacher''s face in the classroom - I could take myself back to the fields, and live there in the cool quiet by myself. Everything in my Lahore was cramped. Five of us shared a bedroom, four of us shared the back seat. So that expansive emptiness seemed impossible: like a glimpse of the divine. I could send my eyes running off over the fields, even as I stayed jammed in the back seat of the car against my little sister Forget-Me-Not, my hands up against the glass. (''Don''t touch the glass,'' my mother said, from the front seat.
''It leaves a smear that never comes off.'') Running, in my mind, faster than was possible, stretching my muscles as hard as they could possibly be stretched. In that space, no matter how I moved - if I flung myself or rolled or cartwheeled (I didn''t know how to cartwheel) - I knew I wouldn''t come up against anything. If I walked far enough, I thought, over those fields, out past the edges of my vision, soon the road and the car and my fighting sisters would vanish, and there would just be me. Standing in the middle of that flatness, turning slowly, with nothing to see on any side. Then, maybe, I could rest. Near the end of my British grandmother''s life, one memory came back to her again and again, as her appetite dwindled and she shrank into her chair. ''I''m with my friend Joy,'' she said to me, smiling at the air, one autumn morning six weeks before she died.
''Oh, Joy. She was wonderful. It was the right name for her. Joy!'' ''How old were you?'' I was arranging five tiny pieces of dolly mixture on a plate at her elbow, hoping to tempt her. ''Perhaps about ten. I can just see her now. Walking up the hill in front of me.'' Her smile caught and stayed.
Half an hour later, she''d lost the memory of telling me and she described the scene again: watching Joy climb that hill, and climbing up after her. I think that memory of walking after Joy lay at the core of who my grandmother was. To steal a phrase by Virginia Woolf, it was the base that her life stood upon. Woolf considered her own life founded on an early memory, from when she was a child on holiday in St Ives, in Cornwall. She describes the scene in an autobiographical fragment from ''Sketch of the Past'': If life has a base that it stands upon, if it is a bowl that one fills and fills and fills - then my bowl without a doubt stands upon this memory . It is of hearing the waves breaking, one, two, one, two, and sending a splash of water over the beach; and then breaking, one, two, one, two, behind a yellow blind. It is of hearing the blind draw its little acorn across the floor as the wind blew the blind out. It is of lying and hearing this splash and seeing this light, and feeling, it is almost impossible that I should be here; of feeling the purest ecstasy I can conceive.
A base that life stands upon. Woolf connects everything she is to that simple early memory. What base does my life stand upon? When I read ''Sketch of the Past'' as an undergraduate, I put down the book and knew, without doubt, that my life stands upon those flat, empty fields in Lahore. Flat landscapes, I realized, had always given meaning to a world that made no sense to me. We grew up watching life through living-room windows which had been covered first with bars and then with a layer of chicken wire, just in case. My mother was British and bewildered; my father was Pakistani, and knew - he said - how things worked, and what was at stake. He made the rules, and it did not occur to my mother that they might be broken. No speaking to neighbours.
No inviting classmates or friends round. And nice girls stayed at home, safe behind the chicken wire. Usually my mother got on quietly with things, while chaos raged around us. At five every morning she rose to boil the huge silver daigchees of milk, so that by the time we woke up it would be safe and cool to drink. She killed cockroaches when they crawled out of drains; she ran downstairs when my grandmother hollered for her; she knelt every evening by the power outlet, burning pesticide mats to kill the mosquitoes. My mother thrives in a crisis, and every night in Pakistan was a small crisis. It wouldn''t occur to her to complain. But the relentless noise of Lahore pierced even her stoicism.
The car horns, pressed down and held with both hands. The shouting. The motorcycles revving. The sudden bangs that were usually firecrackers and not guns. Usually. So every once in a while, my mother would break, would wander through the house, back and forth, crying out against the relentless noise. She had grown up in rural Scotland, a lonely child in a half-empty house, where you could hear one car coming for a mile and every creak sounded loud. The only life I knew was hot and dirty and crowded, bodies pressed against each other: oil sizzling, loud music on my grandmother''s TV, my uncles arguing.
Between fourteen and twenty-five people lived in my house in Lahore at any one time, coming and going. So did, at various times, rabbits, goats, chickens, geese, budgies, dogs, cats, turkeys, peacocks, chicks and parrots. My father had his own bedroom; the rest of us - my mother, me and three sisters - lived in another, piling over each other, shouting and fighting in hushed voices so as not to wake him while he slept. There was nowhere to run. Things happened all at once, all the time. My grandfather, half mad, paced the corridors shouting ''Help!'' The house caught fire. Furniture piled up and was covered with sheets, as if the chairs and sofas had died and were waiting to be laid out for burial. Our garden was a little bleached patch, too hot to step into in summer.
At night mosquitoes arrived, buzzing malaria, and we hid inside. Armed robbers came to the house; we children sat in the bath and turned off all the lights and waited, holding our breath, as downstairs a man held a gun to my aunt''s head. Life bit hard, I knew. It was a fact one couldn''t get around. The way things were. Everything was scary and dangerous and happening right in front of me. Reality meant living continuously up against a basic truth: that the world would hide nothing from you, even if you were eight years old. Those fields on the way to school gave me a fantasy of space to stretch out in, and distance from the chaos at home.
And yet they also seemed to sum up the way life was, when I was eight and starting to notice things. The world was a flat plain with nowhere to hide. It was better to know, I thought, than to have teachers and friends pretend that everything was all right. Nothing was all right. I was a small hard creature, knowing what I knew; as resolute and still and enclosed in myself as the flat landscape that drew me towards it. I waited, every morning, as the dawn mists rose over Lahore, for the car to round the corner and open out on to those fields. And the flat fields told me, wordlessly, that I wasn''t mad. That I knew something important.
That they knew too, and would reflect it back to me, whenever I needed. Flat landscapes have always given me a way to love myself. I had no words for this feeling, in either English or Urdu.