Elton John’s ‘Club at the End of the Street’, since it’s been stuck in my head for a while.

Penni’s guest-blogging at Inside A Dog this month (twice the fun!) and did an earliest memory meme, so I’m picking it up too. Hey, I should be blogging and writing and am doing neither at the moment, so this is a good thing. Seriously.

My earliest memory is of sounds – my father brushing his teeth, the clatter of crockery when my family had breakfast, more clattering when my grandmother came home from work, the car horn when my father came back from work, the sound that the front door of my grandmother’s house made when someone opened it, the different sounds each ceiling fan in the house made. Layered on top of that are smells – porridge and toast and chocolate milk and laundry and slightly damp clothes being ironed and the smell of the jasmine we’d collect in the evenings to make into garlands. The dominant smell isn’t really a smell though – it’s the dry, slightly grainy smell that seemed to follow the sunshine around. Inside, outside, in cars, in other people’s houses, I could smell it underneath all the other smells. These are all Islamabad smells and sounds though – I don’t have any memory of Sri Lanka that I know of.

The first full thing I remember is the day, when I was about 2 or 3 years old, that I realized adults didn’t always tell you the truth. I’d asked about something – I don’t recall what but, knowing me, it was probably badly-timed and ‘inappropriate’ – and had received some sort of vague, nonsense answer. I was walking up the four steps that linked my parents’ room to the rest of the house and I remember the moment not just because it was when it clicked that the answer I’d got wasn’t true but because it was when I realized that I could tell. I remember also realizing pretty quickly that it wouldn’t be a good idea to tell the grownups that I was on to them. Instead I decided that I needed to learn to read asap so I find out for myself.

I remember my mother being ill and in bed a lot and being kept away from her because of it, which I didn’t mind because the room she was in always smelled metallic and cold. That’s also probably why I have so many memories of my grandparents. One very clear memory is of looking at the Margalla hills from the back windows of the house and being fascinated by the shapes at the very tops of the hills. Trees, as it turned out, but my grandfather saw me looking and told me that they were monkeys who were observing my behavior. I still get a little creeped out when I see them.

I don’t remember what my mix of languages was pre-Geneva, but I do remember not speaking Punjabi because one day my brother and I decided to make an effort to speak it (or rather I decided and since he had nobody else to play with, he had to go along with me). Our parents were very amused and of absolutely no help at all, which was frustrating because I wanted to learn it. Later when we moved to Geneva and the number of languages around us diminished enough for me to pick up on the Turkish my parents spoke, I tried doing the same thing, with the same result. They didn’t want us to learn Turkish either.

I do agree with Penni about first-borns being the memory-keepers of the family. Being older, I naturally remember more than my brother does, but the odd thing is that I often seem to remember more than my parents as well. Actually it’s probably not more overall but just more things specific to our family unit since I didn’t have the ‘noise’ of work and family and friends and all that. On top of that, since we moved around so much, my brother and I were probably a lot more focused on our parents and each other than other children our age.

Hey if anyone decides to do this meme, let me know.

Even though I’m dreading the trip to the library that I have to make in just a bit, I think I might not be entirely unhappy about the coming of summer. I generally like the end of the year, and I generally dislike the heat. Of the two though, it seems my fondness for the last two months of the year is greater than my dislike of the heat, specially when Australia seems to enjoy it so much (barring the bushfires, of course). Holidays, Christmas, carols by the lake, long lazy days – I think I see the appeal.

Now the thing is, the way I know for sure that the season’s turned is not the weather forecast as such but my nose and arms. There’s a difference in the way the air smells and feels in each season, just as there is before rainfall. In autumn, the air begins to feel more dense and seems to hit the front of my nose as I breathe. That first whiff of ozone means that winter is setting in. When the air expands enough to carry the smell of grass and flowers, it’s spring. And when it expands so much that it fills not just your nose but your whole mouth with every breath, it’s summer. Which is unfortunate, because summer is also when everything starts to stink.

You know what I’m talking about. Bad smells just don’t seem as bad in winter – either the air is too still to carry them or it’s windy and you’re too busy feeling miserable and cold to register this annoyance at the tip of your nose. But in summer, with every air molecule taking up far more space than is decent, odors invade your consciousness, forcing you not just to smell them but to taste them as well. Even relatively good smells can turn cloying or unpleasant in this kind of weather.

On the train today, for instance, people had clearly taken their cue from the predicted high of 36 degrees Celsius and been extra generous with the deodorant and other nice-smelling stuff. In itself, this is something to be appreciated and encouraged, specially on tightly packed trains and trams. But when you mix that many different smells together in that kind of concentration, they will blend to create an overall scent. Unfortunately for Melburnians, the smell they seem to create when they all huddle together on public transport is: Baygon. And I don’t mean the politely scented bug sprays you get here in the first world, either. I’m talking about the stuff they sell in South Asia: unadulterated poison that can stop a rat-sized daddy-roach in its tracks and half choke you to death in the process.

Still, it was better than that other harbinger of summer: body odor. There is something inherently upsetting about BO, I find – something as invasive and offensive as cigarette smoke in a closed room. Much like cigarette smoke, BO is often also unapologetic. It has no problem with its existence; you’re the one with the problem. Which is why I dread sitting in the aisle seat in trams because sooner or later it will get crowded enough and someone will reach for the strap hanging above my head and, in doing so, will expose their stinky underarms. Being short, standing doesn’t really provide any respite – it can, in fact make it worse if, as often happens, I’m about armpit-height to the (usually male, usually large) offender.

So I have devised a strategy.
It’s simple, really. Carry a can of antiperspirant deodorant and, when confronted with a foul armpit, spray liberally. If the recipient raises a fuss, you can always claim self-defense. Think about it. Rather than waiting it out by burying your nose into the recesses of your handbag or just hand or sleeve or anything else you may have with you that smells better than these atmosphere polluters, DO something about it. And since you can’t very well carry around soap and water to offer them a wash, this is the next best thing. It won’t keep the smell away so much as mask it, but hey, the goal is to make your own life easier, not give hygiene lessons.

Vigilante deodorizing. Give it a try today.

I’ve been hibernating the last few months and have consequently missed out on a lot that’s been happening online and off. The biggest news, of course, is that Musharraf has declared a state of emergency in Pakistan, leaving himself the only law of the land. L’etat, c’est lui, indeed.

Kyla has been writing about the situation steadily and about her participation in the Lahore protest on  Nov 5.

Ameel has blogged about the situation as well, explaining rather well why Musharraf was able to gain our trust and support back when he took over and why people with foresight and a grasp of history insisted that, for all the good he may have been doing, having him around was still a bad idea.

Both Kyla and Ameel have linked to other blogs that are reporting on happenings on the ground.  The Internet’s the only source of information we have really since television and radio channels have been taken off the air and newspapers are not allowed to print anything critical of the government. GEO is alive and well online, though a notice on the site says that they’re not putting too much content up because of the heavy traffic they’ve been getting. Dawn is also operating online despite having been muzzled by the new press ordinance. I don’t know if there’s a difference between their print and online versions at the moment since I haven’t got access to the newspaper itself.

I’ve said this elsewhere so I may as well do so here: the crap the US and UK are spouting about democracy and the elections and their ‘insistence’ that both be returned is just that. It’s for show only. If members of civil society and the government were able to predict that this would happen if Musharraf stuck around too long, so was the US (and when I say ‘US’ I mean the States as well as its little pets). Yes, democracy and the constitution should be upheld and elections should be held, yes the army should get out of government, but the idea that it should or could be done because a foreign government that is interested only in using the patch of land that happens to be Pakistan says so is unacceptable. What earthly difference does it make to the US what kind of government exists in Pakistan? The fact is, it doesn’t. So long as said government does not interfere with the US’s goals in the area, it’s really none of the US’s concern who runs the country.  This very visible media-friendly hand-wringing is, to mix metaphors, a lot of lip-service to public opinion back home (since some of them might actually know what a Pakistan is and will therefore be concerned that their super-duper government isn’t effectively enlightening us benighted savages) and little else.

So instead of listening to their protestations and proclamations, divert yourselves with  Musharraf’s amended press ordinance and the now-suspended constitution of Pakistan.