Tales From The UniversE No 27 - this week's newsletter is from the Manchester Riviera: Playing Cricket With The Kids of Karimabad, Pakistan; Adventures in LovE - part 10 LIVE!; Exclusive poem - i know

An arcadia of imagination

Sep 06, 2023

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Earth burning in sun. Pic: Paradisio Publishing

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1. Adventures in LovE - out now!!!

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2. Playing cricket with the kids of Karimabad, Hunza Valley, Pakistan, spring 1998
In Pakistan you look at the sky and forget you’re looking. Pic: Paradisio Publishing
‘i was young/though never as young as i would become’
In the mountains of north Pakistan, way up in the Hunza valley, in the village of Karimabad at an altitude of 2,500 metres, among the blossoms of late-Winter/Spring 1998, i landed, mid-February, and found another life, a different kind of people who were vibrant, poor, generous, showing eyes lit clear and passed down from the thousands of days before as i waited for the Khunjerab Pass to open into China, to take me along the ancient Silk Road from the tip of the Karakoram Highway into the land of Mao and Sun Tze where Kashgar meets the traveller with its livestock market of snakes and horses, monkeys and sheep, and all other animals you can imagine.
And what did i see these 6 weeks living in their village, among them, being them?
Copious things.
There was this:
One glistening sun-scorched afternoon i sat outside my concrete-walled abode and looked down on the next terraced row cut into the mountain and saw the butcher lead a goat into the dirt and tie the creature up, he had a blade that curved and he moved this through air and cut its throat and i saw blood spurt, life get non-life, man dismember living thing, scythe skin and bone apart and all was clean and slow and quick and i wondered:
Where did the goat’s thoughts and memories go?
What was the last image it saw as the twirling light faded forever?
And the butcher took the parts of the creature back inside and i returned to reading The Brothers Karamazov for the second time this year away exploring the trails of India, Pakistan, China, Thailand and Laos.
Baltit Fort, Karimabad. Pic: Hayyain
In Karimabad i read, too, The Unbearable Lightness of Being in which Milan Kundera reveals the beauty of cows.
And:
The Khunjerab Pass hits 17,434ft; it is the highest paved crossing between nations, you feel you ride the ceiling of the world, you watch K2 rise up from Karimabad among the Karakorums where they range between Pakistan and China.
They call the Pass the Eighth Wonder of the World.
i nestled in to wait until 1 May for it to clear, the snow melt, ice slip back into mountain streams, living in my large-roomed dwelling on one of the stonewalled, steepling straits cut across the slopes, the Hunza River’s bluegreen waters flowing 1,000 metres below.
And those colours of spring. Pinks and powder blues, buttercup yellows taken from tints of the sun that shone in chill alpine air, purples like jewels, the ingot-branched trees and bushes that clung to the soil, and the sounds of the valley, children playing, voices ringing out pure across the peaks, at 5 and 6pm when sundown came, echoes of a childhood i forgot once but still can now recall.
And:
i got a letter from my mother, who has tried to forget me, this a reply to a previous note of mine to her, and i see still, today, a line she wrote:
‘The people of north Pakistan are some of the longest-living on earth.’
All of this while playing the daily games of tapeball cricket with the kids of Karimabad, of the Hunza Valley, of Pakistan (‘Pak’: Persian for ‘pure’; ‘Stan’: ‘land of’), who ranged from 3 years old to men, the game loved enough by them for there to be 11-v-11 a-side, umpires, a scorer, and to critique my leg-spin delivered with a dip and curve fashioned at Lancaster Royal Grammar School 15 years before.
And i see them now these childs, as we are all childs, caught in the lustrous light of afternoons no one else in the world ever saw: moving dancing figures playing a game for fun.
Winding black tape around half a-tennis ball for it to swing through the spring air of Karimabad, the Hunza Valley, Pakistan.
Rapt, transfixed.
Nothing lived before these moments and nothing yet lived to come.