Club night

The unchallengeable fact that yes, Pakistan has been good to me. And me to it over the years.

Roughly once a week there convenes a club both obscure and exclusive. It meets discreetly in an underground chamber, has no sign over the door, membership list and absolutely no political affiliations or even sympathies. It never seeks new members and has no subscription charges. Mostly it meets on Monday nights, but pressure of work on the members — there are just two — necessitates occasional changes of date. The menu can vary — last night it was the tango, a surpassingly sensuous dance that is edgily suggestive but never smutty — but it could equally be the Bach cello sonatas, the latest movie blockbuster or a film classic from times gone by. Jazz often features, both modern and traditional and snacks are served by a mysterious invisible waiter halfway through the evening.

There is sometimes lively discussion that can range from the state of the cosmos to to-and-fro around the lives of our respective families, with that last night laying the seed of this column.

The price of properties and land in rural Portugal had caught our attention, with the possibility that perhaps, five years hence I and my family would call ‘time’ on Pakistan and head off somewhere remote, pleasant, peaceful and which had a decent red wine available every day at a local café that also sold English-language newspapers. We were waxing lyrical on this idyll when my companion remarked, “Y’know Chris, Pakistan has been good to you.”

“Pakistan has been good to you.” A casual comment that stopped me in my tracks, mainly because of the unchallengeable fact that yes, it has been good to me. And me to it over the years.

When you earn your daily bread by detailing everything that is wrong with the country you live in it can be easy to lose sight of the wider realities. Things like that I live in a city that is peaceful, relatively prosperous, one of the cleanest in the country and is home to good and dear friends, relationships that stretch back many years and will endure.

We all complain about the weather in the summer, and revel in the cold months that quickly erase the memories of torrid June, July and August. We grumble about prices and the way that traffic has got worse in the city as we shop in the pricey malls that have sprung up — another sign of relative affluence. What we never, or at least very rarely do, is reflect on our good fortune.

Good fortune does not come for free, it has to be worked for and has been hard-won, but won it is with a job that pays me reasonably well if not as timely as I would wish. We have a happy smiling-and-laughing daughter that sparkles through our daily life, an assortment of animals in semi-permanent residence and a small dog, allegedly a cross between a pug and a poodle and closely resembling a small explosion in a knitwear factory and inherited from a friend who is, quite coincidentally, setting up house in rural Portugal.

Which brings us full circle and back to the most recent meeting of the Bahawalpur Gentlemen’s club. (I expect a blizzard of ‘harrumphs’ from my women readers for extolling the virtues of such an elitist and gender-exclusive institution, but hey, I’ll roll with the punches.) It may seem anachronous to say ‘count your blessings’ in a country currently in the grip of a major political crisis and floods that are again ravaging the countryside and making miserable lives yet more unhappy and deprived. But count them I will and urge you, dear reader, to do the same.

A member of my family was in Pakistan recently, a consultancy that ran into the quicksand of the beginnings of the demonstrations in Islamabad, and she had to return to UK unexpectedly early. But she left reflecting that Pakistan is nowhere near as black as it is painted and she would be back, perhaps with her boyfriend in tow. We might even offer them both temporary membership of the Bahawalpur Gentlemen’s Club for an evening if they are down this way — and spend a couple of hours ruminating on the fact that it does not hurt, sometimes, to look on the bright side.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 12^th, 2014.

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