Bilal Ghafoor

From Locked in Amber: Travels in Pakistan

“…from London’.

‘Lunn-dthunn?’ they asked in surprise. Although the gun was lowered, they were not happy. This was too tall a tale for them. They opened my bag and pulled out my book of Derek Walcott poems, paper and pen and a couple of hundred rupees. They carefully put everything back and handed me the book.

‘Read’.

I opened the book to the poem that I had been reading obsessively since I had found it in a Karachi scrap paper market.

‘So much life/So much life like the rain of this dark August’, I began.

Their faces were slashed by grins. I obviously sounded like a foreigner…”