Eighty-four people were killed and two hundred wounded in a suicide bomb last night in Quetta. This morning the hotel is sombre; the breakfast lounge is quiet and guards with double barrel shotguns pace the roof tops. As I head out through Karachi the driver tells me “The City is on High Alert”. Streets are strewn with reinforced steel and barbed wire. Machine gun turrets have appeared from nowhere. (pic from my hotel room)
The car turns away from another blocked street and by method of trial and error we arrive at the most politically visible and creatively charged gathering of international Pakistani novelists, ministers, diplomats, business men, including George Galloway, and the general reading public. The air is charged. It may not be same city as the one I drifted to sleep in but along with thousands of others I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else in the world right now. I step out of the car into the buzz of the festival.
It is now the day after and I am at the airport about to fly back to England.
Lemn, I attended your reading at the PACC that day. It was mesmerizing, to say the least. As i mentioned that day sitting in was truly therapeutic for us all in the audience. While Pakistan and Karachi in particular is gong through terrible trials by fire and blood, it was good to see our children, the legacy of our bones and blood, laugh and lose themselves in your poetry and power. I dare say, a l’il Lemn shall go a long, long way into inspiring them/us all! God bless you, and hope you return to our shores when things settle! All thebest,
Thankyou William Henderson for putting into words such graceful feedback. I take it to heart. Thankyou