I saw a guy on a bike carrying a live peacock under his arm today. Gotta love living in this country...

Well, I’m putting my money where my mouth is (200 rupees to be exact) and I’m going to sew my own jilb. -gasp- I just bought a piece of georgette and I’m clicking my scissors at it in anticipation. The good thing is, I think it’ll turn out ok, InshaAllah. The bad thing is, if it comes out awful, I can’t blame the tailor for it. And if it turns out REALLY awful, I’ll be disillusioned and I’ll have to go back to the tailor. The possibilities for disaster are endless. Hmm.

Had an interesting discussion in class today. One of the funny things about being bi or trilingual is that you hear words in one language that mean something totally bizarre in another. This came up when I noticed that every single one of my Turkish students giggled when we came to the word ‘pathos’ in a vocabulary sheet. In Turkish, pathos are potato chips, and apparently this is funny.

My Irani student was telling me about how the name of a popular Pakistani sweet translates to an extremely obscene word in Persian, and one Pakistani man who knew this took very obvious and very perverse pleasure out of insisting she have some. (moron)

Speaking of morons, our new Prime Minister Zafar Something-or-other Jamali, personally initiated the festivities of the Urs at Bari Imam. That’s the malang Woodstock (props to Shad) that all those filthy fools are in town for. Today the paper is full of pictures of them up to their usual Urs traditions, dancing, smoking charas (marijuana resin) and going into trances. I saw several Urs processions on Sunday, hundreds of people led by malangs, waving colorful banners, beating drums, singing off key and carrying around a big, decorated box, not unlike the Ark of the Covenant (Indiana Jones and Raiders of The Lost Ark.) It was covered in shiny bits and draped in flowers like a Hindu shrine or a Catholic saint statue.

What’s in the box? I don’t know. What could be so important that they would decorate it and have four guys carrying it around on their shoulders for all the devotees to touch and adore? My mother thought the box might be a reliquary containing some body part (like a tooth or a fingernail) of the Bari Imam. Aniraz thought it would be a big box of mithai. You know what? They’re both wrong. That box is actually their week’s supply of DRUGS!

Losers.

Well, I’m going to go menace my new piece of cloth with a yellow crayon. I’m going to draw lines for where I think things are supposed to be (sleeves here, waist there) and in the end we’ll compare this to where things actually went (sleeves there!? waist where?).

This could be interesting. But chances are it’ll just be tragic.

posted by Abez @ 5/26/2003 11:29:00 PM