Masu and Murti

Last Saturday, Masuma finally convinced me to get out all the camera equipment (including the tripod) and shoot her and Murtaza at French Beach.

They were nauseatingly cute together- so much so that I felt invasive at times.
Here's what turned out.

It determined that never again do I want to have a people photoshoot in my life- I'm just not able to make people comfortable and at ease while staring into a camera lens.

Moving

There's something extremely satisfying about opening boxes and finding things you'd forgotten existed. I loved every second of our moving adventure

Moving was a lot of this



and then things began to look like this







There were a few disappointing moments...




my room began to accumulate a lot of bedding



and then we started unloading the books




and I felt moved in :)

More French Beach

Somehow in the years that I haven't spent in Karachi, I've forgotten just how awful camels smell. My dad always shakes his head and says "Badly designed animals."




Some more pictures of French Beach-
I'm kinda in love with pebbles, so be glad I haven't posted more of those.

Tribal Truck Art

Found on a street in Old Clifton with a sign that proclaimed Tribal Truck Art.
I have no idea what it means, or where it's from-
But it was love at first sight

Mohatta Palace

When I first started taking pictures, someone told me that if didn't like the way light moved, how it transformed an object, photography was not for me.
That advice has remained with me for years and years.
Lighting and I are not friends- we fight a lot.
But at Mohatta Palace today, the sun sat low and in the west, and I found that shadows and geometric angles can make or break a photographic experience.



The History of the Mohatta Palace:
The summer home of Shivratan Mohatta, the palace was built in the late 1920s in the Rajasthan style from the Mogul era. After Mohatta was forced to leave Karachi (political upheaval made a Hindu's stay in Pakistan close to impossible) the palace became the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. After a while, it was given to Fatima Jinnah, the sister of Muhammad Ali Jinnah (the founder of Pakistan) where it became the hub for her campaign for presidency. After her death, Shireen bai, her sister moved into the grounds for many years.



Today, the palace has been converted into a museum that currently holds an exhibition called "Tales of the Tiles," which showcases the history of decorative ceramics in the region of Pakistan

I'd been hounding both of my parents to take my to the palace from the first time I glimpsed it out of a car window, driving past Do Talwar (Two Swords).

Rusted metal, rotting wood- offset by the shadows and lines of the window sills were absolutely beautiful. I was instantly in love- floral motifs, balustrades, spandrels and exquisite railings aside, there's something majestic about the palace.


I made both Ammar and Abajaan insane with my incessant need to shift my camera and stop every two seconds. After the eighth or ninth window sill, even Mom was irritated-





Behind the palace, we discovered an assorted collection of "English Statues." Queen Victoria stood tall and pale in her alabaster form.
I learned from one of the men working at the building that after Shireen Bai's death, the palace was left to rot. It was only after Benazir Bhutto's government assigned Rs. 70 million to the Culture Department that the palace was converted into a museum. Apparently the building had to be sandblasted to its orignal color as layers of soil and grime had accumulated over the decades. The frescoes on the ceilings had to be repainted by hand, and the roof, doors and windows had to be carefully conserved.

Linens and Things

Pick one, any one.

On Beauty and Being Just

When the sun's high in the sky, and you can feel the heat bead on your upper lip, I've found that the kind of restlessness that seeps into me can only be solved by reading.
Usually, I grab a lawn chair, sit in the garden by the rock-wall and curl up and read. One end of my dupatta curled in my hand, wiping the sweat from my forehead.
My courtship of book stores in Karachi has been similar to that of Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw-
I walked out of my first bookstore with Wally Lamb's This Much I Know is True and On Beauty.
It's been a while since I really fell headlong in love with a book like this one. Zadie Smith has always been able to astound me with the way she develops her characters- each and everyone as real and solid as I imagine real people.
This book however, was the kind of book that stays with you days after reading it.
She writes so beautifully- each and every word carefully chewed, tasted and deliberated before being put on paper.

The book is her homage to Howard's End by E.M. Forster- but it's so lyrically rich, that I'd never compare her to him. Her title and her story are influenced by Elaine Scarry's essay "On Beauty and Being Just." The Belsey children and Victoria (Vee) Kipps, are as real as if they were walking off the page and into my life. I can imagine each and every nook and cranny of the small college town she describes, and the esoteric conversation that occurs within the academia circles makes me relive those conversations that happened in Karen Osborne's Intro to Creative Writing class.

There are very few books I'd recommend to everyone that I know, and this is definitely one of them. Hand in hand with Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance, Khaled Hosseini's Kite Runner, and Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, On Beauty's climbed to the top of my list of books you have to read before you die.