The Koel's Cry.

I'm sitting here, in an early morning periodontology lecture, listening intently, when suddenly I hear the Koel's cry. It's odd listening to her, mango season and spring are over, so this Koel is a little unseasonal. But with it's very first 'koo' I'm transported back to lazy summer afternoons at my nano's, looking out her dinning room window into her tree-shaded backyard. The whole house is down for their afternoon siesta and like that line in that christmas poem, "not a creature was stirring...not even a mouse". Maybe my memories have been airbrushed and softened by time, chances are I was just deathly bored in those afternoons (after all this is pre-cable), but now whenever I hear the Koel and whenever I think back to those afternoons, all I remember is an exceptional feeling of peace and calm. It's funny how one sound can trigger so potent a memory and transform a whole morning for me. It is these sudden sounds and sights and smells that make me so thankfull that I'm still in Karachi. That make it so difficult for me to ever even imagine setting up a family anywhere outside Pakistan, and that make me pray with all my soul that Pakistan makes it through it's problems. That it stays afloat, because I don't think I can live elsewhere.