All the Stories are True
We leave Lahore: dirty prestige projects in glass and concrete give way to rough brick warrens of houses and workshops. We drive on out into fields where rice is being harvested and past kilns that fire the red bricks for Lahore. Here, whole families of indentured labourers work like ancient Hebrew slaves under mounds of clay besides ovens hotter than the weather. There is a dark ring around our city of furnace smoke and injustice that puffs it into an ever bigger metropolis. Above the toll booth at the start of the highway out of Lahore is an advert for new-build houses: 'A chance! to change the story.' Change happens over three days. We cross four rivers, speed past the capital and up into the foothills. We wind down the windows and breathe in cool air, filtering through trees, first deciduous then pine. We are on holiday. We descend into the Kunhar valley where the trees are once again tropical but then back up and steadily up and up. The bazaars we pass through change from...
