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 being confident concrete structures, places of trade and commerce to being ever more precarious: pieces of timber nailed together on to the sides of mountains to make shelters supplying essentials to the folk who live here. They cluster together in beleaguered villages balanced on thin terraces cut into mountainsides from which they coax out winter vegetables and on which they keep an animal.

We stop three times a day in such places for hot roti, omelettes, pumpkin curry or dal and chai. Every time, the proprietors' language is different from the last. We are driving through communities who have forever been isolated from one another by the mountains between them. After two and a half days we cross the Babusar Pass at over 4,000 meters above sea level. There, the wind never ceases to whip through, so that tents and tarpaulin roofs flap wildly, heralding an emergency that never ends. The police and those who have set up extreme tea stalls from which to serve fried eggs to travellers cower under tightly tied down canvas. They are the survivors. 

But though the Karakorum Mountain range all around is austere and its formidable mass bears down upon us, there is little time for me to meditate on the meaning and mystery of mountains. We are travelling with children. The Babusar Pass is where there isn't a toilet when my son needs one. The sound of the Indus rushing beneath us is the sound of squabbling about a packet of cheese flavoured crisps.  Where the valley widens and grows lush, a green surprise in a world of rock, is where I feed the baby behind a curtain in 'family wing' of a road side cafe.

Once in the Hunza Valley, we take an excursion in a jeep. I sit behind my five year old son and try to see things through his eyes in front of me. Poplars stand to attention at the feet of the brown rock mountains, learning how to grow tall. There are snow caps pointing the way. I am happy my children are learning the world is not flat. They see that their farm play, their miniature pens for a couple of tiny cows, goats and sheep is all true. When my son draws his usual fire station - fire engine - fire fighter montage, now he puts a zig-zag above it all, with a blue line beneath it, 'the mountains and the river', he explains. 

The river: gold comes out of it. On glittering sand banks below, families pour bucketfuls of water through sieves. At the end of the day they sometimes have gold. Sometimes mountains fall into the river. We know because we see their remains where it roars and foams.

We are learning the kindness of strangers: 'Come and have lunch with us, you are our guests.' Arms opened wide and 'let me rock your baby for you' and she sleeps. A heavy gift of grapes, green and purple. We are grasshoppers in the land and we wait for milk and honey to flow.

We are in a garden among trees that are pleasing to the eye and good for food: apricots, almonds, walnuts, pomegranates, apples. The place is suffused with green light. I lay my baby down on a golden cloth and when I next glance at her she is kicking and laughing for the first time. There are brownies about and my elfin changeling has been replaced with my own rosy daughter. 

When we look in the sky we see jagged frozen lands above us. Light streams from them, dazzling our eyes.

There are wooden doorways into the mountainsides.

There is a man here who glides on warm currents of air. They call him 'the bird man.'

There is a castle in the clouds, a gift from a Tibetan princess.

Eden will be restored.

All the stories are true.