The outside world through my window has melted in a shimmering haze. It is the sort of heat which weighs, it is the irrepressible force, which makes the birds hush and sends all sensible life in doors. Even the air I breathe is overused with the bad air of the city, and the sticky air that lives out of the burned soil. In Lahore summer time is not the season, but the siege. We lock ourselves in with the curtains, with air conditioners, and by days we count by the buzzing of a compressor and artificial shiver of coolness. We are reduced to running between air-conditioned comforts of home, auto and work.
It is in the midst of this lengthy siege when the mind, in longing to escape, start to sketch the maps of other worlds. The dream that many Lahoris share is a well known dream: to be a pilgrim, northwards to the bleak, austere greatness of the mountains. Yet this year my imagination (based as it has been upon stories, movies, and a passionate desire to know a different reality) has been undertaking a much bolder journey. It has been fantasizing about a cross-Atlantic leap, of a city that is farthest possible alternative to a Lahori summer. Not only a cool city but a wet one too. the city that is not brown and dusty, but thousand shades of impossible green. The city where the blast of a horn is not the most natural city sound, but the tapping of rain and the howl of a foghorn.
Not, this summer, the vacation-ground, the last resort to which a heat-scorched soul may turn, not a mountain-renclosure, is that city which is wondrous. It is a huge, living, water-woven city of the Pacific Northwest of the United States of America. It is Emerald City: Seattle, Washington.
To dream of Lahore and dream of Seattle is to dream of the photographic negative of one-self. To dream of the world where sky is no longer done oppressive but rather a blanket of subdued and diffused light; where the water is not a thing that has to be rationed, but an infinite and truly defining element, Where beige has been replaced by an intense and rich and life giving green. It is a release, not only out of the heat, but out of the very fibres of our actuality.
It is only after the aircraft doors open that happen at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport that the dream turns into a mind boggling experience with all the senses in motion. You open the door and you feel prepared to be met by a wave of heat, but what you are met by is not heat. It is cool and soft and moist air. The air is very pure, and is somehow shiny, clean, with a smell of pine needles, earth that smells dank, and something distinctly marine, something salty. It is the smell of a clean world. Light is changed also. It is quiet and smooth and not harshed with shadows and glaring light like Lahore, that is filtered through a high white sheet of cloud. The opening out into the air of Seattle is like drinking of a cool clear spring after a lifetime of thirstiness. It is the sense of being there, not only to a new city, but to a new element.
The real journey of discovery started appropriately on the water. It nurtured and framed the city of Seattle. Saltwater Puget Sound is located to the west and freshwater Lake Washington to the east. Lake Union establishes a connection between them in the middle of the city. It is not the city that is lucky to be built on a coast; it is the city, where water is given as the central planning idea. The world-renown Washington State Ferries, huge green and white ships, silently Silence the Sound linking the city with the islands beyond. With a roar and a spray the seaplanes leave and come to the lake, the pilots apparently as offhand as rickshaws. The shores of the lakes are lined with houseboats of all sorts, the picturesque shacks all the way to the gloriously architectural. Not a new idea, but you still get the impression of how a floating life would be like.
I went there one afternoon to Gas Works Park, a restored industrial facility in the northern part of Lake Union whose bones of refinery towers stood intact as steampunk works of art. High on a grass hill I looked down on the city. The waterfront town-skyline, the Space Needle its elegant, retro-futuristic, spike, rose front the water. Kayaks and sailboats left patterns of the lake surface. Here was an ideal atmosphere of town and country, a combination of opposites which was felt to be carefully calculated and yet spontaneous. The acoustics were an ocean apart a not the incitation of horns, but the soft touch of the water, the squawking of gulls and the peaceful blow of a ferry column beyond off.
The green then is the very skin of the city to be set against water which is its circulatory system. It is known as the Emerald City, and there is nothing farfetched about the name. It is the green so prevalent and intensive it seems one of the main characters in the narrative of the city. It was an eye opener as I took my nature walks in Discovery Park, a huge urban wilderness located on a bluff overlooking Puget Sound. The Douglas firs, and Western red cedars, and Bigleaf maples all loomed up about me, their trunks garlanded in moss, their canopy making a cathedral of green light. It was all undergrowth and ferns on the forest-floor. to wander in a deep, flourishing forest, with the odor of damp ground and of mouldering leaves, and yet all in the midst of a city, was a strange thing.
And after that there is the borrowed scenery. Seattle does not hold back a single card during a sunny day. Floating above the horizon to the southeast like a heavenly vision is the Mount Rainier. The natives refer to it as Tahoma or the mountain that is God. It is a giant volcano which is crowned by glaciers, a 14,411-feet colossus that makes all other features and forms of landscape insignificant. Its existence is life-humbling. It serves to inform the city of the giant and mighty and violent world which envelops it. Having witnessed Rainier on any clear morning as it is coloured pink by the rising sun on its white cap, is indeed a moment of out and out dazzling wonder. It is the landlord that is silent, majestic in the city.
At Pike Place Market, as it turned out, was the soul of Seattle. It is not simply a market place but it is the throbbing heart of the city. It is a many tier maze of images, sound and smell. I was transfixed, as the famous fishmongers threw huge salmon about the place, and sung strange chants. I was amazed by the pyramids of shining fruit and vegetables cherries, berries and apples so large and so coloured I had never seen. I was strolling among the stalls where they sold traditional artisanal cheeses as well as handcrafted jewelry and unusual art. It was of a wild nature, amiable, orderly. This is where I saw the first-ever Starbucks which is a small shop now but created a world empire and realized that, in this place, coffee is not simply a drink; it is a culture, a ceremony, an art. The city is flooded in coffee shops of different personalities, a kind of living room, of the community, where people work, read, and talk.
This passion to the craft does not stop at coffee. It is a local town of small-batch, of good stuff. Whether at the micro-breweries in the Ballard Neighborhood, or studios of the glass-blower Dale Chihuly, appreciation of the items made with both care and craft and craftsmanship is appreciated.
The weather was probably the thing that was most surprising to me in my reaction. The June Gloom or the constant drizzle that a Seattleite may lament about was to me a deep pleasure. It was a fortunate thing the sky was cool and cloudy; a relief after the despotism of the sun. The constant but seeming light showers were no inconvenience at all; they were new, an excuse to step into warm cafe or friendly book shop. It was weather that beckoned a jacket, a feeling of being cozy, of being comfortable which is not possible even in a Lahori summer. It was not thru a consuming weather.
The Seattle-warmth did not come, I realized, in climatic form; but in a cultural way. It is through the authentic enthusiasm that we see with the cheesemonger in Pike Place market as he talks about his products. It is in the silent concentration of the customers in a coffee shop, each to his own self but in one place. It is in the profound and endearing attachment of the city to its natural features and this adoration is reflected by the very well-tended parks and a people that appear to exist in the out-of-doors and do not mind whatever the weather holds.
I am once back in Lahore. The fan keeps on turning its tiresome circles. This is a blanket that is very old, a familiar enemy. but I have changed. The journey to Seattle is not merely a set of the photos and memories. I have integrated it in my mental picture.
When I can no longer bear the weight of the heat in the room, I shut my eyes, and imagine the warmth of the moist cooling breeze on my face, back in Seattle. I remember a smell of pine needles after the rain. When it is too much noise of the city, I think of the quiet depth and quiet greenness of the forest in Discovery Park, or the unobtrusive sound of the ferries in the Sound. It is the remembrance of the grandeur of Mount Rainier, which provides a sort of scope, a silent notion that everyday annoyance of life is minuscule and temporary.
A trip to Seattle was not just a relaxation vacation; it was a journey to alternative reality. It has made me realize that the greatness of a city is not about its monuments but also in its association with its surroundings; not You cannot really get to know a place until the time you taste it, and the flavors of Seattle were as sharp and illuminating as the weather. Food in Lahore is Baroque and a glorious complexity. It is a festival of spice, of the slow preservations where in the meat becomes impossible tender in rich, perfumed gravies and the vegetables swimming in lures of multilayered turmeric, coriander and garam masala. the zenith of any Lahori meal, though, is more likely to be a preparation such as mutton karahi or chicken tikka, in which the chemistry of flame, oil, and 12 spices combines to form a strong, aggressive flavour profile evocative of tradition, celebration, and an epicurean past.
The philosophy of saying yes to change was replaced with the philosophy of saying yes to purity as I found out in Seattle. The temple of this philosophy was once more Pike Place Market. As I looked through the fishmongers I was surprised by the radical freshness of the food. The mountains of sparkling Dungeness crab, the piles of salty smelling piles of fresh oysters and everything wonderful, but especially the beautiful silver skinned salmon, were not simply produce, but were sacred celebrities. Here, I was to find out, the object was not to disguise or to raise the fundamental meat with spice, but to handle it as lightly and delicately as might be so as to bring out to its best advantage its own peculiar quality.about its economy.
It helped me understand that not every sky has to be clear and sunny to be beautiful and that a nice rain can turn out to be as much of a blessing as a clear sky. I came to Seattle as an attempt to escape the sun but I got more than I expected. I noticed a city which has mastered the art of living with water and light, forests and mountains. I got another kind of warmth, the other meaning of beauty. and on my way I took home with me a corner of that Emerald City, a quiet cool green place in the midst of my mind, and whenever the siege of summer grows upon me I can always visit it.
It was a dish that made this difference sit in sharp focus originally to me; one afternoon in a restaurant by the water I ate cedar plank salmon. it was a mere fish, roasted on cedar plank, spiced only with salt, pepper, and a slice of lemon. The flavor was perfect. It smelled clean and fresh and oceanic, somewhere there was a light, smoky aroma of the wood. It was sweet as pure icy water of the Pacific. This is what I realized at that point in time. The Lahori cuisine was of historical, epic novel written with numerous subplots, multi-dimensional characters. The Seattle food was an ideal poem reduced to bare minimum, a poem in which no word was redundant and beauty was in the deep simplicity. And this was not that this one was better than the other, but these were two totally different ways of putting honour on the act of nourishment: one on the genius of the chef, the other on the genius of the place itself.
In addition to the climate and to the food, there was a third climate, more insidious still, to be negotiated: social. Social interaction is air we breathe in Lahore. The community is the tapestry of life inseparably woven in together. A visit to the neighborhood shop ends up in a chat with the store owner who talks about his household. You will find a stranger in the street inquiring you as to where you belong and what you do, not as a spying form of an outsider, but because it is a genuine ingrained habit of social interaction. Privacy is a luxury and a thing that can be regarded as loneliness. Hospitality is demanding and instantaneous; a person you just met may invite you with such insistence to have a cup of tea or a meal that you had no other options except to agree.
Public anonymity is an experience I enjoyed whilst in Seattle, in some cases quite a shock. The locals are ever so kind- the barista who could remember your coffee order and give a smile, the bus driver who can wait patiently to give directions and the fellow hiker giving a friendly nod as you pass them in the trail with a greeting of hello in passing. However, beyond these nice words, there was very solid and honored line of personal space. This is what is colloquially termed as the Seattle Freeze- a concept of a cold atmosphere in which friendliness does not often develop into something greater.
To me this freeze was cold, but, cool and refreshing. It was a freedom to walk freely in a crowded city and go on for hours without a single unwanted communication. I could be in a cafe all afternoon reading a book and no one bothered me, it felt like I was a ghost in the best possible meaning. It was a sort of social silence that with its damp antiseptic air, permitted reflection and repose. However, at times missing the hot, outspoken nature of home presented a feeling rather hard to ignore. I felt lack of simple familiarity, the appalling but basically human messiness of social life at Lahore. Seattle was warm like its coffee: carefully prepared, pleasant and instead of in a pot, in your own cup. Lahore was as warm as a common pot of chai: and boiling. Sometimes messy, but there is a sharing of the warmth by everyone drinking of the same pot.
