| As a qualified Chartered Accountant, I should have known better than to borrow a servant’s bicycle. As a jobless one, I had no option. I needed the cycle more than he did. |
| Looking back to that summer of 1966, I am trying to remember why I agreed to work at the Lahore Museum, and why I chose to commute to it on a cycle or so months that I spent there. It was not for the money: I was paid nothing for the seven or so months that I spent there. It was not for the facilities: I was allocated a chair and desk in the Curator’s empty office, and when the bulb in the solitary light above me fused. I was expected to replace it. It was not for the food; if I wanted refreshments, a viscid tea and mud-coloured lunch of chikr-cholas (pureed and highly spiced chickpeas served on a nan) had to be ordered from the small canteen located behind the museum. And it was certainly not to gain admission to a privileged world of academia, for I soon discovered that the ignorant staff in the Museum belonged to a timeless void which had been bypassed by history. |
Published in THE NATION 11 Feb. 1993, and reprinted in THE ARMLESS QUEEN (1994). |
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