HEAT

"In the sweat of thy face shalt thou drink tea"













Cycling east continued with a ride from Hyderabad to Tando Jam, and from there to Shahdadpur via Tando Adam. It was hot. No, it was very hot. Somewhere between 45 and 50 degrees Celsius. I imagine it's a bit like sitting on a home trainer inside a Turkish steam bath.
It requires a new strategy.


(Picture: 'Cycle')

Normally I would start cycling somewhere between 9 and 10 am, pedal a good 60 kilometres, have lunch, and then do the next 60 or so kilometres till it gets dark. Now, I've got to use the time when the weather is bearable, so from sunrise (around 6 am) to 11. I've tried cycling around 4 pm, but then the air is still (much) warmer than your body temperature. Very uncomfortable. It makes cycling into a mind game. Physically you can go on, but mentally you are losing it.
Somewhere around 6 it's doable again, which doesn't leave much time for putting on extra kilometres, as it gets dark around half 7.


(Picture: the heat trying to make a picture of me and his colleagues, holding the lens in the wrong direction.)

Heat. It reminds me of the Michael Mann's movie of 1995. Pacino as the detective (the "heat"), De Niro as the villain. "If you spot me coming around that corner... you just gonna walk out?" Pacino asks De Niro in the classic road house scene, in which the two rivals are said to have used stand-ins as they didn't want to be in the same room together. Great acting, decor (the express ways of Los Angeles, deserted industrial zones, modern apartments) and faces. Loved the part of Jon Voight as criminal mastermind.
But all this is besides the point. Not only do I spot the heat around the corner, I'm practically spending my each and every minute with it. The police escorts pick me up and drop me off. The afternoon I spend at the station, often in a room next to the 'lock-up', where officers take an afternoon nap on a couple of charpais (literally meaning 'four legs', the Urdu word for stretcher).


(Picture: the heat in relaxation mode.)

The heat actually was of great assistance as I was trying to avoid the 'national highway' and to navigate my way on Sindh's small 'link roads'. When approaching a junction I only had to look over my shoulder to see at least three officers pointing frantically to the right, or left, whichever direction it was to Nawabshah or Qazi Ahmed or Mari. Variations included hand movements that started from the wrist in which fingers go from pointing towards the chest to 'over there far in the distance'. This means: go straight. More subtle officers pointed me the way by nodding their head, or with their eyes or chin. Chin moving forward and upward: straight. Eyes widening: straight. These two together: Straight!, the lower lip often covering most of the upper lip. This one is especially funny when the relevant officers is enjoying a mouthful of betel nut.


(Picture: heat that I made running behind me through the fields after their pick-up couldn't continue due to the mud, and they were trying to catch up with me.)

The evenings I stayed either in the courtyard or on the roof of stations, where they made a bed for me (a charpai with a traditional rillee, a richly decorated blanket). Had some funny 'tour around the stations'. "Here's the latrine, here shower, this is for hanging (pointing at a nail in the wall)." Or when there was no tour and I asked for the toilet ("WC?"). "I am the WC. Here, see? (pointing at name plate) Writing Constable." And once, after a long and sweaty ride, where there was no shower, or bathroom, but where they did have a hose and a bush behind which I could stand and have a quick wash, I was told by a blushing WC: "Sir, we saw you in full..."

After 240 kilometres of cycling in the heat, and about 110 in the back of the police escort, I got to Khairpur, where I am enjoying the hospitality of the Indus Resource Centre. More about this NGO in the days to come.


(Picture: camera crew of Sindh TV news setting up in Shahdadpur to do an interview with the foreign guest, and a guy I met over breakfast, who was on his way with his rooster that he uses for fights. Moreover the picture shows two things that are very characteristic for Pakistan: Pepsico and Benazir Bhutto.)