Karachi

This is the pool in the ‘real’ hotel where I set and wrote my book. I had a small table under the trees in the shade where I wrote each day. The wonderful staff would bring me breakfast in the deserted garden and I would write, and melt, and swim. Even in the shade  it was too hot by mid-day to stay outside.

Most mornings I had this lovely place to myself, just the chipmunks and birds singing in the undergrowth, and the gardener with his hennared hair and beard sweeping the dropped leaves.

Beyond this safe walled garden, the traffic of Karachi hummed like the distant sound of bees. In the cool of late afternoons, I would return to  the pool to read Pakistani authors while a huge sun  dropped like an orange and the kites flew low in the dusk, and I would be transported away to a different life and a different culture…

Writing In a Kingdom by the Sea has kept the memory of my time in Karachi and the voices of my friends as clear as ever it was. My characters are fictitious but Karachi was real and vivid and my memories of that city will never fade…