Good evening, Girl in Red with Ball

By the beginning of September, I started watching out for changes in weather, eagerly waiting for the end of summer. If you wait and look out for these, a day, an evening at a time, you can actually start to feel how each day starts to become a little bit cooler. The days become shorter, you start to set a little bit earlier and earlier for the evening walk. You can feel that the evenings are less warm, less balmy.  Even during the day, the walls of the house don't feel like they are baking hot, the balcony floor isn't scalding hot. 

The onset of early autumn is so much like spring, the brief spell in between coldest winter and the unforgiving summer. Except that when it starts to become warmer, one feels a slight sense of dread at the thought of that oncoming sweltering heat. 

It's going to be 2 years if I make it to mid January 2021. I will have been in Islamabad at a stretch for 2 years for the first time since 2001-2002. 

The photographs in this post are in reverse, by the way. 

So, our new route takes us straight to the "Green Park" from where one can see the hills and the shaadi halls in E-11. We stay at the Park, play ball, scooty , stretch and then walk towards F-11 Markaz from Margalla side road. There's a rough path across the houses on that road and, it has a amazing view of the hills. 

Today, Kavita decided to bring along her scooty and, her ball. She makes a fuss, vows to carry everything herself, and guess, who has to carry everything in the end? 

"Come on, girl with ball and scooty, keep up!" 

I love walking through F-11 Markaz, enjoying the lively atmosphere, the lemon soda stands, the anday walay burger joints, the little kapray ki dukaan in the basement of the Markaz, the phone stores, Quetta Burning Café, all the coffeeshops, Najeeb Pharmacy, and, Meat Dukaan/The Burger Company. We recently discovered the best burgers from TBC. We put in our order for medium rare burgers, go up to Saeed Book Bank while we wait so Kavita can get some stickers or glue, pick up some mangoes for our midnight snack and, then trot home. The final trek of the evening walk goes through Major Road , which is astonishingly shrouded in darkness. Not a single working street lamp. It's always a little sad to walk it because it reminds me of the nurseries and garage workshops that were destroyed at the beginning of Mr. Imran Khan's premiership, along with so many other dhabas, khokhas, slums , hawkers, and informal markets all over the country.