From the Young Man’s sketch map

Trying so hard to generalize (why, I really don’t remember), the Young Man Who Knew Everything explained to his notebook: “The uncleanliness of American cities is composed of such items as shattered bottles and blowing newspapers, beer cans, chemical spills, Styrofoam incubators for hamburgers, and the like. In Pakistan production and distribution are not nearly as advanced; accordingly, the diet of its cities is hardly so rich, and their excretions and lymphatic disorders have an altogether different character. Much that would be thrown away in the U.S.A. is prized here — and of course there are no beer cans.” —Peshawar, then, was a city of tumbledown streets and filth; and the Young Man, with his preference for advanced trash, believed it even dirtier than it was. (I confess that I myself would rather die from an industrial cancer than through an amoeba’s agency; this is a question of upbringing.) — Then, too, there was the fact of being perpetually observed, accosted and remarked upon; this superfluity of attention was at times somewhat like dirt. Like other cheats, he wanted to study, not to be studied. As the attention was almost always kindly meant, responding to it eventually became a pleasure; but in the meantime the Young Man must also face the city itself: the stands selling rotten mangoes and meat so thick with flies that its own color was a mystery; the gasping men, cooling themselves off in the midst of their labor by sticking hoses down inside their shirts; the shops offering expired medicines, sugar syrup, cooking oil and brand-new fans. In the Saddar district, the sidewalks had buckled and upthrust, as if unsettled by the tunneling of giant moles. Here and there were three-foot pits without apparent purpose: little graves for fruit peels and the hooves of slaughtered cattle, with concrete shards mixed in like bones. When he bought bananas they were soft and black. The gutters stank; the water in them was gray, like the underbelly of a dead snake. Everyone moved slowly in the heat.

The Young Man wrote treatises on the effects of that heat: First you felt it in your wet forehead, as the sweat began running into your eyes in the first seconds. Next the sunlight penetrated your scalp. Your hair warmed uncomfortably. The base of your neck was sodden like your armpits, and you inhaled steam as though you were going through the motions of breathing; and soon you got dizzy and sick to your stomach. Some people (such as Afghan refugees) might bleed from the nose and ears.

“Yes, it is hot, ” sighed the proprietor of the hotel. “In Baluchistan, they say, there is a town where in summer the water comes from the tap hot enough for tea. I have never been there; I hope I never will, in sh’Allah! ”^*