"Oh Julian, please let's hear you say something in Urdu." Ah! she said my name in that raspy international English Urdu. The malaria, the delirium, the twenty four hours' air time has been worth it all, even the night when I will see Begum Akhtar.

My well rehearsed Urdu floats out, the beginning of a poem by Ahmed Faraz -- about political prisoners, the Zia dictatorship, and how allegorical candles fade in the wind of the coming of the American backed army. A fat bystander says, "Kamal, he speaks Urdu. You know, Faraz and I studied history in Forman Christian College. He's a good friend of mine, I'll tell him about you. Maybe you could interview him?"

Yasmin is impressed. She is caught unaware. She sits down not because she is overcome with my missionary Urdu but because, I think, it is touching for her to see someone come back to Lahore after so many years. She had to leave here sometime in her past, too. The transnationals have touched. The servants, called "domestic help" in India, bring out tea and hot sweet gulab jamins. A winter night outside, a Christian Moslem non military dinner party inside. I ask Yasmin if she likes banana splits, and if Zulfikar Ali Bhutto really politicized the servants and workers. I say, "There is one servant who works here who claims to not speak any Native language except English. Do you think it is a put on? Or do you think a tight slap across his face would liberate his tongue?"

"Yes, maybe, but your aunt tells me you are a left winger. What's this about slapping shapping the oppressed minority? Let him do what he wants."

My aunt's undying requests for me to seek out a wife are beginning to work on me. I begin to see every woman I meet with a view to a proposal, especially Yasmin: You wanna marry me and live in the hip Plateau Mont Royal area of Montréal, make feminist semiotic curries and play post colonial exiles?

I've just got to get her phone number. But, arsehole, this is Pakistan. You can't just ask her out on a date. I may never see her again, unless the college daughters set up a meeting.

I make it a hobby to go with the driver to pick up my aunt's daughters after school every day. "Just for the drive." The daughters are on my side. This is an elite college. Paths to the various buildings are surrounded by palm trees with swishy large emerald green leaves. Occasionally, a poorly dressed janitor with grass cutting tools walks by. He looks me right in the eyes. Maybe he is defending the students in the college. The uplifting effects of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, I assume. Reddish paths under a tunnel of palm trees lead to the various squat buildings laden with more flowing dupattas. Women in uniforms. Navy blue sweaters over light blue shalwar kamezes. After school; jeans and the latest air filled running shoes from America. "Let's have a peanut butter sandwich," whines one of the daughters. Certainly not a fixed traditional society. Everywhere, the illusion of progress and not. It is too easy to say that traditions are static, traditions are constantly not being traditional. There is no fixed Islamic past, so I can weasel out how to fix a date without feeling guilty. Prostitutes, for example, use the veil, tradition, to hide themselves from the Godly faces of the doormen at the various five star hotels in the major cities.

It only takes a few weeks of being in Lahore to discover that everyone has a modernism versus traditionalism tale to tell. The best story I heard was of a young Pakistani performance artist who, after quite a few years of studying in an American art school in Chicago, returned to Pakistan. He did the most extraordinary thing. He decided he'd put on a street performance just like the rappers in America. After all, Pakistan has a historical tradition of street performance -- public flogging, military parades. The act was to somehow connect Islam with progressive Black American rap music. Sections of Black American society have to some extent embraced Islam: the early and developing Malcolm X, and Louis Farrakhan, to mention just two leaders.

This young returning Pakistani performance artist had taken a recording of a local prayer reader and dubbed it with samplings from Grand Master Flash and Lata Mangashker. The sound pulsated; synthetic electronic drums with Pakistani equivalents of the abrupt stopping and restarting that DJs do in the West. An audience formed around his sound system. He had been away from Pakistan for a decade or so. He had badly misjudged his audience. His sound system was turned into a heap of colourful Japanese wire, a twisted stylus, punched in speakers, and a punctured left lung. His visiting American video artist friends were dumbfounded. The following day, they left for Bangkok, where it is rumoured there is more religious freedom. The Pakistani state faces test match after test match.

Other less Western influenced opposition activists I met all hated Gandhi, admired Faiz Ahmed Faiz, and loved shitting on Richard Attenborough's malignantly flawed eulogy. I remember one intellectual telling the story of how some Calcuttan "untouchables" emptied a large bag of cobras into a packed cinema that was showing Gandhi.

At first, the language of political discussions seemed confusing, but after a while I reassured myself that they, too, were confused and divided on many issues. I remembered Yasmin saying during that dinner party, "The left here is like a chicken with its head cut off -- one minute running to Moscow, the next stopping, turning around, then heading off for some Peking duck." And when we had moved away to a corner of the dinner party she would, with a full smile, say, "Fucking opportunists -- the whole lot of them."

Some of the older activists were capable of letting you have Hegel and the latest theory on Kabul in one ear and why they did not really want to talk with me in the other. Mazar Ali Khan, editor of a leading magazine, said, "Well, Mr. Samuel, I am glad that you took the time to visit us here in Pakistan, but I am afraid that I don't have the time just now to do an interview." This remark was followed by a cagey pause in which his eyes tracked across the sunny desk over some papers, and then, noble advice. "May I suggest -- " he hesitated " -- that you talk to the Moslem League."

Only a few political types wanted to give an interview. The regime had terrified everyone: the unions, the peasants, the workers. In Urdu, I must have sounded like an American missionary; in English, there might have been enough of a linguistic twist of empire that I might be a CIA agent. An agent? Who, me? That would have been great husband material for daughters. Fresh flowers, and a job in DC.

Within the first few days I fall sick. Not an exotic sickness, but the worst combination of flu, stomach flu, super runs, delirium, and dreams which shake apart my national identity and bowels. The country takes you, then it rejects you, turning your shit to water. A kind of unofficial long term visa. All the pills in the West cannot save me. One particular night, I count thirty trips to the washroom. I dream about various world systems, books and articles I read in preparation for this prodigal saga. Words as large as a cinema screen float across my vision: "The Secret of Primitive Accumulation," "Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist." It is all to get much worse.

Hours and hours of sitting in a plane. Jet lag for weeks afterwards. My anal sphincter is in direct contact with all the activist types who have in one way or another played a role in encouraging me to visit my "homeland." In one of my dreams I saw my Urdu teacher from university. She was the only Canadian of Dutch or German origin I knew who was fluent in the language, even though her spoken Urdu was bookish and wooden. I asked her about the sources of certain words; she, in her show off way, started writing them, first in Arabic, second in Farsi, third in Sanskrit, and last in Hindi. If we had not stopped her, I am sure she would have given us the equivalents in Dutch, German, and Spanish as well. She didn't have a talent for wearing her education lightly. She wore the heaviest jewelry the subcontinent had ever produced. When she wrote on the board, the hundreds of bangles and earrings became instruments in an orchestra tuning up. Her fingernails caught on the blackboard. She jingled in the halls like an elephant in Rajasthan.

At five in the morning, after powerful megaphones blast out the day's first prayers, in my malaria like condition, I start to hear Begum Akhtar's ghostly voice oozing from the walls. She is known throughout India, Pakistan, and many other places where we live. Not everybody is affected by her music. My Indian friend, the historian of slave labour, introduced me to her. Once one has developed an attachment to her voice, one never loses it, or if one does, it is only for a while. My mouth is parched.

Begum Akhtar is as important to India and Pakistan as Ahmed Ben Bella was to the Algerian revolution. She sings the poems of nineteenth century Mirza Ghalib or the twentieth century Faiz Ahmed Faiz -- the most important poet in Southeast Asia, one is constantly told here. I cannot remember exactly whose words she is singing. My knowledge of Indian or Pakistani poets is very slight. I know more about English literature, a more or less unhappy admission. Her singing tangles into my dream. I am flashing through bits of Satyajit Ray's film, Jalsaghar -- The Music Room.

We are landing in Kuwait to change planes. The migrant labourers returning from the cruel racist Gulf States burst into joy, even tears, at the sight of lights over Delhi or Karachi or wherever we are stopping to refuel. Begum Akhtar flickers in front of my eyes. The film is scratched and worn in parts, unprojectable: there are so many scratch lines she seems to be singing in a jail cell. However, her voice is sharp, exact, as though it is being played back on a video disc. She sounds like the middle aged Begum Akhtar, but she inhabits the flesh of a nearly extinguished body. The shadows in the film are black and rich grey. I can see objects through her. I hear the sound of rain outside. There is a power in her singing. The poets are never wrong. Faiz, not impressed with Partition, asked, "Is this the dawn we have been waiting for?"