As soon as we get off the driveway the cigarettes come out. She uses words like "fucking military bastards" to shock me, to prove that women in Pakistan can say what women in Montréal can say without any damage to their reputations, souls, and lives in the afterlife. Soon enough, though, her decorative curses fade. Her hand flicks on the right indicator, then the left indicator. Logical turns are made, or so they seem to me. The Renault winds concentrically out of the old city, and the narrative of the malicious oppression of women begins as our evening together unfurls against the brightly lit Badshahi Mosque and the silent ancient canal water flowing to Mohen jo Daro.

She tells me the story of a certain year during the dynasty of the Generals; a Mullah in a market slapped a women he did not know, merely because she was not wearing a dupatta. Many women organized a protest in the same market; they did not wear their dupattas over their heads. Pakistan in the eighties is far from static. Despite all the sexual distraction Yasmin is offering, it is great to listen to her. Women in Islamic Pakistan have elaborate interpretive devices they manipulate. According to a group of activists, Yasmin says, "It is patriarchal feudalism and capitalism within a Koranic context that makes being a woman in Pakistan a crime."

The way the Women's Movement fights against the so called Islamic Injunctions and Hudood Ordinances of 1979 is to quote the Koran back to the regime, offering more progressive and credible interpretations of the Holy Book to refute the reactionary ones. The rules are always stacked against women. If a woman is raped she has to produce four pious Moslems who actually saw the act of penetration.

"Now what do you think of 'pious'?" Yasmin asks as we park in front of a roadside restaurant. "Julian, I suggest that you get a take out order. I don't want to eat inside -- not enough women in this place. I'd feel odd, they'll all look at me." I go into the small restaurant to get kebabs. The menu says "Order by numbers." My eyes pan down the numbers until they reach "Political discussions and drinking strictly forbidden." At the bottom I read: "Rendezvous of the Elite."

I mention all this to Yasmin. "I can understand why all this is exciting for you," she says, lighting another cigarette.

"Is Benazir Bhutto going to do much?" I ask, munching down on a kebab. She laughs. "Here, Julian, are her words: 'I would not like to be the person to come in the way of the enforcement of the Shariat.'" Within feminist Lahore there are debates as to whether or not women ought to work within an Islamic context, whether one ought to go left in the Western Marxist sense of the word, or invent an applicable women's solidarity across classes. The in fighting is the best I have ever seen. It seems so much more real than the in fighting in Toronto and Montréal, where the repercussions are obviously not the same. It is dramatic to watch the Western educated ones get torn to shreds by the ones who were educated both by Western universities and the experience of the various military regimes that have plagued Pakistan since 1947. These women have a commitment to one day come back to Pakistan to change it into a nicer, freer, classless place. Their sense of counter Islamic reinterpretation and manipulation is thrilling; it has so much hope attached to it.

We back out of the restaurant's mini parking lot. My informative evening with Yasmin is coming to an end. Past the canal road, I roll down the window. She pulls out a hash joint.

"Julian, you're in the land of plenty -- have a puff. All the taxi drivers are totally stoned all the time, you know." It has been a great evening. I feel very connected with her. I now have a comprehensive history of the women's movement inside me. She drops me off at my relatives'. There is some goodbye tension as I think about touching her hand, holding her waist, nibbling her Lahorie lips. But I can't take the risk. I shake her hand and hold on to it for slightly longer than is polite, by Western standards. She does not let go, either. I should make my move, but, no, I must protect my integrity as a man genuinely interested in women's struggle. Any miscalculation now could ruin the future possibility of a fuck.

Javid, who I've been asked to look up by some Montréal friends, comes by to visit me. We drink tea, Scotch is offered but refused -- good boys don't believe in drinking and driving. We make a quick plan and announce that we are going to visit Heera Mundi, a red light district in Lahore. Better to be direct about it. Dancing girls in silk. My distant aunt protests, "Don't you dare."

"But, Aunt jee, I must see every side of this city. I am just going as a Canadian sociologist -- don't worry." I won't poke my sex starved pole in anywhere. Anyway, Auntijee, the tragic condition of the prostitutes is enough to wilt anyone's dick.

His motorbike hums to life. We drive past the fruit and nut sellers with their gas lamps hissing away on this cool crisp night. The temperature is like that of a cool September night in Montréal. Past more street vendors who sell guavas and fresh fruit salad. Others fry chick peas in large pots. Chapattis flap on large black pans. Almost teenagers wash pots under the hurricane lamps.

I tap Javid's shoulder. "I'd like some fruit salad."

"Weren't you just ill?" He replies without turning his head, keeping his eyes on the caravan of traffic: packed buses, hooting scooter taxis, smaller minibuses criss crossing each other. He gives the throttle a crack, downshifts.

The motorbike comes to a smooth halt. He zaps the throttle again just before he takes out the keys. When the fruit salad maker is putting the spice mixture on my bowl, he says, "Halka, halka" -- lightly, lightly. As custom has it, he refuses to let me pay. We remount the water cooled Honda 500 cc, threading through the ancient caravan. Somehow we have worked our way to an open space where there is less traffic. In front of us is a free lane of highway, a mile or so. Javid Cyprian, the Christian, accelerates to some truly unreasonable speed. The seat is slipping from under me but I manage to hang on.

At Heera Mundi we park the bike by the roadside and begin our short walk through the winding paths. The hookers are fully clad, making come in gestures with their hands. Their pimps stand uninvitingly nearby. Distorted Urdu disco blares out of cassette players. The fruit salad is trying to find a quick way out.

Sa'adat Hassan Manto used to hang around Heera Mundi. Hookers, incense, music through fractured speakers. Maybe he even fucked some of the older hookers, but that's impossible. Manto's short stories are about resentment, passions that become foolish, manipulative religious fraud, murder, looting in the pre Partition days, and one story about fucking the dead. In fact, a literal translation of "Thanda Gosth" could be "Cold Meat," about a beautiful woman who is raped when she is dead. He was sued by the Christian community in Lahore because he published a nasty story about them. He published many ironic stories about Moslems as well. He translated Oscar Wilde's "Vera" and Hugo's "The Last Days of a Condemned Man" into Urdu. He was influenced by Gorki, Chekhov, Pushkin, and Maupassant. Manto drank himself to death here in 1955.

My relative's house was not far from Temple Road, where I was born in a humble kitchen. In the two months I was in India and Pakistan my accent in English changed; I found myself straining not to lose the mixture of Canadian British and the precious though slight Urdu inflection. But I was losing; Pakistan was winning. I was starting and ending sentences with yaar and jinnab. The fruit salads were not presenting problems. I returned to my original colour. The hints of bride search got boring but not the idea of a few hot one nighters. My relatives thought I was an accountant or a big filmmaker in Québec with a safe job at some complacent place like the National Film Board of Canada. I could afford to fly to Pakistan, so it was not wrong to think I was financially successful.

I suppose life for well off Pakistanis is black and white; there is an automatic assumption that those who followed the line of gold to the West have made it. As of 1 September 1995 I hadn't. My comfortable relatives insisted rather strongly that I was in Lahore to discover my past. They had been conditioned by the TV program Roots. No Joycean epiphanies for me. It would be unfair to expect them to understand my struggle for a visionary post coloniality imbricated with an avant garde anti Eurocentric projection in the overall rejection of traditional theories of perspectival representation. How were they to know about my life? My friends there had ordered and exactingly framed lives, lots of parties, a little legal fraud here and there for a new car or a fridge. They were nice to their servants, who were well paid and loved, and treated like they were "part of the family." My relatives' servants have more job security than I do. I don't even have a job or a regular source of income, except for the provincial government's welfare cheque or arts grants. Their servants don't live in fear of being evicted from their simple houses in the back of the real house. I am always worried about what my landlord will do next. My relatives sent their kids to arts schools. The only cultural queasiness they ever felt was that they were Christian in a Moslem state. Even though Zia had personally bid them all the best at Christmas, their daughters and sons were leaving Pakistan, just like my parents' generation. The Zia regime had appointed some of them to high posts in the military, and these Christians stayed.

Some years later, Zia's body, along with those of a few American advisors, became air, smoke, and water by the simple act of fermenting mangos -- that's my mother's explanation -- "It was the crate of mangos that someone gave him in Quetta." General Zia was cross eyed -- a true descendant of the Prophet.

That day when I first got back to Lahore, when the taxi drove up to their house in that well to do neighbourhood...suddenly, as I was getting out of the taxi, something happened which still divinely confuses me. I excitedly thrust open the car door. There was a crack. A man riding a bicycle had slammed directly into the door's sharp corner. His cheaply printed in Lahore books strapped to the bike with a knotted old belt, his thick framed glasses, went splat. He lay writhing in pain on the road. Luckily, this road was not busy, otherwise he would have been hit by several cars and lorries. Lahore streets are usually busy. I rushed over to him.

"You have killed me, you have killed me." I picked up his undamaged glasses, got him up to his feet, and walked him to the side of my relatives' house.

A woman servant came out to greet me. I told her what happened. She took him to the servants' quarters for a glass of ordinary tap water. He recovered like a stunned bird. I peeled off a few notes from my limited wad of rupees, paid the smiling cabby, and walked into the house. I had been in the motherland for exactly forty minutes.