Libyans Shaking Off Fear of Gaddafi

In the winter of 1978, soon after I entered my teens, I began seeking solitude on the roof of our leaky house in Benghazi. I'd head up with a few thin books and a pack of cigarettes, and the wide horizon and dramatic skies of our warm winters were all mine to contemplate. I also began contemplating the Pakistani beauty who lived in the three-story apartment tower behind our house.

She was a few years older than I, so there was no chance of a relationship. And though I never got a close look at her face, I am certain that it did my growing aesthetic sensibility much good to study the straight lines of her slim figure dressed in various designs of shalwar kameez. She often lay in her neat bed with her back to me, and I studied the dip in the waist, the discernable climb of the hips and her feet arranged, right heel tucked into the arch of the left, like the yin snug inside the yang.