Greetings from Lahore, Pakistan, whose high court offers an oasis for chatter and chai

Diaa Hadid/NPR

I'm always eager for an excuse to visit the Lahore High Court in the British-built quarters of Pakistan's second-largest city.

To me, the high court is a near-perfect specimen of British South Asian colonial architecture: Mughal in its curly arches that frame porticos, the Gothic detail that emerges through the red brick baked on the city's outskirts in pluming kilns.

Within, it's a sea of busy, flapping penguins: Pakistani lawyers in their uniforms of white shirts and black suits rushing between courtrooms.

They take a rest in the main square, all chatter and chai under the banyan trees that still shade the men and women of law.

It's a contrast to the wheezy, heavily polluted city. Lahore has far fewer trees outside its elite quarters — a signal of a broader crisis in Pakistan, where there's one standard for the masses and another for those who hold power.