Gubbara is Urdu for balloon, and this one will not stay up on its own. It falls; you tap anywhere to bat it back up; it must not touch the roof. Behind it, a Lahore rooftop at golden hour with kites drifting past. The pink line along the parapet is the only thing that ends a run.
Any tap, anywhere, bats the balloon back up — but only on the way down, so the number on screen is a count of real keep-ups and not of how fast you can tap. Where you tap steers it: dead underneath kills its drift, off to one side pushes it the other way.
Gravity creeps up and the balloon shrinks. At ten keep-ups a breeze starts nudging it sideways. At twenty-five a cut kite string begins crossing the sky, and a hit costs you height rather than the run. At forty-five a second balloon joins, and both have to stay up.
Play it now, free, in your browser
No ads. Not a banner, not a pop-up, not a “watch a video to carry on”. Your run is never interrupted. No download, no account, nothing to install, and once you have opened it once with a connection it plays with no connection at all — on a plane, in a lift, in a village with no signal.
It runs in any modern browser on a phone, a tablet or a desktop. On a keyboard, Space bats and the left and right arrows bat and steer.
Questions, ideas, or something not working? Write to fawaz_ahmed@live.com.
The same balloon, the same tap, a party room cut out of paper. Here the line you must not touch is the skirting board.
Run, but with love: a runner painted like the back of a Pakistani truck takes the highway, all flowers, brass and bold outlines.