KHARTOUM LETTER: OUTSIDE, PEOPLE are scurrying home as darkness falls. Women hold headscarves over their hair and shoulders and the streets in Khartoum's city centre are starting to empty.
Inside Papa Costa's, the party is only just beginning.
Bareheaded aid workers jostle for space on the dance floor with young Sudanese women content to let their scarves slip to their shoulders as a five-piece band hammers out a mixture of North African pop and western classics.
"This is a typical Sudanese band," says Omar Yahia (50), the proprietor of Papa Costa's restaurant, "one of 20 that used to exist. They would play live and compete with each other more than 30 years ago." That was before the Islamists seized control of Sudan. Live music was all but banned and curfews kept people at home.
But gradually things are changing. A handful of musicians have returned from self-imposed exile as the country ends its experiment with political Islam.
"We have been open for a year-and-a-half and in the beginning it was very difficult. There was a stiff investigation to get a permit for a night like this," says Yahia as the band finishes up a song by Algerian pop star Khaled before moving on to The Eagles' Hotel California.
"But slowly things are getting easier." His own family tells part of the story of Sudan's experiments in political philosophy. In 1969 his father was a minister in President Jafar Nimeiry's government but was later placed under house arrest.
The family fled Sudan in 1974 and Yahia was educated in Britain and France before moving to Colorado where he worked as a graphic designer.
Meanwhile, things were getting worse back home. Nimeiry used Sudan as a political lab rat, dabbling first in state socialism before opting for political Islam and imposing Sharia law in parts of the country. Band members were arrested and private parties playing live music were broken up by Nimeiry's goons.
Little changed when Nimeiry was ousted. In 1989 Omar al-Bashir came to power in a military coup. He was backed by Hassan al-Turabi, an Islamic ideologue and the man responsible for inviting Osama bin Laden to Khartoum in the mid-1990s.
All the while Yahia was waiting for the right time to return. "I'd always wanted to come back," he says, sitting in the open courtyard of his restaurant beneath the stars.
"What brought me back was my age - I don't care if I get shot - and it was just after the signing of the peace treaty. That was encouraging. At last there was no more war. There was a kind of political stability."
In 2005 the Khartoum government of al-Bashir signed a deal with the Christian rebels of southern Sudan ending two decades of war. The agreement also paved the way for non-Muslims to join the government and pointed the way to a more inclusive Sudan.
But for all the music at Papa Costa's - supplied by another former exile, Ali Doka - things are moving slowly. Risque websites are filtered out by state internet service providers and last week eight daily newspapers were seized after their editors refused to submit copy for approval.
Fashionable coffee shops have posted warning signs that dress and behaviour must be "respectable". And the owners of a handful of restaurants that discreetly served alcohol to foreigners were arrested last year.
Yet the signs of a modern city are everywhere. High oil prices mean Khartoum is locked in an economic boom despite American sanctions. New hotels and office complexes are rising across the city as money pours in from the Gulf States and China.
And the ultimate symbol of gas-guzzling, western excess, the Humvee, is a regular sight in the most fashionable neighbourhoods.
Diplomats say the result is a tension between hardliners in the government and pragmatists. The differences were highlighted last year by the case of Gillian Gibbons, an English teacher jailed after her class of seven-year-olds named a teddy bear Muhammad.
She was convicted of insulting Islam's holiest prophet but was released days later with a presidential pardon.
Hag Ateya Elteyb, director of the Peace Research Institute at Khartoum University, says the government has been unable to maintain its hard line as so many outside influences - including United Nations staff and aid workers engaged in projects in the war-torn region of Darfur - make their presence felt.
"Now we have more and more foreigners and investors. There's a new thing happening very slowly as the government relaxes because of these groups," he says.
"I don't know if it's good or bad but the repressive element is going." Nowhere is that more visible than at the traffic islands and verges close to the Nile. At dusk on Thursday evenings the grass is dotted with dozens and dozens of young couples.
"This is where young men and women come to spend time together," says a taxi driver in an old, battered yellow Toyota. "If they had done this 10 years ago the police would have come with sticks."