Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey

by V. S. Naipaul

  And almost at once (the government people had never doubted that they would get us) we were off. The jeep driver was a man of extraordinary handsomeness: rich, dark-brown hair, classical Indo-Aryan features, his slender, strong physique well set off by his baggy white trousers and long-tailed tan shirt. He had a boy assistant, a grubby, square-faced little cigarette-smoker with only a thin shirt below his khaki-coloured shawl. We had started off with such dispatch that it was some time before I was aware of his holding on (for the sake of the drama) to the back of the jeep, shawl wrapped around his head and narrow shoulders; and then, for a few miles, I had taken him for a Balakot bazaar boy hitching a ride.

  Soon we were beside the Kunhar River, shallow in a wide, rocky valley. And after all my weeks in sand and heat I stopped the jeep to listen to the sound of water. The road was shady with trees; they were an extra blessing. But we couldn’t dally; we had far to go; and Masood said there was a lot more water on the way. We began—and, after the easy ride from Rawalpindi, it was like something theatrical, arranged—to see the shepherds driving down their flocks. They were Afghans, unexpectedly small and frail-looking, the men black-turbanned, the women in bright baggy trousers and long head-covers. Busy, the women, private, shut away in their migrant life, grimy with their bright colours (red and black), underfed, exhausted by the work and the walking, their faces tanned and lined.

  The hills were irregularly marked with old, overgrown terracing. The houses, set against the hillsides, had flat, thick mud roofs, often at varying levels; these roofs rested on heavy beams, sometimes whole trunks—trees were plentiful here. Houses set against the embankment of the road often had their roofs level with the road and showed only as a kind of earthen yard: the quarters were below, hidden.

  We stopped at a village to talk to some boys. They looked idle, but they wore the slate-grey uniform of schoolboys, and were not as isolated as they appeared. One boy had an uncle in Lahore; another, brothers in Karachi and a brother in Saudi Arabia. A young man who came out from a two-level, flat-roofed, stone-walled house said that he could go to Karachi any time and earn twenty-four hundred rupees a month as a carpenter. Masood didn’t think he was exaggerating: with the great migration, artisan skills were rare in Pakistan. But the man’s peasant arrogance added to Masood’s own melancholy; he said he couldn’t earn that himself.

  They were not isolated. But we were, already, only a few easy hours away from Rawalpindi, in a feudal land. A very small man, less than five feet—how small these mountain people were!—walked past, leading a buffalo. He didn’t own the buffalo, the boys said. The buffalo belonged to the man’s master, who was walking ahead: a turbanned man we had paid no attention to, not understanding that his empty hands and casual gait were signs of his village status as an owner of a buffalo and a serf. And the house of the great landlord, the local rich man, the boys said, was there: not a flat-roofed house set against the hillside, but a house on flat land, at the end of the field: a big stone house on two floors, with a pitched roof in corrugated iron. And those stunted men now going past were Gujars: the original inhabitants of the valley, not very bright, rather backward in fact, and keeping to themselves.

  The road climbed. The river dropped below us. The steep hills were welted with little strips of cultivation: maize, the late-summer crop of the valley, growing wherever a little flat space could be banked up. And there were the pines. They seeded themselves on the hillsides; the seedlings, after their first horizontal thrust, straightened up and, looking for the light, grew straight and tall; they were the tallest pines I had ever seen. And always there were the houses, not always easy to see, camouflaged by their flat roofs and stone walls.

  Sheep and goats and horses and camels came down the road constantly; the sheep’s backs were dyed. The Afghans couldn’t stop to talk. When they did, they didn’t have much to say. They lived where it was very cold; at this time of year they moved down to avoid the winter snows; that was all. They were at one with their animals: man and beast had come to an understanding. Very small children, while still recognized as babies, were tied up with the baggage on the backs of camels or donkeys. Above that age they walked, were workers, miniature adults, with switches instead of sticks, and, with their turbans and shirts and trousers, looked so self-possessed and complete that it was hard, from a distance, especially if they were by themselves, to assess their age or size.

  The handsome jeep driver said, with something like tribal jealousy, “For every one of those sheep they will get a thousand rupees in Mansehra or Abbottabad.”

  The busy little hoofs of the sheep ground the fine dust of the road finer. And as we crawled in a cloud of dust through two or three jumbled flocks, all woolly, bobbing backs, dyed in many colours, Masood (already wounded by that man boasting about the twenty-four hundred rupees he could earn in Karachi) said, “Can you imagine the lakhs and lakhs of rupees on this road?” A lakh was a hundred thousand.

  I said, “What do they do with the money?”

  Masood said, “They have their dependents. They have daughters or sons to marry off. They have wedding parties. The custom here is for the boy to make a gift of twenty thousand rupees to the girl. If there is no cash then he has to build a house or make some arrangement about land. So that when he sends her away she has something. If he can’t do that the girl can’t marry him.”

  “I thought that in Pakistan the girl had to have a dowry.”

  “Dowry? I don’t know that word.”

  I thought Masood knew the word. I thought he also knew that the custom was not considered good. I said, “In Karachi I was told that orthodox families give only thirty-two rupees because that was the sum given to the Prophet.”

  He recognized that.

  I didn’t believe in that figure of a thousand rupees for a sheep. And when, later, we were stopped by another flock, I got Masood to ask the Afghan herdsman directly. The Afghan thought we wanted to buy. He indicated one of his plumper animals and said he wouldn’t take less than three hundred rupees for him. And now it was the turn of the jeep driver, who had given the figure of a thousand rupees, to pretend not to understand.

  The pale-green river tumbled over rocks; the water was always in movement. But at a certain height the river appeared frozen. The white eddies and swirls formed a fixed, marbled pattern—though you could still hear the noise. And it was fascinating, going down, to see the fixed pattern quicken again, to have the river noise matched by movement.

  At a wide, sharply angled bend in the mountain road there was an Afghan camp. A low tent had been pitched; camels and donkeys were in a group; there was cooking. The cooking fire, the darkness of the tent, made an attractive picture, and we stopped to talk to the Afghans, after asking the jeep driver whether it was the kind of intrusion they permitted.

  We spoke to a young man who was dressed in the Pakistani fashion. He was moustached, with a tanned white skin and a jovial peasant face. But he was canny; he thought that we—in a government jeep—were government men; and the first thing he said to Masood was that the people of his camp had left Afghanistan many years before and now lived permanently on the Pakistan side of the border.

  Masood, not turning away from the young man or altering his voice, said to me in English, “He’s lying. He’s come from Kabul. He’s just been to Kabul. But he doesn’t want to get into any political trouble.”

  The young man took out a brass snuffbox. It was full of a dark-green mixture of tobacco and herbs, a pinch of which was meant to be kept below the lower lip. He gave me some to try. I placed it on the tip of my tongue, and as it moistened it pricked and was not unpleasant. He took in return a speck of my own brown tobacco snuff. It was too strong for him and he made no attempt to control his disgust; he sneezed and spat almost at my feet. Recovering, he first tapped the clear-lensed glasses I had in my shirt pocket, then with his own hand took off the dark glasses I was still wearing. I had forgotten I had them on, it was so bright. I should have let him see my eyes from the sta
rt: he was right to object to my discourtesy.

  He took us to the tent to let us watch. Tea had been brewed or stewed, in the manner of the subcontinent; dirty little china cups lay on the ground. A girl or young woman was making roti, flat unleavened bread, over a brushwood fire, flattening the dough balls between her palms, working fast, tossing and spinning the dough until it was very thin and round and then, with one gesture, draping the thin round of dough over her right forearm before throwing it onto the baking iron. The flour was of local grain, ground in village mills, worked in these parts by water, always abundant.

  The hot roti we were offered was delicious. The tent, the cooking fire, the mountains, the river, the tea, and the roti: I felt momentarily that I could surrender to the life. But was that all they were going to have, the roti and the tea? Masood asked for me. “Only roti and chai? No tarkari?” No savoury dish of vegetables or meat? The young man laughed. “Tarkari? Why do we need tarkari?”

  The jeep driver said they sometimes ate paneer, cottage cheese. But there was none at that meal.

  Masood said, “That’s why they are so healthy.” Masood was nervous about infected food and bad water. He travelled with pills; it was part of his general anxiety.

  The women or girls in the tent were beautiful. Roti and tea was all they were having now; but they looked better fed and better cared for than most of the women we had seen on the road, and the mountain sun had given a wonderful dark warmth to their white skins.

  Sheep and goats were in and out of the tent. Rugs and bedding were at the back. This left-hand part of the ground at the front of the tent, the young man said, was for his father and his uncle; this middle part was for the women; and the right-hand part—but I didn’t get who the right-hand part was for. There were two brothers in the caravan; they were a rich family. That plain, fierce woman sitting in her assigned place in the middle, with her heavy silver earrings and her heavy silver necklace, was the wife of the uncle. She never looked at us.

  Masood, without prompting from me, asked the young man about the price of sheep. The young man pointed to the lesser encampment across the road and said that the sheep there was worth three thousand rupees. It was big, heavy with wool, and it must have been special because it was in the living quarters of the encampment, and both its hind legs were tied to a central stake.

  The camels near the main tent were hobbled in a way new to me: one of the forelegs folded back and tied with rope to the upper part of the leg, so that the big animal could only hop. I noticed for the first time that there was a plug or wooden nail driven into the nose of each camel. It was to this that the lead rope was attached. The young man demonstrated. He pulled down on the lead rope. The camel neighed as if in anger, and did nothing. But then, a little while later, it squatted down on its long legs, which were bruised and callused at the joints. Camels, like elephants, look neater from a distance; close to, their hides are broken and ragged.

  The young man said that the pretty girls in the tent were his sisters. They were unmarried, and so was he. He thought he was sixteen. But this was clearly nonsense; perhaps he didn’t know his age and had no means of assessing the passage of the years. The father of the family now approached. He was sour but superb; elegantly turbanned, forbidding. It was only when he came right up that his very small stature became noticeable: he was an inch or two below five feet. But these Afghan nomads were all small, like many of their animals—the cattle, the ponies, the donkeys; the calves were the size of dogs. Only the sheep and the goats were fine and strong. The father had pale-blue eyes, and they were freshly rimmed with kohl. His white moustache was waxed at the tips; his beard was parted and curled; below his tan his skin was white. Astonishing, the dandyism, the pride in his toilet (there was no other word), greater than that of the women in theirs, at this altitude, and among the camels and the goats!

  The young man said his father was fifty. And the father—his blue eyes full of distrust, even disdain—asked his son who we were. The young man said that we spoke different languages; Masood spoke Urdu and I spoke English. It was his way of saying that Masood and I were both strangers, but of different tribes. The father—casually—offered us tea. We said no. And then there was no more to say. The father sat down in the left-hand side of the tent, meant for him and his brother, reclined against some bundles, and paid us no more attention.

  A donkey, followed by two or three of its tiny fellows, came into the tent to nibble at some cut grass that was possibly being saved for a more valuable animal. The father gave the donkey a loud thump on its side with his open hand. But there was no hurting intention behind the blow; the blow had been given only for the hollow, warning-off sound. One of the little boys of the family threw stones at the other donkeys, but the stones were very small, and were thrown lightly. They were all gentle with their animals. They made big and threatening gestures with their sticks, but the sticks were not used to hit; the sticks stroked, guided.

  The father, reclining against the roped baggage of the caravan, began to cough. And then—with his splendid turban, his kohl-rimmed eyes, his curled beard, and his waxed moustache—he spat, messily, just where he reclined. I saw that he was reclining among animal droppings; and that in the darkness at the back of the tent—more protected than the people—were the valuable sheep and goats of his flock.

  Masood, looking down at the old man, said to me, “They are like that. Have you been to Afghanistan? Kabul? The middle classes are just like that, too.”

  We spoke different languages. And it was as though it was understood that with our mutual interest and tolerance, stranger with stranger, there should also be disregard, and the privacy of each man within his group. Masood’s contempt was not greater than the contempt for us I could read in the old man’s eyes. There were so many tribes in this small area: Gujars, Afghans, Kaghanis, Pathans, Masood (from Lucknow in India), myself. And yet the civilities would be maintained: tea would be offered, tobacco. Our jeep driver had withdrawn; the Afghans bored him already; he made no secret of that. He sat at the edge of the cliff, handsome, more evolved, his hair combed in the film-star style, dust now giving a new tone to his rich dark-brown hair.

  And who was the mother of the pretty girls in the tent? The plain woman in the middle was the wife of the uncle, I knew. The young man said that the mother of the girls (not necessarily his own mother) was across the road, in the lesser encampment, where that sheep worth three thousand rupees was carefully staked to keep it from scrambling about and damaging itself.

  We went across the road to that encampment. The uncle was there. He was simply sitting on the ground; he ignored us. Two veiled women—one of them the mother of the pretty girls—were fussing with the baggage. The veils were unusual, a sign of the status of the family. The uncle spoke to the women. Together they threw a rug on the ground. The uncle moved from where he was sitting and sat on the rug. And while he sat, the women began to set up a tent around him: canvas with ringed holes, the tent poles of bamboo, iron-shod, and linked at the top to make a tripod. The women had trouble with the poles. The uncle paid no attention. He just sat, waiting for the tent and shade, holding an old powdered-milk tin before him. The tin probably contained his money.

  The women’s veils fell off their faces while they tried to get the tent up. They were not like the girls in the tent across the road. Their faces were old and lined and brown. The unmarried girls were beauties. These women, wives, were workers; they were beasts of burden. Like the women of the Dakota Indians Parkman saw on the Oregon Trail in 1846. But these Afghans, and all these mountain tribes, lived in terrain that only they could master. No one could say of them, as Parkman could say of the Dakota Indians, that they were going to be wiped off the face of the earth.

  Masood said, while we were standing over the uncle, “The women do all the work. The men do nothing. It isn’t like that in Europe, is it?” But he was being unfair to the men. They drove themselves hard, too; no one among these nomads drove anyone harder than he
drove himself. Masood said, “That attitude to women is with us, too. But it is getting less in the towns.” Masood had sisters. The older ones had married and become “housewives,” as he said, had fallen into old ways. But the younger girls were students at the university, and Masood was concerned about them.

  But my attitude at that moment was not like Masood’s. The Afghan encampment had taken me back to the earliest geography lessons of my childhood, to the drawings in my Homes Far Away textbook: men creating homes, warmth, shelter in extreme conditions: the bow-and-arrow Africans in their stockades, protected against the nighttime dangers of the forest; the Kirghiz in their tents in the limitless Steppes; the Eskimos in their igloos in the land of ice.

  And the girls in the tent were so pretty: a peasant or nomadic longing stirred within me. In the desert of Sind, at the shrine of that saint, beside the Indus, the talk of murshid and murid had brought to mind Tolstoy’s and Lermontov’s tales of the Caucasus. And here, beside one of the cold rivers that fed the Indus (green water turning muddy, transported in a lined canal to Karachi on its tropical, salty swamp nearly a thousand miles away), I felt taken back to a beginning: that life of animals and tents and the daily march. But what to me was the impulse of the moment was for them a way of life. I would move on, do other things; they would continue as I saw them. And those girls, pretty as they were, with their lovely skin, were really far away, shut off in their own tribal fantasies, beauties now, well fed, conscious of their rising price, but soon to be wives and workers.

  All afternoon we passed them, noted their tenderness to their animals, greater than their tenderness to themselves: those faces so lined and burnt, so old though young. Not many had the complexions and health of the girls in that encampment. Once I saw a man carrying a goat; once I saw a goat wrapped in a blanket and carried on a donkey’s back. One woman walked with one shoe on, the other off, and on her head. It was a style, the shoe on the head: later we saw women with both shoes on their heads, the heels fitted one into the other to form a little arch. Shoes were worn when the ground was pebbly; when the ground was smooth or soft with dust it was better to walk barefooted. The ankles of the walkers were black with grime.