Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey

by V. S. Naipaul

  I had thought it was the river roaring. I saw now that it was a waterfall, tumbling down the hill that was just at the back of the Park Hotel. At the foot of the hill, at the side of the hotel, a stone channel led the water away. In this valley of melting snow, canals were not for irrigation but to prevent flooding.

  The hills at the far side of the valley—beyond the hotel yard or plot, the main road where blanketed men and boys were walking, the low houses of the little town, the hidden river—were lit up by the morning sun, and the folds in the hills were soft and hazy. The sun hadn’t yet risen over the hill at the back of the hotel; the hill and the hotel were still in shadow. But a little way down, where the hill dipped, the sun shone through the branches of some pines: a narrow shaft of light, creating a transparent, ferny effect.

  The smiling hotel man brought tea for three. He set the tray in my room. I went to get our driver and Masood. But Masood was locked away in the bathroom and didn’t appear for some time. When he did appear he said he hadn’t slept well. His stomach was upset. What had he had that I hadn’t had? The meat? The water? Yes, it was the water.

  He said, “The water here looks pure. But it has certain minerals. Have you been to Gilgit?” Gilgit was farther to the north. “The water there is black.”

  He had his pills, though. But then, immediately afterwards, the other side of his nature coming out, he sat down and ate right through the starchy hotel breakfast of thick fried bread slices and limp, oily potatoes, green with curry.

  It was a small settlement of low stone houses, nondescript, some old, some government-built and new (the roof of the government hotel was bright red); and it ended abruptly in wilderness, after the bazaar. Some of the shops or stalls had cooking platforms. Scummy water from the shops ran out into the rocky road; there were animal droppings; the softer ground between the rocks was churned black. Sheep and cattle, even at this early hour, were being driven down.

  Comfortless as the settlement was, makeshift and half ruined as the bazaar looked, the site was old, on an old mountain route. And the route was peopled: always there were the flat-roofed houses, set against the hillsides and the road embankment and half hidden, the thick roofs of insulating mud supported on heavy beams or tree trunks, which could in addition take the winter snow. Winter kindling—drying pine branches, shrubs—lay on the roofs and was like a further camouflage.

  Sometimes, in pebbly, rock-buttressed terraces, grew poor crops of potatoes or peppers or maize (wheat the early-summer crop, maize the late-summer crop, millet the winter crop). Grain and potatoes—and peppers! Pines were scattered. Grass grew in tufts on the steep mountainsides, creating a mottled effect, and suggesting, when you rose above them and looked down, hills or mountains netted with goat tracks.

  Snow, melted now, had scoured and abraded the mountains. Old snow lay in clefts and the colour of this snow was indeterminate: not white, not brown, more like a water surface catching the light. This old snow was firm on the surface; but—though winter was about to come again—the snow was melting, and each snow cleft fed a torrent. At ten thousand feet the land opened out between the mountains: blackened remnants of snow in shadowed crevices; snow thick and white on the mountaintops, softening sharp lines; moss growing on the cleansed red rock of sunlit mountainsides; and, in the middle of the openness, a green lake, with a meadow with forget-me-nots and the small yellow flowers of a summer water meadow, growing for the few weeks before the snow came again. On the far side of the lake there were a few tents, the tents of the nomads: dark triangles against white canvas. The traffic of men and animals never stopped.

  On the way back, down the valley again, the jeep driver stopped near an Afghan encampment. He shouted out to the girl or woman preparing roti in front of her tent. When she understood what the jeep driver was saying she smiled and shook her head. Masood said he was asking for some kind of root. It was a medicinal root; it cured pain. I later thought it was probably ginseng.

  The jeep driver had other concerns as well. Many times this morning, he stopped to chat to the drivers of minibuses. He was a man of local reputation, our jeep driver; I hadn’t guessed that on the way out. So he was more than a man of the mountains; his elegance—the full white trousers, the tan shirt, the beautiful hair—was studied.

  The whispers now, with the other drivers! The air of conspiracy! I thought he might have been asking for another kind of root or drug, less healing. But he was talking about politics, about the local elections the military government had decreed. In spite of the goats and the sheep and the camels and the tents and the cooking fires and the Afghans with their red-and-black costumes and their silver jewellery, the valley was full of politics. The jeep driver’s party was the party of Mr. Bhutto. Mr. Bhutto had been hanged five months before; but his party still drew the people’s affections in the valley.

  Mr. Bhutto, the jeep driver said, was the only man in Pakistan who had ever done anything for the poor. Before Mr. Bhutto, in the time of General Ayub (ruled 1958–69), poor people could get passports only for countries like Afghanistan and India, bad countries, countries with no jobs, no opportunities. In Mr. Bhutto’s time you could get passports for everywhere—Europe, America, Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, everywhere. Now once again you couldn’t get passports.

  Masood (wearing a blue nylon zip-up windcheater and an embroidered white skullcap) said to me in English, “It’s the foreign governments that stopped it. But he doesn’t think so.”

  The jeep driver said he was born in the valley. His father kept a shop, so he was better off than most. He became interested in politics only in the time of Mr. Bhutto. “This place,” he said (in Masood’s translation), “had big landlords in the old days. They grew their three crops a year. They sold their crops. They got local people to work for them, and the people worked for them only for food. This is what used to happen in this place.”

  And that bridge there, across the Kunhar River, that bridge was built by Mr. Bhutto.

  The jeep driver talked on, whipping himself up. He seemed quite different from the man who had driven us into the valley, who had been playful enough to bargain for the Afghan rug for me. Masood stopped translating.

  After a while Masood said, “He’s being emotional now. Very emotional. He is saying that Mr. Bhutto isn’t dead.”

  We had travelled out with sad and sweet film songs about love: they had given a mood to the dusk and the river and the lights of the far-off houses. We were travelling back with this other passion. And I began to look at the people on the road with another eye: they were the poor, the neglected. But that wasn’t quite what the driver was seeing.

  “These maulanas,” the driver said, in Masood’s translation, “are using Islam as a tool. We are all Muslims. We are not Muslims in their way. They want to destroy Pakistan. Our Islam is better. We are the only people who can save Islam and Pakistan.”

  We had to stop. A truck was being loaded with pine logs. The logs were being manhandled from the mountainside onto the truck. The road was narrow; we had to wait until the log-loading was completed. A red Suzuki minibus was waiting ahead of us. We got out. The road was trampled into fine dust by the flocks that had passed. The jeep driver scrambled up the road cutting to talk to the loaders, and then to sit and watch them.

  Masood and I stood beside the gorge of the Kunhar.

  Masood said, “I agree with what he says about the maulanas. It is my attitude. There is fifteen percent literacy in this place.”

  I said, “But isn’t it strange that the only freedom he wants is the freedom to leave the country? He doesn’t have any idea that the country might be developed, that there might be jobs here.”

  Masood didn’t understand at first. The idea of escape was too much in his own mind. When he did understand he said, “But the rulers of the country have never had that idea or given people that idea. Now the army is in control.”

  So now, seeing them as the poor and the unrepresented, and not as people wearing a certain kind of costume
or having a certain cast of features, I considered the labourers, the herdsmen, and the idle people watching the log-loading, above the green-and-white river. And something of Masood’s gloom and the jeep driver’s hysteria touched me.

  I said, “What will happen to these people?”

  Masood said, “God alone knows.”

  Later he said, “Nothing will happen. What will happen?” And later still, after a flock of dyed sheep picked its way past us, grinding the fine dust finer, causing it to rise, colouring his white skullcap and greying his walrus moustache, Masood said, looking down into the river, “They have empty hands. They don’t have guns. Millions will have to die.” And that was not rebellion speaking; that was despair. “Do you know how many political parties there are in this country? There are ninety-four political parties in this country. What can happen?”

  I said, “When did you start getting worried about the future?”

  “Nineteen seventy-one.” That was the year of Bangladesh. “No, I think it was before. I think I started worrying about the future in matriculation.”

  Masood had misunderstood my question. I had asked about Pakistan. But he was so choked by his own anxieties that he had taken the question to refer to himself. He had taken the question to be a continuation of our talk the previous evening.

  The jeep driver was sitting on the hillside, knees up, white-trousered legs apart, watching the loaders.

  Masood said, “I used to do tuitions. I used to get four hundred rupees a month for that. But I had to stop. The parents of the children treated me like a servant. They never treated me like a teacher. If I had to get to the house at four and got there at five, they made trouble. If their children failed they blamed me.”

  Money, his career, his family: after the previous evening, these were the topics to which Masood returned.

  He said, “My father now asks himself why he came. ‘Why did I come? Where is the dignity I thought I was coming to?’ ” But that, as I had felt before, was only half true. Masood’s father, the Muslim army sergeant, migrating to Pakistan in 1947, had found the dignity he had wanted in 1947.

  The truck was loaded at last. The heavy logs were beaten into place with staves, and ropes were twisted tight around the logs. The truck moved off. The red Suzuki minibus moved off. We followed, after a tussle with the opposing traffic that had also built up.

  We stopped at the town of Jared. It was famous for its woodcarving. But the examples I saw were poor—wooden daggers, trays, ashtrays: poor design, poor carving. Masood bought a walnut ashtray for fifteen rupees. Clearly there was once a tradition; now the absence of skill, eye, judgement, was like part of the human desolation.

  We passed the truck with the logs again, and then again we were behind the little red Suzuki. We ate their dust.

  All at once there appeared to be some kind of commotion at the back of the Suzuki. Someone was hurled out onto the road. And then someone else was thrown out.

  I said, “They are throwing people out of the bus.”

  Masood said, “A fight.”

  The Suzuki was moving on. But then it stopped. We avoided the first man; he was uninjured, and on his feet again. Then we passed a young boy or man—his slack, string-tied trousers opened, his genitals exposed—lying on the road. People from the bus were already running up to him. We passed the Suzuki—there was no one in the driver’s seat—and stopped about a hundred yards ahead, where the road widened.

  I didn’t want to see blood. I was glad our driver had stopped where he had. What had happened wasn’t clear. But the Suzuki’s windscreen was smashed, and on the steep hillside above was the explanation: a herd of goats, part of the migration, wandering off the road. They had dislodged a stone; the stone had smashed the windscreen and wounded the driver. For some seconds the Suzuki would have been out of control on the mountain road. That was no doubt when one of the passengers at the back had thrown himself out. Then the wounded driver had fallen out; and someone, perhaps the man beside the driver, had brought the Suzuki to a halt.

  The driver was now being lifted, to be brought to our jeep. And our jeep driver was climbing, sure-footedly (he was a man of the region), up the rocky slope to where the goats and their herdsman were, high above the road. What was our driver doing? Why the haste? The answer was simple: it was to knock the herdsman about, to beat and drive him down to the road.

  The quaint tribesman, the man driving his flocks down to their winter pasture, was now only someone very small and vulnerable. He was hit about the face and abused by our driver. His black turban—his dignity—fell loose from his bald head, became a dingy length of cotton; and he was pushed and punched all the way down, leaving his precious goats behind. There, on the road, various people from the Suzuki took runs at him and punched him and then ran back to where they had been standing. Then anger came to them again, and they ran up again to the old herdsman—crying and, without his turban, looking as small as a child—and beat him about the head and chest.

  I said to Masood, “They’re going to kill that man.”

  Masood said, “No. They’re going to stop beating him now. You see, they’ve put him in the bus. Now they’re going to take him to the police station.”

  But it had been an accident. And what about the man’s goats? But it was the custom of the place; Masood saw nothing to object to. Yet our jeep driver had spoken so feelingly about the poor. The poor were his fellows, people of the valley; outsiders were not among his poor.

  They brought the Suzuki driver to our jeep. He was unconscious. One man held him in his arms in the front seat. Masood and I sat on the back seat; the jeep driver’s boy held on to the back of the jeep. The wounded man wasn’t bleeding.

  Masood said, “His wounds are internal. They say it was a very big stone that fell down and hit him as he was driving.”

  I had thought, seeing him half exposed on the road, that he was a boy or a very young man. I saw now that he was older; that he was very thin, with a face and body shrunken from undernourishment. He remained unconscious. The man cradling him spoke to him softly, as to a child. But the wounded man never replied, never opened his eyes.

  We drove as fast as we could down the Kaghan Valley to Balakot, beside the Kunhar gorge, the lines of the hills, the tall pines, the terracings of maize, the flat-roofed houses. From time to time Masood or the jeep driver felt the unconscious man’s cheek with the back of a hand. They said he was alive; but he never stirred or made a noise.

  For an hour or so we drove. And when we got to Balakot, to the little grey hospital, there were only children in the yard, and no one came out to take the wounded man. The doctor had gone to Peshawar; the compounder was in Mansehra. It was to Mansehra that the wounded man had to be taken. But that was no longer our responsibility; we had to surrender our jeep.

  And the responsibility of the jeep driver was also at an end. There was nothing more he could do. He had worked himself up into a political passion; he had expressed this passion in his persecution of the Afghan herdsman, his tenderness towards the wounded man. But his solicitude—and his sense of drama—could not survive the long, exacting mountain drive to Balakot. When we left him there—handsome, idle—he was like a man enervated and empty.

  We drove away—in our borrowed car and with our borrowed driver—through the late afternoon and early evening. After the mountains, the land was softer, drier, with more varied vegetation.

  Neither Masood nor I spoke much. There was little to say. Masood’s troubles made him heavy, made neutral conversation difficult.

  The bicycles on the road carried no lights. The buses and trucks often had no lights at the back, because there was no point in lighting up where you had been. The horse carriages had no lights at all.

  I said, with sudden irritation, “They have no lights.”

  Masood said, flatly, “They have no lights.”

  I set him down on the Peshawar road—Peshawar, the military town to the west, in the flat, wide valley leading to the Khyber Pa
ss and another part of Afghanistan.

  9

  Agha Babur

  In Rawalpindi the newspapers carried news of government cuts. Six ministries were to be wound up. There were to be economies in Baluchistan: no new jobs were to be created, and there were to be no salary rises for people in jobs. Twenty-nine officials of the Weights and Measures Department were to be dismissed. The Pakistan Times said that the officials concerned had “urged the government to provide them alternative jobs to save them and their families from mental agony and starvation in these days of high prices.” According to The Muslim, however, the officials had asked only to be relieved of “mental agony and frustration.”

  The minibuses that plied between Rawalpindi and Islamabad had gone on a one-day strike to protest against police harassment. The bus drivers told the newspapers that the police wanted higher bribes. The police said the drivers had been “misbehaving” with passengers.

  Thirty-four teachers told The Muslim that they hadn’t been able to leave for their jobs in Oman in southeast Arabia because the emigration authorities in Pakistan had raised questions about the teachers’ “no-objection” certificates. In the same issue of The Muslim there was an investigative report about the high costs of an extension to a government-run tourist inn in the far north: a job that should have taken seven months had taken five years.

  In the Pakistan Times a retired army man wrote an article about indiscipline. “It is now openly acknowledged that ours is a corrupt society, practising every conceivable social evil imaginable. Children growing up in a domestic atmosphere where smuggling, black-marketing, hoarding, bribery and corruption … are indulged in quite blatantly, should not be expected to accept discipline in any form. When these children go to the educational institutions, they naturally try to project the home atmosphere there.…” The solution was a greater firmness, “an iron hand,” in the schools (no politics to be allowed there) and in the courts. “Imprisonment, flogging and even capital punishment will do the needful.”