Nevertheless, from time to time, efforts are made to be reasonable with each other. From the ebb and flow of negotiations someone had the good idea to resurrect the old railway line between Delhi and Lahore that the Twain party took on 17 March 1896. They gave the new train a name, the Samjhota (in Hindi) or Samjhauta (in Urdu) Express, depending on where it was originating; either word means concord or agreement in English. The train would make the round trip twice a week. The original plan was to have the whole rake complete each round trip and although Pakistani locomotives and carriages didn’t mind trundling two hundred miles across the Indian Punjabi plains - any more than the Indian version minded delving the twenty miles into the Pakistani Punjabi plains - the trade unions and security wallahs on both sides soon agreed it would be less stressful to have the passengers disembark and re-embark across the respective frontiers.
In Mark Twain’s notes he reported that he left Delhi at midnight and arrived in Lahore at 05.30 a.m. next day, 18 March. I can only presume something is wrong with the note as no train then, not even the Flying Mail on which he would have been traveling, turned in that sort of speed. Nevertheless one thing is certain, it would have been a lot quicker then than the slow chug of a folly that makes the journey today.
As I am sitting, swaying and jolting on the Samjhota Express it is good to read his notes again, if only to remind myself why we are making this trip this way at all: only to follow in his train tracks, as every guide book and tourist forum insists this is the worst possible way to journey from Delhi to Lahore. And the border crossing complications haven’t even started yet. And two sets of unpleasant, deadly memories are right here with us on these tracks.
Apart from the Partition massacres, on 18 February 2007 a bomb exploded on this train, killing 68 passengers and injuring a hundred more. It was just days before the two governments were due to meet for peace talks. The case remains unsolved. WikiLeaks reveals that the CIA’s top suspect is David Headley, a name-changed, Pakistani-American, Pakistani-intelligence-sponsored terrorist behind a number of other massacres, including the 2008 Mumbai terrorist atrocity. Other investigations point the finger at Abhinav Bharat, a right-wing Indian group with links to retired Indian Army officers. The memories of that blast and the religious hatred of humanity behind it haunt the slow train journey now; the very slowness of passing through the scene of the horror stops the memory moving on.
Is there an easy way, a pleasant way to go from Delhi to Lahore? Yes, and an amusing way too. One takes the Delhi to Amritsar train, the Sachkhand Express. This ends twenty miles from the border, and taxis and buses abound to help with the final leap. Once at the border the respective armies put on a display of bravado and machismo as they strut and goosestep round their countries’ flagpoles and barriers. It has become quite the tourist attraction with numbered seats and postcard sellers - photography in theory being forbidden. The show - and there is no other word for it - lasts for half an hour. Rumor has it that once the tourists have gone they all muck in together, not surprisingly as they are all Punjabis after all.
Border show over, one then walks through the two frontier posts without excessive botheration. Once into Pakistan an equal number of taxis and buses abound to take one the final twenty miles into Lahore. That’s the easy way, the amusing way.
And there is the other way, this way that the Mark Twain sleuth hounds are taking. Eventually the Samjhota Express reaches Attari on the Indian side of the border. All change! I had noticed that we were the only people in our carriage and when I went to find a serviceable loo saw that there were only three other passengers in the next carriage - backpacking tourists from the Far East. Now as we jumped down onto the shale (there is no platform as such) it is clear we are the only five passengers from all of the six carriages.
If you don’t mind I’m going to compress the next four hours into four sentences. Exciting it was not (1). Ironical it was; the fact that there were just the five of us clearly aroused both sets of guards’ suspicions and so prolonged the process: why would anyone sensible chose such a stupid way of travelling from Delhi to Lahore? (2). A further complication was completing “Occupation” on the forms: I didn’t want to put “Tourist” as just a quick look through my cases, crammed with books and notes and the “magic letter” from the Indian High Commission would reveal I am slightly more than that, leading to unknown further delays (3). “Writer” could mean - dread word - journalist; “Historian” won the day. And there was plenty of idle time for mathematics: five people, four hours, twenty-two guards equals five and a half guard/hours per entry (4).
***
An hour later the Pakistani version of the Samjhota Express grinds its way into Lahore station, Platform 1 no less. Lahore Station, like the one at Lucknow we visited three weeks ago, was designed post-Sepoy Uprising to be both train station and fort. At first sight it looks like the son of St. Pancras in London but in fact the turrets are reinforced and the clock towers bomb-proof; it’s a classic piece of Oriental-Gothic Raj style and a classic piece of once-bitten-twice-shy Raj intent.
Lahore Station is as busy as any in India and one is met by the usual hordes of porters and taxi touts. Luckily I had said “yes” when the nice PRO at the Avari Hotel in the Mall not only asked, but insisted that we should be met. And so it is done; a tall, young, spring-footed, tousle-haired British Pakistani meets me - and greets me with a British Midlands accent. He is Muji from Birmingham, here on a three-month hotel management placement and the sort of chirpy person to whom one warms immediately. He is good news but he has bad news: we cannot reach the hotel; there’s a full-scale demonstration on outside, probably for the next hour. What’s it about? Blasphemy.
“For or against?” I ask.
“Not for,” Muji replies.
We cross the square outside and find a chai shop to watch the show. The marchers holler past the station, a mass of green and white flags and placards, black or white clothing, anger on the faces and hatred in the voices. They all look like they have been cloned from the same anger/hate hybrid gene.
“They all look alike,” I say and sip. To a man they all seem to be twenty-two years old with unshaped beards, no moustaches, and shaking right raised fists.
“They are all alike. Fuckin’ nutters,” says Muji.
“I’m pleased you said so first. What are they shouting about?” There seems to be only one slogan shouted.
“My Urdu’s a bit shaky and I don’t read it, but something like ‘Hang Munrid a thousand times!’”
“Gosh, who’s Munrid?” I ask.
“Fucked if I know. Blasphemy is a big deal here now. Every day, that and the CIA yank they’ve locked up. Or something else. Have you heard much about the blasphemy business?”
“Only the headlines,” I reply. I retrieve yesterday’s Times of India out of my carry-on. Under the headline “Pakistan Assassinations Highlight Sway of Radical Clerics”, I read out “Yousaf Qureshi made headlines when he offered $6,000 to anyone who kills a Pakistani Christian woman convicted of blasphemy. She was seen in public making a sign of the cross, a definition of blasphemy in today’s Pakistan. Now, the cleric told worshippers packed into his 17th-century mosque his followers had done a ‘marvelous job’ days before, by assassinating a cabinet minister who had defended the woman.”
“Yeah,” says Muji, “there’ve been two assassinations of cabinet ministers here lately. The last one, guy called Bhatti, was shot by his own bodyguard. They’re all fuckin’ batty if you ask me. There’s no police at all; they’re all bent as fuck anyway. Mind you, the whole country’s bent. It’s run by the army and they’re rippin’ everyone off too. I just keep me head down, that’s what the hotel says we all have to do. Not that I’m that interested. I hate politicians in England too.” He looks up and out at the emptier street. “I reckon we can go if some bastard hasn’t nicked the car. We’re meant to have a driver waiting. Last one we empl
oyed drove off with one of our cars. That happens all the time too.”
“How come you’re staying at the Avari?” Muji asks as we drive through the rickshaws and rubbish. I notice the English road names: Aikman, Tollington, Club, Davis, Durand, Shalimar, GT.[82] “Not that there’s anything wrong with it. Best in town I think.”
I explain: the Twain party all stayed at the Nedous Hotel in Mall Road. It was sold in 1946, revamped and renamed the Park Luxury Hotel. That was knocked down and made into the Lahore Hilton. Then they gave up and now it’s the Avari Hotel. I had emailed them after the visas were sorted and asked if by any miracle they had any of the Nedous archives. They said no, but come and stay anyway. Too expensive, I said. Not with a media discount - you are a travel writer, aren’t you? I am now, I said, and so here we are. And, it has to be said, they didn’t exactly have to squeeze us in.
***
That first night Mark Twain lectured at the Railway Theatre, but it has sunk without trace. I am disappointed because this is the first time I’ve drawn a compete blank: elsewhere even if no Twain venue still stands there have been records and a location, somewhere to go and mope about. Actually I couldn’t have gone to the Railway Theatre for a show even if it had existed: the 10 p.m. Karachi curfew had been extended to Lahore.
“Not that it’s an official curfew,” says Ahmed from a bar stool in The Tollington Pub in the depths of the Avari Hotel. “You are somehow just meant to know.”
We introduce ourselves. Ahmed is a 45-year-old Pakistani Canadian, a researcher from Toronto working on a new HBO series about the Mujahideen. This is his first trip to Pakistan; he’s been here a month, up north, and is only in Lahore overnight to fly home out from here tomorrow. His family was Kashmiri; his father a railway engineer working where Ahmed has just been, in the North West Frontier, at Partition. His parents were not worried, Muslim Kashmir was bound to be part of Muslim Pakistan; it wasn’t, another Partition disaster. His family was homeless but at least his father was well trained and qualified and Commonwealth Canada welcomed them, with generosity too. He cannot say enough good about Canada, the home he has come to have, and enough bad about Pakistan, the home he never had.
He is interested in India and the contrasts, there and here.
“I haven’t been here long enough for the contrasts,” I reply, “but you can’t help being impressed with India. I love the way they live in the past and embrace the future. If knowledge will be this century’s most valuable raw material they are a generation or two from being on top of the world. Everywhere you look in India are colleges or advertisements for colleges. You could write a pamphlet with all their exam initials.”
Ahmed says, “There’s no education happening here. It’s another scam. They call it the ghost-school racket. The politicians take money from foreign aid and NGOs for new schools and put up a shell. There’s a big opening, VIPs cutting tapes, usual bullshit. Then they go and that’s it. All the money for books and teachers - even students - gets no further than the politicians’ pockets. Even if you can find a teacher, they’re paid squat. If they are paid at all. They were out on strike in Peshawar last week. Hadn’t been paid for months. If you want to take a higher exam you slip some money into your answer sheets. If you want to pass you slip some more in. No wonder they got madrasahs everywhere.”
“How does that work?” I ask.
“Only a quarter of girls - a quarter right? - and half of boys complete primary school. The literacy rate in the country as a whole is only fifty percent, much less among the under thirties. They are way behind Nepal and Bangladesh - and as for India...”
“But the madrasahs?”
“They spend half the day teaching the children to learn the Koran by rote in Arabic. Imagine your schooldays learning the New Testament in Aramaic by rote. But the other half they do spend teaching them how to read and write. And they are free, Saudi money mainly, and the kids get fed, fed well too. If you’re a poor Muslim anyway and you want your children to read and write you send them to a madrasah.”
“That’s all they learn, the Koran in Arabic, and reading and writing Urdu?”
“That’s it. No sports, no culture, no technology. No computer skills, not in the Koran. No English, not in the Koran. No science, especially no science, not in the Koran. You think the literacy rate at fifty percent is bad enough, but that fifty percent know nothing about the world at all. Half the population is under 25 and half of them illiterate.”
“And the rich?”
“Pakistan is run by 27 families, extended families. Some are in politics, some the military, some in business but one way or another they have the place all sewn up. None of them pay any taxes. They couldn’t give a shit. They’re all educated abroad, a lot of them only speak English. Switzerland is where they all bank. But even the Swiss got fed up with President Zardari, told him not to be so blatant, even took him to court. The Swiss!”
“The famous Mr. Ten Percent.”
“That name started when he was married to Benazir Bhutto ast the time she was Prime Minster. Man, she was a crook, big time, a real scammer. He is even worse. Now he’s President. When he was sworn in he had to declare his worth. The world was watching so he couldn’t put nothing. He put down 1.9 billion US dollars. Transparency [International] reckons he has stolen ten times that amount and five times more than that if you include his cronies. It’s like Nigeria without the oil. They don’t need oil, they’ve got US aid. And that’s not all.”
After a month of buttoning his lip Ahmed was in full flow. “Zardari has been in prison for murder, twice, and indicted for four more, then mysteriously they were both pardoned - Benazir for corruption and him for ordering the murders - including, by the way, her brother.”
A few beers later and we have put the world to rights. The Americans created a lot of the problems by throwing money at the Pakistanis to spend on the Mujahideen when they were fighting the Russians in Afghanistan. Once the Russians had been defeated the Mujahideen were left to stew. Some became the Taliban and now the Americans are throwing more money at the Pakistanis to fight them. Meanwhile the Pakistani Taliban are gaining ground rapidly as the drones policy, bombing Pakistan territory in search of the Taliban, is backfiring on patriotic hearts and minds. The politicians let it continue as the army feeds some of the American money back to them. The 100,000-strong ISI, the army’s intelligence unit, is riddled with Taliban sympathizers and assassins, such as the dead cabinet minister Bhatti’s bodyguard. The ISI created various terrorist groups to fight the army’s wars by proxy in Afghanistan and Kashmir and these have now become self-funding through guns and drugs and are no longer under anyone’s control. The best any outside government can do is stop giving the Pakistanis foreign aid or military funding which simply disappears and encourages corruption - and irony-free American politicians please note, the Taliban, which brings us back to where we started. In fact, if you sat down with a blank piece of paper and US$20 billion you would not be able to invent a more counter-productive, ill fitting and yes, morally bankrupt set of policies however hard you tried. SNAFU, I believe is the appropriate acronym, or as Mark Twain said “Politician and idiot are synonymous terms”, or even Sita’s favorite: “Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.”
***
The next day I knew I was going to be disappointed even before I was disappointed. This was one of Mark Twain’s favorite days, lunch with the Lieutenant Governor in Government House and then a ride through Lahore on one of the governor’s elephants. Government House is reputed to be surrounded by troops. A bit late, one would have thought: only a few months ago the resident Governor of Punjab, Salmaan Taseer, was assassinated too over his support for repealing the blasphemy law. Taseer was a highly successful international investment banker turned politician, a sort of Pakistani version of Michael Bloomberg but without the annoying prissiness. An
d as for finding an elephant...
In Lahore the Lieutenant-Governor lent me an elephant. This hospitality stands out in my experiences in a stately isolation. It was a fine elephant, affable, gentlemanly, educated, and I was not afraid of it. I even rode it with confidence through the crowded lanes of the native city, where it scared all the horses out of their senses, and where children were always just escaping its feet. It took the middle of the road in a fine independent way, and left it to the world to get out of the way or take the consequences.
I am used to being afraid of collisions when I ride or drive, but when one is on top of an elephant that feeling is absent. I could have ridden in comfort through a regiment of runaway teams. I could easily learn to prefer an elephant to any other vehicle, partly because of that immunity from collisions, and partly because of the fine view one has from up there, and partly because of the dignity one feels in that high place, and partly because one can look in at the windows and see what is going on privately among the family.
The Lahore horses were used to elephants, but they were rapturously afraid of them just the same. It seemed curious. Perhaps the better they know the elephant the more they respect him in that peculiar way. In our own case - we are not afraid of dynamite till we get acquainted with it.
It’s only a short walk along the extension of Mall Road and into the Mayo Gardens from the Avari Hotel to Governor’s House. For once I don’t take a guide as I know about the Nedous Hotel and the Railway Theatre. Governor’s House is close at hand and although unvisitable is, I presume, photographable and gawpable. Instead we amble through the city streets and market, keeping Governor’s House on our left, somewhere. There’s no hurry and the amble turns into a half-marathon, ambling-wise.
The Indian Equator Page 25