Lahore is noticeably poorer than Delhi, Old or New, and I suspect that outer or tribal Pakistan is noticeably poorer than outer or tribal India. Certainly its religion-bound, education-free prospects are much poorer. Delhi’s streets are covered in trash but occasionally, just occasionally, it is swept up and sifted for trinkets and, even more occasionally, bits of it for recycling. Here in Lahore the trash is denser and older and without the benefit of cows and goats chomping on it as a first line of attack. Twice I saw makeshift bonfires near the market; when the garbage gets too bad someone takes the initiative and burns it, creating more pollution. In Delhi they are making some effort to tackle air the foul air, introducing four-stroke and LPG rickshaws, gas-powered town buses and the like, while here the smelly old two-stroke rickshaws and old, old cars and buses belch out smoke unabashed. In Delhi if one is lost it is certain that at least a shop owner will speak enough English to set you back on track; here even the pharmacy owner I ask doesn’t speak English. In Delhi beggars have their pitch and are, by and large, passive; here they wander around and are active and persistent. In Delhi one sometimes feels like one is in the twenty-first century, with hope and pride in the air; here in Lahore one more often feels like one is in the nineteenth, with fear and despair in the eyes. And I miss seeing women out and about, especially brightly dressed and bangled women.
Eventually, with many vague attempts at left turning, we come out on Staff College Road, the wrong side of, but still adjacent to Governor’s House. There’s another demonstration but this one is very different from yesterday’s. The demonstrators are older, quieter and are waving sheets of paper and not placards. There is no sign of Islam or hatred. Simply anger.
I find a man in a suit and ask him, “What’s all this about?”
“Oh, the electricity. Wish I was with them but I need to be in my office.”
“What about the electricity?”
“Haven’t you noticed the generators?” Actually I have, especially around the market. “The Lahore ESC just sends out these enormous bills whether you are there or not. There are no meters. And no electricity for a lot of the time. These are mostly shop keepers and stall holders. They’ve had enough.”
“But if there’s no electricity there should be no bills.”
“Ha, then they cut you off. Then only reconnect with baksheesh. The supply company was denationalized, then given to one of Zardari’s cronies. Ever since it’s become another scam. They sell to the highest bidder. It’s called hot-wiring, a guaranteed supply. But you pay. Where are you staying?”
“The Avari.”
“Ask them. I better go.”
I cannot get anywhere near Governor’s House, another fine architectural example of Raj confidence, not just in an endless future but in experimenting with different classical motifs from the Palladian portico to the Moghul sepulcher rear and Oriental-Gothic wings. It is indeed surrounded by troops. Gillian’s one noble attempt at photography is instantly banned by frantically waving lines of incoming camouflage.
Decision snaps sometimes replace camera snaps and I decide to bale out of Lahore there and then rather than wait for tomorrow. I’ve seen all there is to see here, story-wise, my bar buddy Ahmed has left and Lahore is sinking in anger. I walk back to the train station and for a while enter a parallel Pakistan, one with purpose and old world charm and one without testiness and disruption. The unkind thought arises that the railway track is an umbilical chord back to an easier, more pleasant life in India.
Rawalpindi
Trains to Rawalpindi, combining with its neighbor and Pakistan’s capital Islamabad, run every other hour and three hours later I am on the 4.30 p.m. Subak Kharmam Express up towards the North West Frontier. Gillian has joined Livy and Clara on strike; all three need a rest and stay behind in Lahore while Mark Twain and Carlyle Smythe and I make the trip up to Rawalpindi.
Once out of Lahore one sees yet another Pakistan, Pakistan the picturesque. Twain made this same journey but made no comments about it but here I’m reminded of his impressions of Bengal more than I had been in Bengal; or maybe - apart from the nakedness - it was the insidious Pakistan-now-equals-India-then mindset:
And everywhere through the soft vistas we glimpse the villages, the countless villages, the myriad villages, thatched, built of clean new matting, snuggling among grouped palms and sheaves of bamboo; villages, villages, no end of villages, not three hundred yards apart, and dozens and dozens of them in sight all the time; a mighty City, hundreds of miles long, hundreds of miles broad, made all of villages, the biggest city in the earth, and as populous as a European kingdom. I have seen no such city as this before.
And there is a continuously repeated and replenished multitude of naked men in view on both sides and ahead. We fly through it mile after mile, but still it is always there, on both sides and ahead - brown-bodied, naked men and boys, ploughing in the fields. But not a woman. In these two hours I have not seen a woman or a girl working in the fields.
He wouldn’t see one outside a house now either, but that’s a different matter.[83]
***
Three hours and a glorious sunset over the plains later, I reflect on how the good the trains are - and such excellent value; presumably a service not yet farmed out to one of Zardari’s crook-cronies. In fact this Rawalpindi railway line was a source of great pride to the British and Indian - and of course future Pakistani - engineers and managers who built and ran it. The terrain up to Rawalpindi and beyond was difficult and the rush for a quick completion, caused by the need to have a reinforceable garrison in place near the Afghan border, made the building of it even more challenging. It was only finished eight years before Mark Twain and Carlyle Smythe arrived, by which time the garrison had become the largest in the British Empire with 40,000 soldiers encamped, including “one regiment of British and one of Native cavalry; two regiments of British and two of Native infantry”.
It is still a large garrison town now and the headquarters of the Pakistani Army and Air Force. Twain stayed and lectured in The Club, Rawal Pindi, in the cantonment area, so attached to but not exclusive to its military clientele. From old photographs it looks remarkably like the Poona Club and it met the same fate: burned down by a blaze started in the open-fire kitchen. It was rebuilt as the Artillery Officers’ Mess, a status it maintained through Partition and its take-over by the new Pakistani Army.
Like much else it has now been semi-privatized by an unholy alliance of politicians and generals and when not in use by the officers can be hired for special occasions. I wander in late morning the next day and share a soft drink with three young officers at the bar. They all speak perfect English. Like the Indian Army, the Pakistani Army is cloned from the British Army - the commercialization here, with advertisements for wedding hosting, BBQ & Tombola Parties and Karaoke Evenings are a later development. I’m still trying to imagine a sober karaoke evening, or wedding reception for that matter. Outside are the famous old tennis courts where the first ever Davis Cup was held but now half full of paying parked cars. A ticket booth stands where the main court umpire must have sat.
The eldest officer, Humza Yousaf, striped up as a captain, asks me where I am staying. I say Flashman’s Hotel opposite. (I couldn’t resist it, being a lover of George Macdonald Fraser’s yarns; it is also the nearest hotel to what was The Club.) It turns out he has family in England only thirty miles away from mine and our prep schools used to play against each other at soccer and cricket. We agree to dine together tomorrow evening; and a very informative dinner it will be too.
The area around Flashman’s Hotel is Saddar Bazaar, a wonderful collection of alleys and shops and a thriving business center, a self-contained town within a city. Wandering further afield reveals Rawalpindi, or just Pindi as the locals say, to have a distinct and robust flavor. One warms to its cool atmosphere, welcome even now in late spring. The people reflect the geography: alth
ough we are still in Punjab it is nearing its end and more exotic-looking mountain tribesmen mingle with local traders and a disproportionally high number of men in military and mullah uniforms.
Unfortunately it also attracts its share of fanatics. This is where, in the old East India Company grounds, Benazir Bhutto was assassinated in late 2007. It was also where her father was hanged by General Zia, a particularly unpleasant religious maniac-cum-military dictator-cum-serial-embezzler, and from whose rule the psychotic warrior-gangster-priest nature of Pakistan has never recovered. It was also where in 1951 the first elected Prime Minister of Pakistan, Liaquat Ali Khan, was assassinated. One would be a brave Bhutto, or any politician, to go anywhere near the place. Sometimes it feels like a politician in Pakistan has the life expectancy of a rear gunner in World War 2.
It’s not just politicians. More than three hundred people have been killed and many more hundreds injured in the eighteen bomb blasts here since 1987. All have been religiously inspired and politically driven. The nature of the outrages has changed too: up to ten years ago anonymous car bombs were in vogue but now the suicide bomber holds sway. And it’s getting worse. The recent attacks on mosques were inter-Muslim internecine affairs, an ominous shift pointing to a religious civil war.
The rampant terrorism affects everything. The Cricket World Cup is being held right now. Pakistan is cricket mad and was due to co-host the tournament. Then some Islamists sprayed the Buddhist Sri Lankan cricketers’ bus with AK-47 bullets and the World Cup games were taken away from Pakistan. One of the venues was to have been the local Army Cricket Ground, already host to a test match, in the grounds of The Club and now adjacent to the Artillery Officers’ Mess. Many Pakistanis cannot even bear to watch it on television being played in India, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, and unlike in India, where the World Cup is talked about constantly, the country’s shame has made it taboo in Pakistan.
***
Flashman’s Hotel, with its low-rise and evocative colonial fort front and prominent position on Mall Road, is a joy. It has recently been refurbished and they have resisted the temptation to carve up the old Raj suites into smaller bedrooms as has been done in hotels elsewhere. I am the only foreigner staying so maybe it’s not driven by good taste but good business. It was owned by the Pakistan Tourism Development Corporation but that has since been privatized, possibly why they insist on guests paying cash. Sleep is sound but broken at dawn by an hour long amplified prayer melee. One gets used to the pre-dawn muezzin all over the Muslim world; the call to prayer echoes out over the loudspeakers and normally only lasts for a minute, leaving enough time for the visitor - and most of the faithful - to turn over and snatch another hour or two sleep. Here in Rawalpindi they broadcast the whole service and the combined and echoed noise from the half a dozen minarets in earshot not only makes re-sleep impossible but sends the day off with a most discordant racket, an electronic Babel.
I meet my new officer friend Humza for dinner. Inevitably the subject turns to Pakistan, the failed state. A few glasses of Pakistani beer, aka mineral water, later we conclude that it is a failing but not yet a failed state; it is certainly a rogue state. There is one more leader in it to turn it around. Another Zia or Zardari and it’s finished. The problem is no leader is on the horizon, hardly surprising given the constant assassinations of leaders and hopefuls.
Gillian and I had been in pre-1979 revolutionary Iran a couple of times and Pakistan now reminds me of being there then. There the state, in the shape of the Shah and his coterie of crook-cronies, had abandoned responsibility for governance and had descended into outright gangsterism; the same could be said here. This quickly spirals into a self-fulfilling prophecy: the regime knows the good times cannot last forever, so uses what time may be left to focus solely on getting even richer even quicker.
True, there is as yet no outstanding mullah, no Ayatollah Khomeini around whom the illiterate and dispossessed could rally, but one feels that if a new leader is to arise he will be religious rather than political or military. Right now the danger is not much the strength of the mullahs but the chronic weakness of the state, which is allowing the fundamentalists to push towards their Sharia goals without any resistance. As in old Iran, the reality for the mass of the population is uneducated joblessness with no hope of reprieve while they stare aghast at the blatant misuse of power by their elite. Also as in old Iran, growing anti-Americanism, due to their pursuit of the Afghan War on Pakistani soil with increasing Pakistani causalities, is leading to a corresponding mistrust of all Western values. Most of those with these Western values may scoff - albeit politely - at the primitive theology behind the mistrust, but if all you know comes from a man-made interpretation of a man-made religion the resulting world views are going to be, well, primitive. There are now no fewer than thirty Islamic parties who all unite around toppling the civilian government and creating an Islamic state.
The politicians take the blame for the American presence in Pakistan, but by a sort of internal Pax Pakistanica control of foreign policy and national security lies with the military and both parties are making respective fortunes from skimming off American spending, now at US$22 billion and increasing by a further US$3 billion a year. In fact, Pakistan has been under total military rule for half of its existence and it is no surprise to find that - like the Prussia of old - it is not a country that has an army but an army that has a country. Under its wing it then has two statelets answerable only to itself: the ISI, now out of control, and the nuclear weapons program shrouded in effective secrecy.[84] It consumes an extraordinary twenty percent of the national budget, employs a million people and runs extensive business interests all over the country, including raw material and import monopolies and extensive property portfolios unhampered by any planning restrictions.
It doesn’t take a genius to see that American foreign policy in South Asia is as foolhardy now as it was in Southeast Asia forty years ago. Reasonable people in Pakistan are helpless, as with one hand the Americans throw money at the deeply unpopular activities of the military-intelligence establishment while on the other demand that the hapless civilian-gangster government wrest back control of the country.
The terrorist groups that the ISI has sponsored with US money are now so drug- and gun- rich and out of control that they have taken to attacking the ISI’s paymasters, the Army itself to protect their fiefdoms or, more accurately, thiefdoms: 2,300 military personnel have been killed by the ISI’s proxies in the last five years. Of more concern to my dinner companion is the other 100,000-strong force, nominally under military control, which controls the 110-strong nuclear weapons program. Already Pakistan has sold nuclear technology to North Korea, Libya and Iran against all international rules and even harbors the scientist, A. Q. Khan, responsible (harbors is a polite way of saying openly fetes). Quite why America has funded it all in the first pace is unclear, especially as the sole purpose of the weapons is to blow up the West’s neighboring ally, the multiracial, multicultural, secular democracy of India.
The real danger is one that everyone acknowledges but seems powerless to prevent. The Taliban has turned its attention from Afghanistan, where it is suffering such heavy losses that even it cannot sustain them, to the much easier pickings of Pakistan. The worst-case scenario, that the Taliban acquire Pakistan’s entire arsenal of nuclear weapons, is not at all beyond the realms of possibility.
On that happy note we say goodnight. Like Mark Twain, I “had intended to penetrate the north west Frontier as far as Peshawar, only a few miles from the Khyber Pass, portal of Afghanistan”, but sickness had dislocated his schedule and two more days were lopped off by a message that his ship was sailing from Calcutta ahead of time. I needed - well, wanted - to get back to the life afloat too.
***
The next morning I wish Rawalpindi good-bye, and back in Lahore Gillian good morrow. Then we both wish Mark Twain, Livy, Clara and Smythe goodbye; they are re-shug
ging along old train tracks to reach Calcutta quickly, as it were, to catch the steamer to South Africa, following more of that equator. Pakistan we wish good-bye too as we fly out from Lahore to Dubai and then on to Istanbul to rejoin Vasco da Gama in southern Turkey.
Good bye to everyone, it’s been fun... if a little exhausting; ten weeks on the road in India is boxing enough for that writer then - and this writer now.
72 Both now in Pakistan.
73 Or 250 million if you include India as it was in 1900, so including Pakistan, parts of Nepal and Bangladesh.
74 Also an assistant, almost a disciple, of our friend Ochterlony from Calcutta.
75 Named after the post-Fraser, pre-Sepoy Uprising owner, Hindu Rao.
76 The East India Company had told the 82-year-old Bahadur Shah II that the title would die with him.
77 Etymologically from the Greek “bed guard”.
78 Meanwhile, trained doctors perform the lucrative operation known as genitoplasty, turning an estimated 300 girls a year into boys by grafting a penis and injecting hormones. At US$5,000 parents reckon it is cheaper than a wedding and dowry - and morally better than sex selection abortions which have left India with seven million more boys than girls under six.
79 He believed in the idea of exemplary punishment pour encourager les autres: having decapitated a local hoodlum he kept the head on his desk.
80 Burma, now Myanmar, although part of the Raj, always had a different fate.
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