by Rory Maclean
‘I will relate a story for you,’ he says. ‘When your good friends were posted to Islamabad, their house was a bordello. Shocking but true. Big Fat Tony, their driver, also secured by the High Commission, had run it under the noses of the previous incumbents. I felt it my duty to tell your friends about the taxi girls.’
‘Taxi girls?’
‘Ladies of chancy virtue,’ he informs me, ‘who arrived every day in taxis – bold as brass – and proceeded directly to the basement.’
‘To do what, Iqbal?’ I ask.
‘Sir, to do. To do. The next morning, armed with brooms, your friends and I greeted the girls and whisked them off the doorstep, along with Big Fat Tony. The pretty things had diamonds in their noses and rings on their fingers and they wailed at the injustice of it all. How would they feed their babies? Who would care for their parents? I realized then how very much I love my holy, shameless country.’ As we barrel headlong towards a crash barrier, Iqbal stops laughing long enough to add, ‘Forgive me if my illustration is inexact. I do fall short of due expression at times.’
‘You’re saying Pakistan is a whore?’ I ask him, gripping the seatbelt’s shoulder strap and remembering with fondness the relatively sedate journeys in Turkey. ‘America’s whore?’
‘Glorious is God,’ he replies. ‘Not just America’s.’
Since 9/11, Pakistan has become the United States’ greatest ally in the war against terrorism. Even though the Pakistani army’s backing of the Taliban helped ruin Afghanistan. And its intelligence service sanctioned armed militants’ attacks on India. And its global mail-order business in nuclear-bomb technology endangers the whole world. In spite of this, the US State Department pours $700 million of assistance into Islamabad’s coffers every year.
‘My dear sir, people may be Christian or Muslim or no matter, but every mortal soul prays to the one and only great god of money. Like those pretty ladies, my Pakistan will sleep with jihadis, Koreans, even Texans, anyone who butters their bottom.’
‘Butters their bread,’ I say, unsure myself of the suitability of the expression.
‘I am beholden for that apt correction,’ he replies.
The Grand Trunk Road veers into the Khyber Pass. Through it marched armies of Greeks, Buddhists and Mughals, carrying their banners high. The British followed them, building a new road around the side of the arid mountain, leaving behind milestones and sad little graveyards. Now, old men cool their feet in dull, roadside streams. Boys in rags play cricket on dusty pitches with stone wickets. The monsoon is weeks overdue and dirt-poor villagers have moved out of their earth houses and on to string beds under dusty neem trees. We wind around them and deep limestone gorges in a convulsion of terrifying twists, as Iqbal mops his neck with a handkerchief and turns up the air conditioning. ‘I beg you to excuse the woefully backward scenes before you,’ he says. ‘Ours is a country of great inequality.’
I’m hungry to discover what has befallen the ‘Homeland of the Muslims’ and say, ‘Pakistan was born of a flawed dream, wasn’t it?’
‘Not a flawed dream, sir, but a dream flawed by man.’
In 1930, ‘the Poet of the East’ – Mohammed Iqbal – called for the creation of a single Muslim state in north-west India. The compelling idea couldn’t be resisted, especially in the face of escalating violence between Hindus and Muslims. In 1947, when the British left India, Pakistan was partitioned off at the cost of millions of lives and livelihoods.
In the early days, the new country was liberal and tolerant. Christians and Shias worshipped alongside Sunnis without fear of prosecution. Wine and bawas – quarter bottles – of gin were sold in the cantonments. But, in gaining independence, the nation’s founders lost their only cause and, unsure of their new role, they decided not to jeopardize their futures by risking fair elections.
With political life throttled, the army – Pakistan’s only organized group – flourished. Its growing frustration with weak civil authority sparked a series of military coups. Army, government and populace became estranged. Prime ministers were deposed or executed. The population was allowed to grow unchecked. A gifted people were crippled by corruption and mismanagement. Poverty fed anger. Each dictator left behind him – according to Iqbal – ‘filth, stink and very ugly scars on the society’. The state began to fail.
But those failings couldn’t be blamed on the dream of a faith-based nation – such candour would have undermined Pakistan’s very existence. Instead, its shortcomings came to be attributed to men failing the faith. The country recast itself as the first Islamic state since the days of the Prophet. Multi-dimensional Islam was narrowed into a state ideology. Opportunistic democrats bolstered their position by building up a small and passionate following of radical Islamists. National insecurity – disguised as the assertion of faith – prolonged animosity with India and propelled the building of the ‘Islamic’ nuclear bomb. Today, poor, failing Pakistan, seventh largest nation in the world, has an annual GDP of less than $540 per head.
‘Hats off to the creators of Pakistan,’ says Iqbal. ‘They changed the map. They dreamt of building a society that was – we can say now in hindsight – utopian. But to answer your question: how did Pakistan get this way? By believing that God wished to be a politician.’ He smiles to himself. ‘Now, we sit in the bazaar in our wooden cubicles, winking at strangers, offering up our rubies…’
Iqbal’s big hands never leave the wheel nor the horn, driving bullock carts and taxis out of our way. He travels at a tremendous speed, past hand-painted lorries adorned with F-16 fighter jets, not pausing for breath, losing neither his narrative nor his good humour. As we drop out of the tribal lands on to the burning plain, he tells me that in his time he has been a tailor, a seaman, an actor and a cook. He says he has driven cars for the Aga Khan and the former director of BOAC in Karachi. He confesses that for a couple of years he fell on hard times.
‘Gambling,’ he admits, ‘with the wrong sort of people. Just like my beloved, unequal country.’
Peshawar is 35 miles from the Afghanistan border. On its outskirts spread the now-flattened Kacha Garhi camp, once home to 100,000 Afghan refugees. Across the highway from the wasteland of broken earth walls laze the manicured lawns and new condominiums of retired military men. ‘City of Flowers’ to the Kushans, ‘Frontier Town’ to the Mughals, ‘the city which comes first after the wilderness’ to the Persians, Peshawar remains a thriving, roughedged trading town. Caravans paused under its shady trees, put their animals to grass on its lush acres, bartered weapons and favours in the Storytellers’ Bazaar – activities which haven’t changed in a thousand years.
Iqbal jumps my first red light on the subcontinent and pulls into a sunless alleyway between the Asia Arm Store and Tip Top Cleaners. Beneath a billboard for City University (‘Get studying! Get out of Pakistan!’), he tells me, ‘My dear, I am bushed to the bone.’ He has been on the road since before dawn, and we still have a four-hour drive to reach Islamabad.
‘Do you want to take a nap?’ I ask him.
‘Not exactly a nap, sir, but perhaps you’d enjoy exploring the town?’ he suggests, conjuring up his own story. ‘While I take a little R&R. My cousin lives in Peshawar.’
‘Your cousin?’ I ask, both bewildered and delighted by the sudden suggestion.
‘A friend of my cousin,’ he says with a theatrical wink. ‘Please forgive my lack of hospitality. I must attend to her by myself on a pressing matter. See you back here in an hour?’
I leave him to meander around the Old City, weaving between buzzing bee-yellow Qingqi rickshaws and horse-drawn tongas, into a warren of crude concrete shops, pavement barbers and cycle-repair stalls. I open my notebook and write. ‘Black flags, sugar-cane juice stalls, mule drivers, overstuffed fleece shops. A cyclist pushes through the crowds with a bed frame balanced on his head. Braying donkeys, broom-closet sweet stalls, qawali music playing on transistor radios. A dirty green kite rises on thermals of exhaust fumes over the proud new offices of the Pa
kistan Atomic Energy Commission.’
My snatched glimpses heighten the sense of flux, both of a world rapidly changing and of myself changing within it. I find a chair in a smoky samovar house to gather my thoughts. As I gulp the black tea, I catch my reflection in the shop’s mirror.
‘Large, down-turned green eyes. Pale cheeks burnt by the day’s journey. Translucent skin, silver beneath eyelids. Receding red hair. My father’s long ears. My mother’s mouth. A hungry travel writer with pen poised, trying to replace cliché with something more human and variable.’
I decide to send home my notes, so make for the City Net Café. A policeman stops me at the door.
‘What is your intention here, sir?’ he asks me.
‘I need to send an email,’ I explain.
‘Please ask permission from my superior.’
I didn’t expect to need official approval to go online. But I hadn’t noticed the bullet holes in the plate-glass window.
That morning, a young Pashtun named Habib had come to City Net. He logged on at one of the twenty terminals and sent a message, ‘I am waiting for you in net cafe. I have mother with me and will go to the village.’ A few minutes later, a bearded Arab entered the shop. When he greeted Habib, half a dozen plain-clothes intelligence agents jumped up from the other terminals and seized the men. Habib drew and fired a pistol before he was overpowered. A dozen anti-terrorist commandos then bundled the pair into waiting jeeps.
I don’t hang around to meet the senior officer but retrace my steps to the vehicle. Iqbal is waiting in the driver’s seat, complaining about his back.
‘I have been reflecting most deeply,’ he says once we are back on the GT Road. ‘I do not wish you to have a negative snapshot of my land.’
I don’t mention the incident at the café.
‘It is true that in the early days there was an intense hope for improving ourselves overnight.’
‘And now most Pakistanis worry about their need for food and shelter?’
‘Perhaps, but we’ve always cherished the promotion of peace,’ he insists. ‘Not only that, we’ve been dedicated agents of those forces who project these ideas.’
‘Like the CIA and the Taliban?’
‘I think Pakistan can be a bridge between Islamic countries and the Western world, just as we played a role in bringing America and China together in 1972. Geographically speaking, Pakistan is at the very heart of Asia. You shout loud enough and you hear the echo from Tashkent to Tibet.’
‘I’ll remember that,’ I tell him.
East of Peshawar, the colossal mountains loop away to the north and the land levels into green fields dotted with goat herds and army camps. Children cut fodder from the central reservation, darting between the buses with armfuls of grass, helping their elders stack busby-like hay ricks. In Nowshera, a camouflaged battle tank rises on a concrete plinth next to the School of Mechanized Warfare and a Military Dairy Farm. The broad Kabul River ripples on our left-hand side, its banks high, sandy and flanked by smallholdings of cauliflower and corn. At Attock, its sanguine, brown waters sweep into the swift, blue Indus – which sources high in the Himalayas – the contrasting coloured currents flowing side by side for over a mile downstream.
Iqbal accelerates into the Punjab, passing on the inside lane and once on the gravel shoulder. As the shadows lengthen, the roadside grows even more crowded, pedestrians and creaking carts moving home from the fields alongside the thundering traffic. The country’s only overpass, being constructed by hand, curves above our heads toward the Karakoram Highway and the Silk Road link to China.
‘You know, I’m baked in this culture,’ volunteers Iqbal. ‘When I go across the seas, I am mighty delighted the moment the aircraft touches back down in Pakistan. I like to listen to the language, to see the casual mannerisms of the people, to experience the hospitality.’
A gauze of high, wispy cloud spreads with the night but neither dissipates the relentless heat.
‘No nation is without failings of course,’ he goes on, the darkness unleashing a loquacious intimacy. ‘But in the Koran, Lord God Allah says, “I don’t give good rulers to bad societies,” so I blame myself for what has befallen Pakistan.’
‘In what sense?’
‘In the sense that I am part of this society. Few citizens have played their role, have stood up and defied the untruth loudly and clearly. Loudly and clearly. That is where we’re lacking. We shrink from risks at times. We don’t call a shovel a shovel.’
‘A spade a spade,’ I say. ‘But if you had spoken out, wouldn’t you have been shot?’
‘Not shot, my romantic friend. Perhaps beaten and imprisoned for an unspecified period of time, but never shot. We are a civilized clan,’ he says, laughing himself back into good humour. ‘Forgive me this one last time, but it is never easy being a divided man of torn loyalties.’
‘Loyal to what?’ I ask him.
‘Loyal to Islam and money. Loyal to the old British ways and the modern world. Most of all, loyal to my holy but shameless brown whore.’
Lime-coloured neon tubes burn in scrawny, bandy-legged eucalyptus trees, drawing drivers into busy roadside canteens with earthen forecourts stained sticky-black by motor oil. Our headlights catch them and the hand-painted road signs for ‘I Love Allah a/c Centres’. I drop my notebook and scrabble in the shadows at my feet to find it. Iqbal races on until the lights of the capital flash before us.
Islamabad reveals itself as a planned city of leafy enclaves, broad avenues and white-walled villas protected by armed guards, like the hideaways of Latin American dictators. Even in my exhaustion, the place feels artificial, divorced from intrinsic culture, its grid system and shopping malls part of the homogenized post-modern suburb. Along Constitution Avenue – which locals call Suspended Constitution Avenue – stretches the sterile diplomatic quarter: ranks of embassies, the French School, the Canadian Club, and the Secretariat, Benezir Bhutto’s folly, which looms out of the dark like a moghul’s palace. As in Washington and Canberra, not a soul walks on the deserted streets.
We wheel into my friends’ driveway and Iqbal hides the Prophet’s teachings behind the red CD plate. I realize the muscles of my forearm have seized around the passenger’s hand strap.
‘Welcome to the fool’s paradise,’ he says.
21. Gates of Eden
I rise up out of darkness, out of sleep, into a soft, cool dawn. Light floods my room, washing away its edges, smoothing out the corners. I blink at the brightness, in my glaring disorientation, feeling all but disconnected from the earth. Around me, the high, wide windows are draped in thin white cotton. Beyond them a faint breeze stirs into dance a silhouette of leafy branches. The shadows of pigeons sweep across the translucent veil. A pale lily stands in a stone vase. In the distance I hear the soft pad of footsteps and the click of a gardener’s shears. I lift back the bed sheet, slip across the white marble floor and vomit in the toilet.
I feel bad, not from Afghan pilau or a roadside tikka but from a single unwashed lettuce leaf which garnished my late-night peanut butter sandwich. I scoffed it without thinking, on arrival at my Canadian friends’ villa, overwhelmed by their larder-full of Wonderbread and taco kits. Now a boulder squats in my stomach, and in the light white room I want to surrender under its weight, but I have an appointment.
To many Intrepids, Pakistan was another ‘passing through’ country. ‘You may end up blasting through West Pakistan in about forty-eight hours,’ wrote Douglas Brown in Overland to India. Mik Schultz advised his readers to ‘take the morning bus from Kabul to Peshawar, then continue with the night train to Lahore and India.’ Geoff Crowther described the country as a ‘heavy trip’ for women. ‘If you’re the slightest bit underdressed in their terms, you’ll be mauled and touched up constantly.’ Only three pages were devoted to Pakistan in Wheeler’s Across Asia on the Cheap.
In the sixties and seventies, travellers tended to overstay their time in Afghanistan, then, emerging from the blue fug of hash sm
oke, remember India and want to get there in a hurry. Most overlooked the Sufi shrines at Uch Sharif, the spectacular Vale of Swat and the Graeco-Buddhist ruins at Taxila. Those who did dawdle in the republic may have wished that they’d hurried on. After his twenty-two-day bus ride from Bradford in 1971, Allan MacDougall, a Canadian traveller, reached the Indus, dived in and contracted typhoid. An Encounter Overland driver was shot in the leg near Taftan trying to outrun bandits in a Toyota pick-up. A German backpacker was machine-gunned to death in her tent in a bungled robbery. Even the authors of the current Lonely Planet guide admit, ‘Pakistan is a wild and woolly place.’ Few kids ever considered the ‘volatile’ nation of ‘drugs, guns and military coups’ as a place for spiritual enlightenment.
‘I don’t think I’d be a Muslim today if it wasn’t for Mr Zimmerman,’ admits the imam.
‘Bob Dylan?’ I say.
‘Trust yourself to do the things that only you know best,’ he sings out loud. ‘Trust yourself to do what’s right and not be second-guessed.’ Then, with a smile, he adds, ‘Allah works in mysterious ways.’
John Butt, a tall and passionate man with a lean, weathered face and white spade beard, was a dope-smoking, rock ‘n’ roll-loving Intrepid. In the late sixties, en route to India, he ran out of money and converted to Islam. He became a talib and scholar, rising in time to the position of Muslim chaplain at Cambridge University. Every few months he returns to Pakistan, his beloved North-West Frontier province, and Afghanistan.
Now he sits with me on the scorched earth beneath a date palm in Shakarparian Park, a low green ridge between planned Islamabad and chaotic, sprawling Rawalpindi. To the east, the Margalla hills rise above the pines and jacaranda trees. To the west stands a vast, unsubtle sculpture of a star and crescent.
‘There is a saying in the East that experience can be bitter,’ Butt says, holding his open palms together. His short neat hair is trimmed beneath a four-peak, green velvet Uzbek cap. ‘But if you can learn the same experience from another, then you can grow from it without the pain.’