Himalaya (2004)

by Michael Palin

  There is, sadly, no sign of the 128 gardeners recorded in an early description of the Shalimar Gardens. Instead there is a man cutting the grass with a small domestic lawnmower hauled by a water buffalo. Every now and then he brings the buffalo to a halt and empties the grass cuttings into the nearest ornamental lake, where they’re devoured by large and slothful fish.

  Eating being one of the preoccupations of Lahoris, I end the day in Food Street, on the recommendation of Asim and Azam, my friends from the train. I think they’ve slightly oversold the place. It’s picturesque enough, with fresh-painted wooden verandahs and shiny, stuccoed balconies, but it’s obviously designed for tourists and has that cheerful soulless glow of civic improvement. The food, especially the house speciality of Mutton Karahi, served in the wok it’s cooked in, is good, strong and filling, but how I long for a beer to wash it down. The soda I’m allowed is just not the same.

  The alcohol ban brings the conversation around to religion, and my assumption that because Asim and Azam are young ‘modern’ Pakistanis they would be less interested in matters of faith than their elders proves to be wrong.

  Azam, the accountant, maintains that being a Muslim means that the Koran orders everything for him, offering guidance and instruction in every area of life.

  He picks a glass up from the table.

  ‘Even a simple thing like this glass. How I hold it. In my right hand, never my left. I should always drink sitting down, never standing up. I should look into the glass as I drink.’

  He puts the glass down and looks across the table at me, almost defiantly.

  ‘I do all these things not just because it says so in the Koran, but also because I know they are good for me.’

  Tomorrow Azam will become engaged and they will have a big party. He doesn’t know when they’ll marry. It could be a year, two, or even three years.

  ‘Will you live together until then?’

  Both he and Asim shake their heads vehemently.

  ‘Oh, no. No. Sex before marriage is out of the question.’

  Day Twenty Eight : Lahore to Amritsar

  On the front page of the newspaper there is a photograph of a man on a ladder painting black stripes over an advert that shows an unveiled woman holding an apple drink. He is described as a member of the Shabab-I-Milli Islamist Activist group. Lower down the page are pictures of two sisters, their faces disfigured by acid thrown by the husband of one of them. ‘Acid attacks,’ notes the report, ‘are among the worst of the huge numbers of crimes against women committed in Pakistan.’

  There could hardly be two more graphic reminders of the problems that loom ahead for the country as it tries to reconcile progress with deeply entrenched tradition.

  As I pack for the last time before crossing the border to India, I have to say that Pakistan has been a revelation. Simplistic post 9/11 propaganda sought to equate it with terrorism, as if you could equate a population greater than that of France and Germany combined with any single thought or idea. I have found Pakistan to be infinitely more complex and diverse than I had been prepared for. Wilder and more beautiful too. Never once did I feel threatened. Give or take a few cold beers, I leave it with regret.

  The Indian border is only 18 miles (30 km) from Lahore, an accident of politics that brought terrible suffering to the city when Pakistan was created in 1947. The exact details of where the frontier would run were not revealed by the British until a few hours before independence was declared. When it became clear that one of India’s oldest and most prestigious cities was to become part of Pakistan an hysterical panic broke out. As half a million Hindus and Sikhs fled east and even more Muslims fled west, reprisals on both sides were swift and bloody.

  Cross-border trains arrived at Lahore station full of massacred corpses. Men, women and children on both sides were attacked and killed. Law and order were paralysed as the communal violence took its course. The British refused to bring their army out onto the streets to help. Across the subcontinent as a whole it is estimated that partition resulted in over a million deaths.

  The legacy of hatred still smoulders. The border post at Wagah is the only official land crossing between Pakistan and India, and even then Pakistanis and Indians are only allowed to cross in specially secure trains between Lahore and Amritsar. Foreigners, if they have the time and patience, can walk through from Pakistan to India, and this is what we intend to do.

  The thermometer has fallen to a mere 41degC (106degF), but the humidity has risen. There was quite a storm across these plains last night and a combination of dust and moisture makes the air thick and sticky. It’s what Roger calls a three-shirt day.

  The canals that run along the side of the road to Wagah are thronged with people cooling off. Families picnicking on the banks watch children splashing in the mud, men wash rickshaws and bicycles in the water, women, veiled and sari-ed, take tentative dips. Hot-headed teenage boys fling their shirts off and leap from bridges. There seems to be a heightened devil-may-care mood along the roadside today. As the traffic grinds to a standstill boys who would not normally have dared approach us dance like scarecrows in front of our minibus and bang the sides as we move on. It’s nice to have one last image of Pakistan with its hair down.

  At the border the road peters out in an open assembly area, full of trucks. Beyond this rises a modern red brick arch decorated with faux-Mughal columns and cupolas and flanked by terraced seating. Through the arch can be glimpsed two pairs of heavy metal gates, with a white line between them, which is the border itself. Beyond them rises another arched gateway inscribed with the single word ‘India’, the grandness of the gesture somewhat compromised by a row of threadbare potted plants arranged along its parapet.

  This is the arena for a nightly display of nationalist feather ruffling, as both sides lower their flags in a ceremony deliberately designed to provoke unabashed jingoism in the assembled crowds.

  Loudspeakers blare out. The terraces are filling up and a heavily perspiring man wearing a T-shirt in green and white national colours is warming up an already damp crowd.

  ‘Pa-ki-stan!’ he shouts.

  ‘PA-KI-STAN!’ they roar back.

  Two very small children carrying flags are sent out by their mothers to join him. They’re greeted with tumultuous applause.

  We can hear the same sort of thing happening on the Indian side, the only noticeable difference being that they have music playing from their loudspeakers, while the Pakistanis have prayers and readings from the Koran.

  At 6.05 precisely (this is, after all, a military ceremony) a bugle sounds, and, to resounding cheers, two of the tallest people I’ve seen in Pakistan march out towards the border gates. These are Punjabi Rangers and to say they march is an understatement. Every movement is executed with barely suppressed fury. Arms are snapped out like freshly drawn swords, legs fly into the air, high enough to brush the nose with the knee, before thudding into the ground with the force of a steam-hammer. This study in bellicosity is emphasized by uniforms as black as their smouldering eyes. Fan-shaped head-dresses rise like hackles from their turbans.

  They are followed by a squad of 12 more Rangers, who emerge with a splendid mixture of panache, aggression and bad acting that has the crowd roaring.

  Speeding, slowing, high kicking, strutting, stamping, grimacing, leering and hissing with a finely honed ferocity, they create the impression of caged beasts ready at any moment to bite their opponents’ heads off.

  The Indian guard, in light khaki with red and gold turban plumes and white gaiters, march out to meet them. They try hard to be as theatrically aggressive as their Pakistani counterparts but somehow you don’t feel their hearts are really in it.

  Nevertheless, the show must go on and both sides, now eyeball to eyeball, contrive to present a quite surreal display of precision nastiness, raising their forearms like weapons, pawing the ground, baring their teeth and snarling at one another like turkey-cocks.

  Even the lowering of the flag is conducted
with a tight-lipped, carefully choreographed, competitive swagger, the final flourish of which is the controlled slamming of the gates between the two countries.

  Applause and cheers follow the two flag parties as they march rabidly back towards their respective arches.

  After this the whole thing degenerates into a PR exercise as the men who have terrified us for the last 30 minutes reappear to mingle with the crowd and have their photograph taken with kiddies and members of Parliament.

  This pantomime at the border sends out confusing signals. Beyond the arches and the terraces where this carefully calculated piece of theatre has taken place is the reality of the Indo-Pakistan border: a mile-wide strip of no-man’s land, guarded and patrolled as far as the eye can see by troops armed with more than high kicks and grimaces. Follow this line north into Kashmir and you will find several hundred thousand heavily armed men facing each other, not for entertainment, but because 56 years after independence, the line of partition remains a deep, unhealed wound.

  India

  Day Thirty : Amritsar

  A sign greets the traveller who makes the long walk across no-man’s land and through the easternmost archway. ‘India, the Largest Democracy in the World, Welcomes You’. As if to emphasize what a difference a half-mile makes, cold beer salesmen assail you and you are liable to be overtaken on the road by women on motorbikes. But the difference between the severity and discipline of Islamic Pakistan and the liberalism of secular India seems nowhere better demonstrated than in the border city of Amritsar.

  Muslim and Hindu live reasonably happily together here (indeed, it’s a fact that, despite Partition, there are more Muslims in India than in Pakistan), but the predominant religion in the first big city on the Indian side of the border is neither Muslim nor Hindu. Amritsar is a Sikh town.

  Sikhism, professed by 65 per cent of the population here, is one of the world’s newer faiths. It was founded by one Guru Nanak, in the early years of the 16th century. After a lifetime of travel, he concluded from what he saw that ‘God is to be found neither in the Koran or the Puranas’ (the sacred Hindu texts). Unable to accept the Hindu caste system, or what he saw as the intolerance of Islam, Guru Nanak came up with an admirably pragmatic solution. One God for all, rich or poor, with no human hierarchies or priesthoods, idols or icons coming in between.

  In a nod towards another religion, the Sikh gurus chose a pool visited by Lord Buddha around which to build their first temple. It was called Amrit Sovar (The Nectar Pool) and though the name was elided to Amritsar, the pool, much extended, still exists and the temple built around it is now one of the most famous shrines in the world.

  To get to the Golden Temple I take a motorcycle rickshaw into the centre of the city. The bracing, or exhausting, anarchy of Indian streets begins as soon as we leave the hotel. Cars veer out of side roads without stopping, lame dogs hop gamely across your bows, bicycles and buses appear from nowhere and blasts of the horn mingle with blasts from exhausts. At a roundabout we are forced into the middle of the road to avoid not just a cow, but a cow feeding its calf. As we pull out, a scooter with three small children concertinaed in between their mother and father hoots indignantly at us before disappearing in a cloud of fumes from the back of a passing truck.

  Road safety signs with slogans like ‘Hell or Helmet!’ and ‘Stay Married! Divorce Speed!’ are partially obscured and universally ignored.

  An additional discomfort for an Englishman driving into Amritsar is a series of very public reminders of how much we were once disliked.

  On one roundabout is a statue of a dashing figure in a theatrical moustache, a puja garland around his neck, running forward pointing a gun. This celebrates the assassin Udham Singh, who shot and killed Sir Michael O’Dwyer, a hated governor of the Punjab, in London in 1940.

  Around the next corner is a statue to S. C. Bose, who felt so strongly about getting the British out of India that he tried to ally his Indian National Army with the Germans and Japanese in the Second World War. A half-mile further on is the alleyway leading to the Jallianwala Bagh, where 400 peacefully but illegally protesting Indians were massacred on the orders of Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer in April 1919, an outrage considered by many to mark the beginning of the end of British rule. Today the site is a park where a sacred flame burns, sponsored by Indian Oil.

  The complex of buildings that contains the Golden Temple is called a Gurudwara (Gateway to the Gurus), the name given to all places of worship of the 20 million or so Sikhs in India. This, the holiest and grandest of them all, dominates the centre of Amritsar, its balconied, white stucco facade and flamboyantly domed roof rising exotically above a clutter of stalls, billboards, shops and crowded pavements where groups of Dalits (‘the oppressed’) squat inches from the traffic.

  There is a strict dress code for the Golden Temple. First of all the head must be covered at all times. Scarves of various colours are readily available for non-Sikhs, either from any one of the 17 young lads who converge on you as soon as you pull up outside, or more cheaply from one of the stalls inside the forecourt. Shoes and socks must be removed. By the time we have deposited them at special lockers (a lady takes mine, something that would never have happened in Pakistan), we look like a line of pantomime pirates. Hands must then be washed at marble-lined public basins and bare feet passed through a trough of water at the bottom of the steps.

  The combination of the heat of the day, the constant crowd moving in and out and the carrying of film gear makes all these preliminaries rather a trial, but the sight that greets us when we finally reach the gateway arch banishes thoughts of discomfort, at least for a minute or two.

  The Golden Temple itself, called by Sikhs the Hari Mandir (God’s Temple) sits, like a great glittering barge, in the centre of a huge tank of water, with one narrow causeway (jammed with people throughout the day) connecting it with the promenade and the dazzling white ancillary buildings that enclose it on all four sides.

  Four gates, one on each side, symbolize the inclusivity of Sikhism, the temple’s openness to all, irrespective of religion, caste, creed or sex. The four equal entrances are not all that distinguish it from other religious buildings. Instead of climbing to an altar, the stairs to the Golden Temple lead downwards to the holy place, an encouragement to approach with humility.

  Once down the steps to the waterside, there isn’t much encouragement to sit around. Most of the pilgrims are moving, in a remorseless clockwise flow, around the marble-flagged promenade, some strolling, some bustling purposefully, some dodging the mops and buckets of the cleaners, most squeezed onto coconut matting to avoid burning their feet, while hymns from the Holy Book are sung over booming loudspeakers. Some men are stripped down, bathing in the holy water, which seems to be largely full of fat carp with gulping, Jagger-like mouths. Very few visitors, apart from a one-legged man lying asleep, head resting on his crutches, are doing nothing.

  I notice how much more openly curious people are here than in Pakistan.

  ‘What is the country in which you are residing?’ they ask. ‘For what purpose have you come?’

  Occasionally, a passing family group will quite unapologetically insert themselves alongside us and get a friend to take a photo, as if we too are part of the tourist attractions. Helpful explanations of what’s going on are given, whether solicited or not.

  An elderly gentleman with a long beard points in the direction of the Hari Mandir.

  ‘Whatever you require from God he is giving you. That is what they are singing about.’

  There is a brisk, businesslike pragmatism about the Sikhs. They don’t seem over-concerned with the mysteries of belief.

  Philanthropy, along with business enterprise and physical bravery, is a vital part of Sikhism and all their temples have a langar, a kitchen preparing free meals around the clock, financed through the one-tenth of their income that all Sikhs are expected to give to good works. It’s a huge operation, with an estimated 50,000 meals prepared each weekday and
twice that at weekends. The work is all done by volunteers, and any Sikh, whether surgeon or street cleaner, is expected to come and help chop onions or wash dishes. In the words of one of the ten holy Gurus on whose teachings Sikhism is based: ‘If you want to understand me, come into my kitchen.’ This we do.

  The kitchen is spread through several buildings. One is entirely devoted to a chapatti production line. A rat skips nimbly out of the way as fresh sacks of flour are cut open and fed into the bowels of a slowly turning machine, which regurgitates the flour as dough. One group of helpers rolls the dough into balls, another flattens each ball out into a pancake, and another lays them out on hotplates the size of double beds, made from cast-iron sheets laid on bricks with gas fires underneath, and capable of taking a couple of hundred chapattis at a time. When one side is done the chapattis are flipped over in quick, dexterous movements of a long thin implement with a half-moon end. When the flipper is satisfied both sides are right he gives an extra strong flick, which sends the chapatti flying off the hotplate to land neatly on a pile on the floor. The piles are then removed and carried out to the refectory.

  The chapatti production line shares a tall barn-like space with dal cauldrons, the largest cooking vessels I’ve ever seen. Vats like giant tympana are set above gas jets and stirred with mighty ladles.

  I pick my way through the kitchens, across a terrace where 30 or 40 people sit slicing onions and garlic, green peppers and ginger, and up the stairs to take a meal in one of the spartan communal dining rooms. Each floor is the size of a warehouse and can accommodate 3000 covers at any one time. I join a line of people who file in and sit cross-legged at a long coir mat, soggy from periodic washing. Volunteers pass through, giving out segmented stainless steel trays, which others then fill up with chapatti, dollops of pickle and dal ladled out of steel buckets. Water is poured into our mugs from another bucket.