Every few minutes another gaggle of cousins arrives from New York, Tehran, London or Bombay, prompting hysterical scenes. This is the first time in years that the entire Bhutto clan has been together (less an errant sister-in-law facing trial in France and Benazir’s estranged brother Murtaza wanted in Pakistan for hijacking a PIA plane). Some have risked imprisonment by returning.
Between frantic sewing and talking and preparation of sweetmeats, the time is spent singing and dancing. The girls have been practising for weeks, singing of the bride’s beauty and the groom’s weaknesses, ready for competition with the groom’s family at Thursday’s mehndi or henna celebration. ‘On my beloved’s forehead his hair is shining. Bring, bring, bring the henna which will colour my beloved’s hands,’ they sing. Already there are many hoarse voices. And laughter too, when less traditional lines are added like ‘You must agree that Benazir will serve the nation.’ Every so often the merrymaking is stopped abruptly by a power cut. These prompt speculation that the military dictator General Zia, who hanged Benazir’s father, is reasserting his authority.
A multi-coloured marquee has been erected in the garden between the palms and mango trees. Bowers of jasmine and roses lead to a silver tinsel-bedecked stage. On top of this is a mother-of-pearl bench – the wedding stage where Benazir will sit next to Asif and say yes three times to become a married woman. A mirror will then be held in front of them so they can see each other as partners for the first time while sugar is ground over their heads so their lives will be sweet.
Are they in love? I wonder. It was an arranged marriage – Benazir’s press statement announcing her engagement began less than enthusiastically: ‘Conscious of my religious obligations and duty to my family, I am pleased to proceed with the marriage proposal accepted by my mother.’
But everyone tells me that in arranged marriages you learn to love each other. ‘It’s better because you go in with no preconceptions or expectations,’ say her friends Yasmin, Sanam and Laleh. All her aunties tell me how pleased they are that ‘Bibi’ is finally settling down.
The morning before the main celebrations is devoted to beautification. Underneath Mr Bhutto’s powerful portrait, groups of brightly swathed girls sit chattering for hours while intricate henna designs are painstakingly etched on their hands and feet and aromatic oils massaged into their skin. Upstairs Benazir is undergoing the painful process of having all her body hair removed, but there are no screams to be heard above the din down here – this after all is a bride who has endured years in detention by a military regime, including ten months in solitary confinement in Sukkur jail.
The police stationed outside number 70 raise their eyes at all the commotion, unable to see a way of extracting baksheesh from the situation. On my first few visits my car was followed in a way Inspector Clouseau would have appreciated but they have given up trying to keep track.
For once, though, politics seem forgotten. Even the orange-seller on the corner, usually anxious to explain how the ‘CIA devils’ are destroying the country, is obsessed by the wedding. Rumours abound about who is and who is not coming. David Owen has accepted, and Colonel Gaddafi was never invited, despite stories in the Urdu press that he declined because of domestic problems and has sent a six-seater Cessna as a gift. Benazir assures me she’s seen no sign of it.
Of course being Benazir, you couldn’t expect the political to stay out of the wedding altogether. Ten thousand people – many of them PPP workers – are already camped out at the Lyari grounds where a stage and massive speakers have been erected for a public ceremony that has the sound of a party rally to me.
Weddings are a time when personality clashes are put aside. Rival leaders of the Movement for the Restoration of Democracy and former leading members of the PPP are here, though no generals have been invited. Many non-political alliances will be forged over the next few days as eagle-eyed aunts and mothers look out for suitable catches. Being tall, fair and holding a British passport qualifies me for many of their shortlists, but unfortunately I cannot claim to be particularly ‘domestically well versed’ and, gin and tonic in hand, I am certainly not a good Muslim…
I had spent the previous summer as an intern on the foreign desk of the Financial Times and knew that more than anything I wanted to be a foreign correspondent.
The camel corps they called them. Occasionally they would waft in with the smell of the desert or tang of the sea, dressed in crumpled linen suits, their tanned faces making the people in the office look washed-out and grey. They covered wars, revolutions and insurgencies, and spoke on the phone in exotic languages. They were glamorous, rugged, the skin round their eyes all wrinkled from the sun, and they carried battered leather satchels full of notes and foreign newspapers.
They were all men and to me they were like gods.
The FT in those days was more grandly housed in Bracken House (now a Japanese bank) opposite St Paul’s at the tail end of Fleet Street. It had two neighbouring watering holes – Balls Brothers and the Dolphin – to one of which the gods would sometimes take me. They would order champagne by the bottle which impressed me greatly, and I hung on to their every word. Far from pronouncing on important world issues of the day, mostly they would grouch about the foreign desk rewriting their copy or not giving it its due prominence. How could they complain? They had dream jobs.
Occasionally some news event would happen in their part of the world and the phone would ring in the bar. Whoever’s region it was would curse, return to the office, hammer out some words on the typewriter, throw the copy into a wire basket then be back in the bar for another ‘El Stiffo’.
I didn’t understand when people did any real work or how the newspaper came out, but I wanted that life.
One day I too got to toss a carbon-copied sheet in the basket and see my words magically appear in the next day’s newspaper. Jurek Martin, the foreign editor, had been due to attend a lunch of South Asian politicians. At the last minute he could not go and looked around for someone to send in his place. I was always talking about India where I had spent the previous summer and written a thesis on Kashmir, and through his thick glasses his gaze lighted upon me. At the lunch I sat next to a gentle-voiced man called Bashir from the Pakistan People’s Party – Benazir Bhutto’s party – and he asked me if I would like to interview her. Of course I said yes. She had just announced her engagement and was sitting serenely in her Kensington flat, surrounded by lava lamps and cellophane-wrapped bouquets. The resulting interview was my first big article in a national paper and it would decide my destiny.
Throughout my teenage years I had yearned for adventure. My parents had moved from gritty, council estate Morden to leafy Carshalton Beeches so I could go to one of England’s last state grammar schools. Nonsuch High School for Girls liked to boast it had only two rules – Consideration to Others and Always Walk on the Right – but whatever I did I broke them. I was always running along corridors or walking on the wrong side or alerting classmates to flashers by the top field which bordered on to a park. So bored was I that I wrote bloodthirsty stories to shock my teachers and kidnapped the headmistress’s special chair, sending a ransom note demanding 40 million Green Shield stamps or a limb would be amputated every hour. I was endlessly in detention. Kept after school writing lines, I would gaze out of the window conjuring up far-off worlds.
I suppose it didn’t help that I spent most of my teens trapped inside a body brace. A visit to the hospital for a broken little finger led to a general check which revealed that I had scoliosis, curvature of the spine. I was lucky – the Boston brace made of foam-lined plastic had just been invented and was far less uncomfortable and obtrusive than the old Milwaukee, a leather-and-iron contraption with chin pad. Even so, for an adolescent girl starting to be conscious of her appearance, wearing a back brace twenty-three hours a day was not easy. From the ages of 13 to 18 my life revolved around hospitals where men in white coats scratched their heads as they applied compasses and protractors to X-rays of my co
ntorted spine. The only good part was getting out of hockey.
Despite the school I missed and the trouble I got into when I was there, I was lucky enough to win a place at Oxford. No one in my family had ever been to university and I applied to University College on the basis that it was on the high street between a bank and a pub. Oxford seemed terribly elitist and I hadn’t thought I wanted to go until, driving home from the interview with my dad, I looked back through the gap in the Chilterns and saw the sun setting over the dreaming spires.
At Oxford the world seemed full of possibility. Being dragged along by a friend to a cheese and wine party hosted by the university newspaper Cherwell eventually led to me becoming editor. I loathed the smell of the Dyson Perrins organic labs and swapped chemistry for PPE – philosophy, politics and economics. My mum was horrified, unable to imagine what kind of job might require a knowledge of Descartes or Kant. She was not reassured when she saw me writing essays on topics such as ‘Can Sheep Have Religious Beliefs?’ and ‘Can a Geranium Have a Point of View?’
After graduating, my summer at the FT was followed by a job at Central TV. I was one of two trainees, both female, in a newsroom full of male reporters and editors. Most of them had worked their way up through local newspapers and radio and were not at all keen on the idea of graduate trainees, particularly ones from Oxford who smoked white-tipped Cartier cigarettes. My fellow trainee Ronke was a glamorous single mother who had already spent a few years in local radio and we eyed each other like tomcats marking out territory before ending up best friends.
I had only been there a few months when the large gold-inscribed invitation to Benazir’s wedding landed on my mat.
After that introduction to Pakistan I knew I could not go back to my job covering local news in Birmingham. I went to see the FT and got a vague agreement that they would rent me a Tandy word processor and pay for whatever they published. I bought a bucket-shop flight to Lahore and packed everything I imagined I would need to be a foreign correspondent, including a tape of Mahler’s Fifth, a jumbo bag of wine gums, a lucky pink rabbit and a bottle of Chanel No. 5 that my boyfriend’s mum had got at trade price. I could hardly carry the suitcase.
The foreign editors I had spoken to in London had all expressed more interest in Russian-occupied Afghanistan than Pakistan, so I headed for the border town of Peshawar in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province. The place names alone promised Kipling-like adventure. In my case was a copy of Kim and I liked the idea of following in the footsteps of the little boy who had been sitting drumming his heels astride the Zamzamma gun on the Lahore Mall when a yellow-faced lama in a dingy robe appeared and lured him to the Frontier region.
A minibus service called the Flying Coach plied up and down the Grand Trunk Road from Rawalpindi to Peshawar and I was the only foreigner on board. Green parakeets were flying back home in their droves and the dusk-time sky was streaked with apricot and purple as we turned off by Peshawar fort and arrived in the Old City. Immediately I was surrounded by people trying to sell me everything from Chinese hairgrips to onyx chess sets. It was here, among the leaning wood-framed houses and narrow alleys piled high with spices and brass pots, that Mahbub Ali, the wily horse trader, entrusted Kim with secret letters revealing the plots of Central Asian emirs.
I had my own pack of letters from a Pakistani friend in London but no idea where I was going so let a rickshaw take me to Greens Hotel. This turned out to be where the arms dealers hung out. My first night there someone tried to sell me a multi-barrel rocket launcher. My small room was already inhabited by shiny brown cockroaches and the mattress was so thin that the broken springs jabbed into my skinny frame. But out of the window I could see the dark serrated ridges of the Khyber Pass silhouetted against the sky and that was all that mattered.
Everything in Pakistan seemed to be about who you knew. My unpromising-looking letters from London would open all sorts of doors. One of them led to me being befriended by the Arbabs, a family so well connected they even had roads named after them. The old man Fateh Khan Arbab told me bloodcurdling stories about the Pathan tribes and their Pashtunwali honour code that gave protection to strangers, whoever they might be, and demanded an eye for an eye for any offence. It was he who arranged for me to go and spend a day with a tribal chief in his fort on the Khyber Pass. I took my friend Tanya who was visiting me on holiday from her high-powered advertising job.
Malik Nadyer Khan Afridi was a small dapper man in his fifties wearing an oversize overcoat and astrakhan hat and carrying a large black furled umbrella. He looked like someone’s harmless grandfather, or at least would have done were it not for the seven Kalashnikov-toting heavies who followed him everywhere. In fact he was chief of the Zakakhels, a sub-tribe of the Afridis, guardians of the Khyber Pass. So renowned are they for their ferocity that it was said during colonial times that if you found a snake and an Afridi in your bedroom you should kill the Afridi first.
‘Foreigners are not allowed beyond this point,’ reads the sign as one passes between the two stone turrets of the Khyber Gate. Behind us we left the green plains of Peshawar, and ahead lay a dry stony land in washed-out hues of grey and beige. The pass is about twenty-five miles long and it took a while to climb in my little blue Suzuki car, weighed down by two sulky Pathan tribal guards, in long black tunics and clutching Kalashnikovs, squashed into the back seat. Just as in Kipling’s day, Peshawar still had a deputy commissioner and he had only granted us a permit on condition we took the guards for our protection. I had picked up enough Pashto to realise they were discussing how much two healthy young Englishwomen would fetch on the open market.
The way starts wide and flat, bounded by low stony hills, then snakes up to the British-built Shahgai Fort, now home to the Khyber Rifles, where visitors to this day are still greeted by bagpipers. From there it plunges down through a gorge so narrow that at times the cliff walls overhead almost seem to touch. Small stone forts dot the mountain tops and the cliff walls are decorated with pennants from regiments that have served in the Khyber Rifles. Along the valley bottom were concrete ‘dragon’s teeth’ laid down in World War II by the British fearing a German tank invasion of the subcontinent.
For it was the history, more than the scenery, that stirred the blood. Images crowded my head of armies of conquerors such as Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, Tamerlane and Babur, the first Mogul Emperor, with their cavalcades of elephants or camels. All had marched through this pass seeking the great prize of India. Each had to fight with the Afridis.
This was also the land of the Great Game, where British officers played the tribes off against each other, and Russia and Britain vied for control of India. The British first marched up the Khyber Pass in 1839, on their way to the first Anglo-Afghan war, which was to end in disaster three years later with the massacre of every soldier save the lone Dr William Brydon, spared to tell the story. They returned in 1878 and again were forced by the Afghans to withdraw. Each time, they lost hundreds of men fighting their way through the Afridi-held Khyber territory.
We saw no women on the way up and all the men we passed were armed. I wondered if their taste for British blood had dulled over the years.
We were starving by the time we got to the fort and devoured the plates of yellow cake and spicy samosas that were brought out, washed down with warm Russian champagne served in pint glasses. Then two men appeared with skewers the length of swords bearing roasted pieces of freshly slaughtered sheep.
After we had eaten our fill the malik rang a little bell. ‘Now we will have lunch,’ he said.
Tanya and I looked at each other in horror. He led us through to a wood-panelled room with a long table laden with plates of food.
‘If I have to eat any more, I’ll cry!’ hissed Tanya.
I was unsympathetic. The malik’s eyes glinted pistol-grey as he bit into the skewered lamb and bloody juices ran down his chin.
‘We’ll have to eat it or he’ll kill us,’ I replied.
I had bee
n in Pakistan long enough by then to be adept at playing with food and taking many small helpings. But Tanya was seated alongside the malik with no place to hide her plate, on to which he piled more and more. The conversation moved on to Afghanistan; his tribe, like many Pathans, was split along both sides of the border. Afghanistan’s then President Najibullah was known as the Ox for his strength, but the malik was disparaging. ‘He used to clean my shoes,’ he said. But he waxed lyrical about the country which he described as a land of milk and honey where pomegranates shone like giant rubies and peaches grew to the size of footballs.
‘I would love to go there,’ said Tanya.
‘Why not?’ he replied.
Why not? Well, there was the small matter of its being under Soviet occupation.
Not a problem. He rang his little bell to summon some gunmen.
Woozy from our second bottle of Russian champagne, we piled into his jeep and drove though Landikotal bazaar where men in shacks either side of the road were selling opium in goatskins. The sudden putter of machine-gun fire made us jump.
‘What are they doing?’ asked Tanya.
‘Shooting each other,’ replied one of the malik’s henchmen.
Finally we got to the Afghan border at Torkham and its long-abandoned Customs house. Two hours later it was blown up by a Scud missile. We would tell everyone afterwards we had a narrow escape.
Smuggler’s paradise
Financial Times, 3 September 1988
Khyber Pass
LAST WEEK I HAD DINNER with a smuggler. The directions, which sounded bizarre, were precise: the sixth fort on the left after the English grammar school for young ladies, halfway up the Khyber Pass.
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