Deep Field

by Tom Bamforth

  Even in the curiously antiquated language of radio call signs—whose tangos, romeos and foxtrots echo the jaunty language of World War II Spitfire pilots—the Indo-Pakistan rivalry made itself felt. In the Islamic Republic, I for India was unacceptable (replaced with the more neutral Italy) while W for Whisky remained in place, much joked about by the country’s Johnny Walker–quaffing officer class.

  At Partition, Pakistan was left with the rump of the country: half of Punjab, half of Kashmir and the depopulated and troubled frontier provinces of Balochistan and the North West Frontier. Aside from the city of Lahore, and perhaps Peshawar, this new state created for the subcontinent’s Muslim population was cut off from the great centres of South Asian Islam: Delhi and Agra with their Red Forts and the Taj Mahal; Aligarh, whose university was modelled on the Oxford colleges where many of Pakistan’s leaders were educated, and was where the idea of ‘the land of the pure’ was born; Lucknow, the courtly cultural capital of the Urdu-speaking world. These places were now in India—a new and different country.

  The experience of Partition was one of both logic and lunacy combined—the logic of the ethno-nationalist nation-state chaotically superimposed over the entire Indian subcontinent. The creation of Pakistan embodied this strange contradiction: it was an ancient neologism; a country for the Muslim minority that contained only a minority of the subcontinent’s Muslims; and its source of life—the river Indus—gave name to the state from which the creators of Pakistan sought to escape.

  Even Pakistan’s national language was not widely spoken in the truncated lands that would become Pakistan. Urdu (related to the word ‘horde’) was a language of Northern India, a military lingua franca that arose out of the army camps of the former Mughal Empire. It is largely the same as Hindi but written in the Arabic script and more heavily influenced by an Arabic and Persian vocabulary. The Urdu-speaking Northern Indians who migrated to Pakistan after 1947, who became the country’s military and administrative elite, were known within Pakistan as mohajir, a term derived from the Arabic word meaning ‘immigrant’.

  When I had arrived in Islamabad, the capital created by such mohajirs, I did not realise the power this association held and did not become aware of it until I started organising a trip into the rural Punjab to observe local elections. The Punjabis—the most populous group in Pakistan—had seen their written language banned at Partition and the compulsory expansion of Urdu as the language of state, as artificial and remote from the earthy ribaldry of Punjabi as the capital itself. Calling random government offices, electoral departments and district commissioners, I was told of a slightly longer than usual crackle over the ancient phone lines as it dawned on the local administrators in their dusty, paper-strewn offices, that they were being summoned from the capital. Any and every request was agreed to instantly with an unhesitating ‘yes, Sir’ as representatives from the capital expressed their seigneurial rights: cars, accommodation, food, guides, information were all supplied without question. Getting off the phone after another of these calls to an unsuspecting minor official, a colleague of mine once remarked that he ‘could hear his spine stiffen.’ Just receiving a call out of the blue from a member of the Urdu-speaking elite in the capital had terrified him.

  The brilliant Urdu short-story writer Saadat Hasan Manto wrote heart-rendingly about the moment of Partition, expressing much of the bewilderment and absurdity of the moment—a sensation that can still accompany new arrivals in Islamabad. His bleakly comic story ‘Toba Tek Singh’ is set in a lunatic asylum during the creation of the two new states and the administrative difficulties in working out which countries each of the inmates should belong to. One Sikh lunatic asks, ‘Why are we being sent to India? We don’t even know what language they speak there,’ while a Muslim inmate shouts ‘Pakistan zindabad’ with such vigour that he loses his balance, falls over and is knocked out. The new boundaries cause endless confusion. ‘If they were in India, where on earth was Pakistan? And if they were in Pakistan, then how come that until only the other day it was India?’ Another inmate escapes and seeks sanctuary from the lunacy of Partition itself by climbing a tree, declaring: ‘I wish to live neither in India nor in Pakistan. I wish to live in this tree.’ Two Anglo-Indian lunatics are concerned that the European ward in the asylum will be abolished, that breakfast will never be served again and they will be forced to eat chapattis. There is general concern that, in the confusion of Partition, both India and Pakistan would simply slide off the map altogether.

  Despite its relative newness as a country, Pakistan is a land with a long, troubled and somewhat truncated history—and is influenced by the great civilisations with which it borders: Afghanistan, Iran, China and India. So much of what is now written about Pakistan ignores this—it is seen as a piece on the geopolitical chessboard, a difficult ally, a hard place, the most dangerous place on earth, prone to extremism and facing sectarian meltdown. The idea of Pakistan has become synonymous with threats posed by supposed ‘Talibanisation’ and ‘atomic mullahs’.

  One day, while walking through the narrow, windy streets of Peshawar’s old city, I was stopped by a man in long white robes, with dark glasses and a long black beard. Having been taught to be suspicious of precisely this stereotype, I started our conversation guardedly. We discussed the weather (hot), the cricket (dull), tourist sites in and around Peshawar. Just as I was beginning to wonder what the catch was, the man gripped me by the hand and shook it vigorously. ‘You see,’ he said, ‘we are not all terrorists.’ And we went our separate ways. Now that Pakistan is increasingly seen as Afpak—part of the front line in the war in Afghanistan—it is almost radical to suggest that its overwhelming social, cultural, political and economic ties lie with an Indic, rather than Talibanic, civilisation.

  Daylight, as always, cast its tepid light over the heady exultation of my night-time arrival in Islamabad. The city was very far from what I had imagined. It was not the thriving subcontinental metropolis of ‘life and liberty’ that I had imagined from the glorious words of Nehru’s speech. In his own address to the nation on 15 August 1947, Pakistan’s founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, in well-intentioned but less inspired rhetoric, said:

  Our object should be peace within and peace without. We want to live peacefully and maintain cordial and friendly relations with our immediate neighbors and with the world at large. We have no aggressive designs against any one. We stand by the United Nations Charter and will gladly make our full contribution to the peace and prosperity of the world.

  The city of Islamabad was the incarnation of Jinnah’s view—a lawyers’ creation given form by a military love of order and right angles, thus giving urban expression to two of the dominant forces of Pakistan’s post-independence history: the army and the judiciary. Its order and tranquillity did not breathe the excitement of the midnight hour but reflected ‘an opportunity to demonstrate to the world how can a nation, containing many elements, live in peace and amity and work for the betterment of all its citizens, irrespective of caste or creed’, as Jinnah described the mission of his new nation. Islamabad did just this.

  I woke to wide empty boulevards and leafy suburbs. Vast houses lined the road next to the Margalla Hills, the foothills of the Himalayas, and a neatly trimmed cricket pitch with a gabled pavilion glinted in the early morning sun. The city, as I discovered, was one vast urban grid of order and logic, trees and gardens, and neat designated shopping zones whose air-conditioned shops sold rich fabrics, books, and knocked-off designer goods. Advertising hoardings promoted Coke and mobile phone companies offering to ‘connect the gentry’. I wandered round, slightly bewildered by this almost-empty Islamic Canberra, whose suburbs had been given alphanumeric sequences of sectors and subsectors instead of names. The main shopping centre was in F10, while my hotel languished in the obscurity of E7/2. The vast government boulevard named after the former Chinese premier Zhou Enlai was a modern concrete rendition of Lutyens’s Delhi. Ever grander buildings culminated in what was known as Benaz
ir’s house, or the Pink Palace—a colossal pseudo-Mughal building in soft pink marble and sandstone built to accommodate the political aspirations and realisations of the Bhutto family. Where in Britain and Australia the mark of the arriviste financier was mock-Tudor, in Pakistan it was mock-Mughal; not quaint homeliness but the mausolean splendour of the Taj Mahal.

  After a morning walking around and talking to nobody, I returned to my hotel room, with its exceptionally loud and ineffective air conditioner, the soothingly bland predictability of BBC World and pictures of eighteenth-century English rural scenes—pheasants taking flight, a man (with top hat and tails) and a woman (in a lacy dress) admiring a swan. There I pondered my findings. Thinking I would use this momentary reprieve to try to learn some Urdu, I had a look at a teach-yourself language book but was slightly put off by such chapter headings as ‘I do not have a reservation’ and ‘Where’s my wife?’.

  With all its separateness and control, Islamabad did not so much present an example of modernity and progress to the rest of the world as repeat the follies of the old. In all cities in the subcontinent there exists the ‘old city’, with its swirling streets and vibrant centres whose lanes are filled with lives and livelihoods exhibited to the world from small shopfronts and market stalls that—to the outsider—wind their way in a mesmerising knot of chaos and commerce. Beyond this, the colonial rulers established the cantonment or the civil lines catering to an altogether new imperial reality. Where the great Mughal mosques, palaces and centres of government were located at the heart of undivided India’s great cities, the British rule introduced a separation, especially after the mass uprising against British rule in 1857, variously known as the sepoy rebellion, the Indian Mutiny or the First War of Independence. Virtually all towns and cities in India and Pakistan thus have civil lines or a cantonment once reserved for the British army and bureaucracy but now occupied by the Pakistani middle class and retired military officers, whose rents were becoming increasingly exorbitant. During an early visit to find cheap accommodation in Islamabad, accompanied by a friend’s contact in the Islamabad real estate world, I even managed to pass out at precisely the moment when yet another venal landlord started his quotes—this time for a mini oven masquerading as a room.

  Islamabad, I realised, was the cantonment to the thriving city of Rawalpindi. Built as the model city of the new state it had, in fact, replicated a much older version of imperial rule equally marked by the social and administrative separateness of the new (military) ruling elites.

  A few weeks later, and after a few more visits to Rawalpindi, I sought to impress a young Austrian diplomat with my knowledge of the swirling chaos of Rawalpindi and to entice her away from ordered and highly fortified mini-Switzerland of Islamabad’s diplomatic enclave, I suggested a date in ’pindi with exaggerated promises of adventure and the ‘real Pakistan’. Leaving behind the world of red number plates, expat-only embassy clubs, and official cars marked with ceremonial swords strapped to their bonnets, we took a local bus in forty-five degree heat into the heart of Pakistan’s other capital and immediately got lost in the maze of ancient streets and covered bazaars. I had attempted to make an effort and had recently bought some local clothes—a lightly decorated linen shalwar kameez—and hoped to blend in, or at least not to stand out too badly. The sun was intense and my misguided resistance to sunscreen and hats had led my colleagues at the office to call me gulabi sahib (pink sir) rather than gora sahib (white sir), which Europeans were usually called, on account of my regular sunburn. Trying to impress with my sense of local style and to offset the disadvantages of pale skin, I donned my new finery and set foot tentatively into the crowded bus with my date. The response was electric—our fellow passengers erupted into applause, slapped me on the back, offered congratulations and, as the bus lurched down the street an itinerant imam offered to convert me to Islam on the spot. Slowly it dawned on me that I had bought not an ordinary shalwar kameez but a marriage suit and the other passengers had come to the conclusion that we were traveling to Rawalpindi to tie the knot!

  In ’pindi itself, the response on the street was equally cheerful and my attempt to blend in suddenly became a mock-nuptial procession with cheering, well wishes, invitations to tea and the imam in tow, determined not to let pass his opportunity to save souls. This was too much for the Austrian who was immediately ill-at-ease amid the crowds, stares, ribald humour, and momentary celebrity caused by my sartorial confusion. We briefly took refuge in an abandoned Hindu temple next a street vendor selling cool, freshly crushed pomegranate juice and contemplated our next move. Knowing that the covered Rajah Bazaar was nearby where there were likely to be more women and she would feel less exposed, I suggested that we plunge into the arrhythmic mesh of side streets and make for the bazaar. It was a fatal move. If we had been lost before, within moments we had become dreadfully entangled, not in the cool of the bazaar itself looking at exotic fabrics and making memorable tourist purchases, but in the depths of the Rawalpini meat-market. It was fascinatingly awful—street after narrow street was lined with carts and hole-in-the-wall butcheries choking with diesel fumes, flies, dust and the smell of meat turning progressively more rancid in the midday sun. The dirt paths were splattered and puddled with blood and off-cuts and around us were the convulsing bodies of newly slaughtered animals. Promising that I knew the way out, I led her around a corner only to come face-to-face with a dead end and another grim series of shops whose great meat-hooks prominently displayed their treasured wares: bulls testicles swinging sickeningly in the smog-filled afternoon breeze.

  Used to the hyper-cleanliness of Vienna supermarkets, my companion was deeply unimpressed and, as a vegetarian, was understandably incensed. She had by now come to the realisation that my claims to know ’pindi’s complex geography, made in the safety of the Islamabad’s diplomatic enclave, may not have been altogether accurate. To the amazement of the onlookers who had moments before been wishing us a happy wedding, an argument erupted with each of us claiming the other had been misled. And there, in my wedding attire covered in blood, sweat, flies and pollution, I realised that I had inadvertently found myself in the polar opposite of the sanitised cantonment world of Islamabad. While my date may have ended in disaster, my Pakistan journey had started exhilaratingly.

  ‘LET’S GO SOMEWHERE really proletarian for lunch today,’ said Imran, rubbing his hands with delight as he emerged from his office—a glorified compression chamber of ancient newspapers and harsh cigarette smoke sweetened with hashish. I smiled wanly as my early enthusiasm for these ‘proletarian lunches’ of dhal and chapattis, or sometimes just cigarettes and the occasional joint, had worn away under successive bouts of food poisoning. Grimacing and bracing myself for another nauseating round of inedible street food, I dutifully followed Imran out of the quiet and chilly comfort of the highly air-conditioned office and out onto the street. Even going out onto the street in the full heat of the summer (at least 45 degrees with high humidity) defied both the weather and the accepted conventions of the Pakistani middle class. These lunches, for all their gastrointestinal cost, had become vital in my political education in Pakistan.

  My daily work as a would-be analyst of Pakistani affairs involved reading the newspapers from cover to cover in the morning and going out to extended lunches with gossipy, well-connected friends from the office or the coterie of analysts and purveyors of political intrigue, who seemed to fill every corner of Islamabad. This was followed by more reading about Pakistan’s political complexities in the afternoon. In the evenings, over al fresco dinners at the Kabul Restaurant, we would hatch yet more exotic conspiracies before buying up pirated DVDs and heading back to the minute flat I shared with another apprentice analyst to watch, spellbound, as the great Bollywood screen sirens Aishwarya Rai and Madhuri Dixit wove their majestic way through historical melodramas set in the Muslim north of the subcontinent before Partition. It was, if nothing else, an extremely intense crash course in subcontinental politics, culture and
history of the most intoxicating kind—an excitement only heightened by the fact that I was able to spend a reasonable amount of time out by myself travelling in Peshawar, Karachi and Lahore, where I had the opportunity to meet and interview many of the main protagonists from the political, military, diplomatic and NGO worlds.

  Being effectively a local institution, rather than the embodiment of a big international NGO, we had much greater freedom. There was no security and no restrictions, and I was free to do more or less as I pleased. The other huge advantage was that, in an expatriate world in which there is often a tendency towards self-aggrandisement and complaint about local people and conditions, I worked in an organisation staffed and run by some of brightest Pakistanis of their generation. These were people who had studied and taught at the world’s leading universities, each of them fluent in half a dozen European and Asian languages, and who casually reminisced about addressing congresses and parliaments and dining with presidents and foreign ministers. They did so on the basis of extensive field work in extremely demanding conditions so as to advocate the cause of peace. Theirs was a deep sophistication and when, later on, I was lucky enough to work with what I now realise was one of the finest European NGOs around, my reaction was to find my new colleagues personally and intellectually boorish by comparison, as evenings of discussion and historical melodrama were replaced with the consumption of beer and a chewing tobacco beloved of Scandinavians, called snus. (As these evenings progressed, my interlocutors found their ability to communicate impaired by a small teabag of tobacco that was stuffed under the upper lip. This left a brown stain down the front right incisor tooth; like cultish mafia tattoo, it was the clear and unambiguous mark of the Scandinavian aid worker.) In Pakistan, after being a very small and largely ineffectual cog in a very large Australian bank, I suddenly felt that I’d made it to the centre of the universe in which everything was urgent and new and stimulating.