NOT WANTING TO RISK dirtying his freshly cleaned white clothes, John brought them with him in his backpack, still wrapped in brown paper. So he enters the small bathroom at the masjid. He washes his hands and face, changes into his clothes. So he emerges minutes later, hair glistening, face shining, garments spotless, barefoot. He is ready. Thus Brother Gabirol introduces John to his second witness, a distinguished elderly man named Maulana Ismail. Thus they shake hands. Thus he kneels on a prayer rug. Gabirol kneels in front of him and places his right palm, thumb to thumb, against John’s right palm. The maulana and Khaled kneel on either side of him. Thus they form a protective circle around him, a ring of safety, and he feels good, he feels safe, he feels this private ceremony is right. Brother Gabirol looks at him inquiringly. He is ready. He nods. Thus Brother Gabirol closes his eyes. Thus John recites. He articulates the verses, with pauses for the apostrophes. He tries for the throaty h, the correct number of breaths. He gets it right only sometimes. He uses his closed fist on his chest to mark the breaths. Subhan allah wal-hamdu. La illaha il’allah et Muhammed rasulu. He brings his forehead to the floor and repeats la illaha il’allah, he breathes, he repeats, he hears behind his own words and breaths and beats Gabirol’s words and breaths and beats. Thus he keeps going, thus he recites five hundred times. Thus he feels himself transported, afloat. Thus he isn’t here on his knees. He is elsewhere. He is in another place and another time. An ancient place, an older time. He is with Ibn ’Arabi in Mecca, and he feels older than himself. He is on wheels, grinding, circling the Ka’ba, perambulating, chanting, shouting with great joy, la illaha il’allah, la illaha il’allah, la illaha il’allah. Thus he understands that this is what it’s for. JOY. Self-celebration. He is with Ibn ’Arabi. He feels rather than hears Brother Gabirol rock back on his heels, and reluctantly he returns from far away to his place on the rug, to his prostrated, perspiring body. He is in Brooklyn now. The room is overheated. A trickling moist sheen covers his skin. He smells an odor he doesn’t recognize, something herbal or medicinal, but burnt, burnt parsley. He begins his five hundred first recitation, and Gabirol, who is keeping count, nods. John raises his head, turns toward his right, toward the maulana, and greets him with as salaamu aleykum, then to his left, toward Khaled, who replies wa aleykum as salaam. Gabirol stands. Gabirol places an embroidered white mantle over John’s shoulders. Allahu ak-bhar, Gabirol announces, and they repeat after him, Allahu ak-bhar, Allahu ak-bhar, Allahu ak-bhar. Thus John believes. Allahu ak-bhar.
PESHAWAR, PAKISTAN—MAY 2001
THEY WERE FLYING BRITISH AIRWAYS, New York–London, London–Islamabad. Pakistan’s newest, most modern city would be John’s first view of this world. More than sixty languages, his guidebook informed him, are spoken in Pakistan, but English is the official one, used in business, government, legal, and public discourse.
You’ll have no problem, Khaled said. Even at Islamia, lectures open to the public are in English.
At Barbara’s last fund-raiser, a young Pakistani writer working at his country’s embassy described Islamabad as an Islamized version of D.C. air-dropped into the foothills of the Himalayas. Be sure to visit Mr. Books, he’d said, Islamabad’s best bookshop.
On the plane beside Khaled, John read about Islamabad’s Zero Point from which all distances are measured.
Zero Point. A film of the universe’s history run in reverse would show the universe contracting to a dot, eventually disappearing back to the beginning, before time and space, to a primal zero, the birthplace of the universe, when the big bang banged and burst forth a fury of galaxies, stars, planets, our nonstop cosmos. In the beginning was the point. In the beginning, some 15 billion years ago, before time was timed, on day zero of the world.
He would grind to Zero Point, a sacred spot, and begin again in the womb of the world. He would join an ongoing race of scholar-adventurers, men who have surrendered themselves to the life movement of the universe. He would be this century’s Richard Burton, Sir Richard Burton, speaker of twenty-nine languages, translator of the Kama Sutra, editor of A Thousand and One Nights; Sir Richard Burton, explorer of wild Sind, of Baluchistan and the Punjab; fearless Richard Burton, first European to make the famous pilgrimage to Mecca; the great Sir Richard Burton who described the mystical fana al-fana as a merging of the creature with the creator; Lieutenant Burton, secret service agent in western India; Captain Richard Burton, Sufi initiate; Murshid Burton, who could move the name of Allah through his body; Gnostic Burton, dervish and wandering holy man; Devil Burton, amateur barbarian and frequenter of brothels. All of which would make Barbara both proud and unhappy at once. But she would come around. She and Bill were cool parents, and John was determined to prove himself. In his own way.
He circled Zero Point on the map to mark it. From there, he would set out with his backpack, his skateboard, and guidebook and, for the rest of life, use it as a measure of distance traveled. Though he would have only twenty-four hours in Islamabad, not enough time to see enough, he would grind to Zero, pray, then go forth and learn the difference between nothing and something, absence and presence, meaning and chaos. From Zero Point, he told Khaled, he would skate forth to Islamabad’s main drag, into the Blue and Green Areas, and cover ground quickly.
I hate to bust your bubble, Khaled said, but Zero Point is just a signpost that gives the mileage and kilometers to surrounding cities. You’re overinvesting in it.
Khaled planned to spend a good part of his first twenty-four hours catching up on sleep. This will be the best accommodations we’ll have for a year, he said. Definitely our last night with air-conditioning.
During his last visit to Pakistan, Khaled had signed on for a five-week retreat in the hills. After weeks of hard physical conditioning in a dusty camp, he said, I just wanted a hot shower and a real bed. My aunt picked me up. She claims I slept for thirty-six hours straight.
Barbara was paying for their night in Islamabad, and they were staying at the President, a three-star hotel popular for its all-night café, which John knew Khaled would enjoy.
If I’m up early, Khaled said, I’ll pray at Faisal Mosque. It’s huge. It can hold like fifteen thousand people.
John looked at a picture of the mosque in his guidebook. Though it was made of aluminum and heavy concrete, it looked as light and airy as a cluster of Bedouin tents, somehow afloat in the blue blue sky. The rooflines were white and taut as wind-filled sails. It’s beautiful, John said. Poetic. He traced a path from Zero Point to the mosque. He would check it out on wheels.
He continued reading his guide all the way into Islamabad.
Islamabad. The name of the capital means “the abode of Islam” and reflects the Islamic ideology in Pakistan. Islamabad is new, planned, spacious, leafy and green. The wide roads, detached houses and gardens contrast with Pakistan’s older cities….A skyline of high rises with posh offices is springing up in Islamabad’s business district with the unusual name of Blue Area.
Armchair travel, Khaled called it. I’m going for real life. I don’t need a guidebook written by an Englishman telling me what to see and do. We’ll be residents, not tourists.
You know, John said. Not everything has to be so black and white, an either/or. Reading informs my experience. I want to be open to all of it, both the learning and adventure.
EARLY NEXT MORNING, showering, John discovered that Pakistani towels were strangely useless things, and he was glad he’d packed his own. He made a mental note to mention it to Barbara so she could pack a couple when she and Bill visited.
Outside, the sun was rising, with not a cloud anywhere. John stepped out and inhaled deeply. This was for real, he was here, in Pakistan, on the streets of Islamabad, on wheels. Finally. If only Barbara could see him.
The first call to prayer sounded, and suddenly the whole of Islamabad filled with it, from microphones everywhere. He turned his board toward Faisal Mosque, allowing sound and traffic to guide him, and came upon a scene in the courtyard that previously he’d seen onl
y in pictures: thousands of rounded backs, backs of every color and stripe, prostrated in prayer. He found an unoccupied prayer mat, kneeled, dropped his center to his heels and his head to the ground into the jalsa which he still thought of as child’s pose and gave his voice to the voices bearing witness: La illaha il’allah et Muhammed rasulu. La illaha il’allah et Muhammed rasulu. La illaha il’allah et Muhammed rasulu. And giving voice, he felt himself expand, grow larger on the inside. His skin stretched to accommodate this new self. He inhaled. He exhaled. His chest expanded, his ribs opened. He recited, a voice amid voices. He was alive. His voice hummed with the hum, and dissolved into the bluing air and brightening sky as one voice. And then, all together, all at once, he and these thousands, these thousands plus one, rocked back on their heels, and turned their heads to the right, turned their heads to the left, and acknowledged one another in their descent back to ordinary life: As salaamu aleykum, as-saalamu aleykum, Allahu ak-bhar.
As quickly as the crowd had gathered, it dispersed. John remained on his mat, not yet wanting to move. He looked about him, at what was now a mostly vacant courtyard. Perhaps he’d only dreamed it. But it had been awesome, and he couldn’t explain how or why. Not yet. His voice, a thousand voices. A wave of sound on which he’d been borne aloft. And he’d found himself wanting to stay aloft, with the sound, in the sound. Nothing he’d read had prepared him for this. He stayed where he was and repeated. Allahu ak-bhar. Allahu ak-bhar. He looked forward to the noon call. He would wait for the noon call. And the evening call. And the next day’s call. To this experience of himself as a strangely enlarged I, a broom-swept, uncluttered I.
THEY TOOK THE TRAIN to Peshawar. The day had gone hazy, but still John could make out the landscape as his guidebook described it: long stretches of a huge gray bowl with a green bottom. He looked for the three chips in the bowl: the legendary Khyber, Kohat, and Malakand Passes. He read aloud to Khaled, who learned some new things about this country he already knew, proving he could benefit from guidebooks.
North West Frontier Province is a British invention, an administrative convenience brought about by bureaucratic in-fighting in distant Punjab, on the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. The predominant color of the landscape gave us a new word in English: khaki, derived from the local word for “dust.”… Much of the North West Frontier is indeed very dusty. Areas are so dry, rocky and barren that the province has been described as a gigantic slagheap. This is a little unfair, for it does possess great beauty.
… In Kipling’s famous novel Kim, the Grand Trunk Road is described as “the backbone of all Hind.” Grand Trunk Road connects Kabul with Calcutta. “All castes and kinds of men move here. Look! Brahmins and chamars, bankers and tinkers, barbers and bunnias, pilgrims and potters—all the world going and coming. To me it is a river from which I am withdrawn like a log after a flood. And truly the Grand Trunk Road is a wonderful spectacle. It runs straight, bearing without crowding India’s traffic for fifteen hundred miles—such a river of life as nowhere else exists in the world.”
That may have been true in Kipling’s day, Khaled said, but the GT couldn’t handle modern traffic. The new M2 motorway is three lanes wide and entirely computer controlled. Your guidebook is totally outdated.
John paused to absorb Khaled’s update, decided he still wanted to know these stories, even if the information was ancient, and continued.
…Continuing up the GT Road, Attock is 60 miles from Pindi…. Attock Fort sprawls across the hillside looking over the River Indus. The Indus here enters a gorge and continues through it for some miles down to Kalabagh. The Fort rises in steps reaching a great height above the river. The outer stone walls are nearly 1.5 miles in circumference…. Nearby, the muddy brown waters of the Kabul River join the blue waters of the Indus. The Indus is much tamer now since Alexander crossed it on his bridge of boats. Its flow is controlled and regulated all the way down to Sindh. Just upstream of Hund is the massive Tarbela Dam, completed in 1973, and the largest earth-filled dam in Asia, storing a peak of 14 million cubic metres of water and supplying 2.1 million kilowatts of electricity. Elders in rural Punjab, affected most by the building of dams, believe that dams “remove all the electricity” from the water leaving behind only “useless husk.” This, they say, is why Punjabi youth is no longer what it once was.
Peshawar’s streets were named for their functions—City Circular Road, Cinema Road, School Road, Railway Road, Hospital Road, Sunheri Masjid Road, Police Road, Jail Bridge Road—which ought to make getting to know the city easier, but unlike Islamabad’s straight lines and hard corners, these were winding and circular and irrational. On his wheels John often came upon unexpected detours and dead ends: a crumbled ancient wall or tower, a sealed-up entrance. A sign in English usually explained the reason, always some age-old catastrophic flood or fire. An ancient city, Peshawar’s history was made up of downfalls, ransackings, renaissances, downfalls, ransackings, renaissances. So Islamia College, John found, was not where he expected it, on Islamia Road, but in the cantonment on Jamrud off Khyber Road. In Old City, wide arches led to narrow blind byways while narrow one-person alleyways opened onto large open-air bazaars, each one renowned for its particulars. The Meena bazaar, with guards at every entrance to keep men out, sold pretty women’s stuff: ribbon, lace, buttons, bows, beads, braiding, threads, embroidery, and printed fabric. To bring back gifts for the women in his life, he would have to rely on a woman, Khaled’s aunt perhaps. The gypsy bazaar sold carved bone and wood, real and false hair, skin and hair dyes, and traditional gypsy cosmetics such as kajaal. Here, gypsies told fortunes, prescribed magical remedies, carved tattoos against the evil eye. Toward Chowk Yadgar was a bazaar for saddles and guns. At Pipal Mandi vendors sold wholesale grain. There were vegetable markets, fruit markets, cloth markets, bird bazaars; markets for pottery, copperware, salt, antiques. The tea shops were on Qissa Khwani, street of the storytellers, where travelers, John read, have been telling tales tall and short since time immemorial.
Khaled, who’d been to Peshawar more than once and had advised leaving the skateboard at home, now warned against exploring the bazaars on wheels.
You’ll infuriate everyone, he said. Peshawar’s crowded, more crowded than the six at rush hour. Besides, some of the roads aren’t even paved.
John shrugged. He’d skated crowded streets in D.C., in New York City, in Brooklyn. He’d found concrete everywhere. CONCRETE CONQUERS EARTH was a headline in the summer issue of Skate. If fifth-grade geography hadn’t changed and two-thirds of earth was still water and the remaining third still land, then two-thirds of this remaining third might now be concrete.
Khaled looked at him. That’s the ugliest thing I’ve ever heard. But, listen, you’ve never experienced real crowds. D.C. and New York aren’t crowded, not compared to what you’ll see here. Seriously, it would be like trying to skate on a subway platform at rush hour.
Quit warning me, John said. I won’t crash into anyone.
He was reading about the Pathan tribes, the Wazir, Mahsud, Khattak, Bangash, Afridi, Mohmand, Yusefzi, Shinwari. Even their names sounded more legendary than real. The Pathans themselves, he read, made all sorts of claims about their origins. The Wazirs thought they were the ten lost tribes of Israel.
Tell me about these tribes, John said.
Pathans, Khaled explained, follow a tribal code. First rule is hospitality, which is offered even to enemies. Revenge is the second rule. Tribal feuds usually begin over a woman. They’re touchy about their women. The smallest gesture can lead to major retaliation. My mom says the Pathan word for cousin also means enemy.
Khaled’s mother had lived in the hills above Peshawar until she was eight. But when John asked him to contact his Afridi relatives and wrangle an invitation, Khaled said no way.
You may think getting yourself killed’s an adventure. I plan to live long enough to tell my life story, even if long life is very un-Pathan. But remember I’m half Brahmin.
But John want
ed to meet these tribes, stay with them, learn their ways, know them. Into the twenty-first century, he wished to wrest a nineteenth-century-style adventure, complete with danger and deprivation, wounds and scars, immersion, scholarship, becoming. Though a twenty-first-century man, he wanted to insert himself into a medieval legend, a form of time travel, and he was prepared to go all the way.
If you worry too much about surviving to tell your stories you’ll end up without any, John warned. Besides, I really can’t do it without you. I need your contacts and your Pashto.
Khaled lifted an eyebrow. You could start by learning Pashto.
John agreed. Islamia College offered classes in Urdu, Pashto, and classical Arabic, and though he’d registered for the Arab-language sessions, he signed on to also audit a Pashto-based class on the Qur’an. With only a year in Pakistan, he would have to learn the way children do: he would jump in and flounder. To avoid falling back on English, on easy familiarity, he asked to be housed in a Pashto-speaking dorm, though it meant separation from Khaled.
Why do you always want to make life harder for yourself? Khaled asked.
To speed up my learning curve, John said.
HIS WHITEWASHED DORM looked like a Victorian orphanage: a large bare room with fifteen single white iron beds, each three feet apart, all facing the same way, headboards against the back wall.
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