Border Crossing

by Rosie Thomas

'A nun on a washing machine?'

  'Sister Matic.'

  'A man with no arms and legs in a swimming pool?'

  'Bob.'

  'Nah. Clever Dick.'

  'Your passport here, please.'

  It was an effort to obey orders without snorting with suppressed mirth like a bunch of third-formers. We were waved on, into a last queue to have the passports laboriously checked just once more, for luck, and onwards to the Pakistan frontier. While we were waiting outside the border I pulled on the appropriate loose trousers and a long-sleeved shirt. We would have to stay covered up all the way to western Turkey.

  The entry into Pakistan was a big contrast with what we had suffered in India. Efficient members of the Pakistan Motor Sports Club were waiting to expedite our passage, the officials all smiled at us, and the police officers were proud, tall and wonderfully handsome men in navy-blue frock coats with striped cravats and rows of medals on their chests. They wore printed name badges. With his mind still at Paddy O'Doors level, Phil was charmed to encounter Officer Pushdeep and Officer Hardeep.

  There was a police escort for the 26 kilometres into Lahore, and we found ourselves second in line behind Adam and Jon. The police jeep took off at a funereal pace with the Bentley nosing up its behind, and after a couple of km the police driver pulled over and came around to ask Adam just how fast his car could really go.

  'Try me,' Adam grinned.

  We set off again. The jeep went faster and faster, the Bentley never yielded an inch, and the Amazon surged along in their wake. At one point we were doing 110 kilometres an hour, and Adam probably still didn't have his foot hard down.

  Lahore looked beautiful as we spun through it. There were canals lined with weeping willows, and wide avenues where the lamp posts were hung with red and white banners welcoming the honourable participants in the Peking-Paris Rally. We were directed through the gates of the hotel, and then out into a huge garden, to draw up in dusty lines on the immaculate grass.

  To step out of the fetid car, journey-stiff and with dirt in every crease, and to absorb the afternoon sunshine and breathe in the scent of mown grass and roses, was like arriving in paradise. The green lawn was smoother than velvet underfoot. Garlands of scented crimson rose petals were draped around our necks and waiters brought silver salvers laden with beaded glasses of ruby-red iced fruit punch. I was so happy I could have lain down in the purple shade under one of the trees and spread out my arms to embrace it all. And tomorrow was a rest day. No car, no noise, no dirt, no beep to echo inside my skull.

  The hotel was big and grand, and air-conditioned almost to dewpoint. We had a high room, looking down on the tree-tops and happily distant rally cars. There were white fluffy robes in the bathroom. We took long, hot showers and removed the black crescents from beneath our fingernails, then put on the bathrobes, opened the alcohol-free minibar, and lay back on one of the beds to giggle at old British sitcoms on the television. When things were good between Phil and me, they cancelled out the bad times entirely.

  Before dinner I went out shopping with Melissa, and Dan and JD. That morning Jennifer and Francesca had blossomed slightly uncertainly in shalwar kameez made up in cheery Peter Jones floral prints, and Melissa and I were naturally eager to keep our end up. Down the road from the hotel we found a functional, neon-lit department store, and the assistants brought out piles of outfits for us to choose from. Every person working in the shop was a man. There were no saleswomen, and almost no women customers, and the streets outside were thronged with men.

  Dan and JD selected the first garments they were shown, while Melissa and I waded through the heaps of white cotton tunics and baggy pants, rejecting this one for the wrong embroidery, that one for the wobbly neckline. They sat on a bench, waiting and watching, but after half an hour they grew impatient and incredulous.

  'They are all the same.' Dan spread his hand, flat-palmed. 'What is the point of all this?'

  We tried to explain that shopping was the point of shopping, but it cut no ice. I quickly chose an ice-blue shalwar kameez for Phil. In the end he wouldn't wear them, sticking to the customary T-shirts and Army camouflage trousers even after Dan appeared looking elegantly patrician in his pale mint-green version. Maybe he thought the look was a bit too feminine for a wild boy racer.

  While I was changing for dinner there was a knock at the door, and I opened it to find a Pakistani man with a worried expression.

  'Where is Murdoch Laing? Who are his friends?' he demanded.

  It turned out that the man had known Murdoch since university, and he had organised a big party to welcome his old friend to Lahore. Unfortunately still dogged by mechanical breakdowns, the Aston and its crew hadn't made it to the border before it closed down for the night. His host didn't want to cancel the party, and he was looking for Murdoch's friends to celebrate with him instead. I assured him that he wouldn't find any shortage of takers.

  Dinner that night was at a long, candlelit table under the trees in the scented garden, with delicious food and the best company. It was one of those evenings when nothing could go wrong. Lahore became a place of happy memory, and I thought back to it often enough in the days that followed.

  Phil devoted his rest day to checking out the wheel bearings on our car, and helping Dan and JD to replace one of their front steering arms. I did some very overdue work, which wasn't too much of a hardship under a parasol beside the hotel swimming pool. Colin attended to the Porsche and its ailments, so Melissa had energy and time to spare – she hired a car and a driver and embarked on a sightseeing circuit of the Fort, the Temple of Mirrors and the Shalimar Gardens. She consoled me wisely when I bewailed my failure ever to see anything anywhere on this crazy trip.

  'Just look on it as a recce,' she said. 'We can come back to all the places we like and see them properly.'

  I would certainly come back to Lahore.

  But at the end of the day, Phil and I did find an hour to go out on our own to the Old Bazaar. It felt good to be making this rare sightseeing expedition together – the first since the Potala Palace. The taxi-driver who took us from the hotel was four feet high and four feet round, and spoke good English. He volunteered himself as our guide, and we let him lead us into the warren of alleyways.

  It was like being drawn into a moving paintbox. There were stalls selling iridescent sari lengths, and bolts of wedding fabric beaded and sequinned and reflecting darts of rainbowed light. There were wonderfully elaborate and kitsch marriage seats, wound around with metallic ribbons in purple and silver and scarlet, and men's wedding hats made of intricately pleated satin, topped with a stiff crest of paper and nodding feathers, and pinned with an egg-sized glass jewel. Kitchenware stalls shone with great copper cauldrons and kettles, and pewter-coloured pans in infinitely graded towers, and racks of forks and spoons and giant ladles. There were shoe stalls stacked with towers of white boxes, and paper merchants, and spice sellers with brown hessian sacks spilling out cumin and cardamom and cloves. The alleys were clogged with shoppers, bicyclists and strolling men, and – here at least – head-down, hurrying women in swishing saris. Wildly ornamented and glittering tuktuks cut recklessly through the crowds. There were musicians on the corners with drums and sticks of bells and little brass cymbals.

  There were food vendors too. The air was thick with smoke and the smell of cooking. Men expertly fried poppadums, and stirred vats of fragrant curries. There were piles of every kind of nut, and mounds of glossy dates, and powdery sweetmeats. I wanted to try everything, but for my stomach's timid sake I didn't venture a single mouthful. I didn't need to get ill again.

  Down at the far end of an alleyway at right angles to ours I suddenly saw a giant red and pink totem pole. It was Howard, all six foot six of him, in a red polo shirt. Surrounded by tiny darting people he looked like Gulliver in a sea of Lilliputians. He lifted his great hand and waved to me.

  The light drained out of the sky. Looking up, I saw the colour fade from dove-grey in the distance to slate
over my head. The smoky air was criss-crossed with telephone wires, with the dark blobs of roosting pigeons strung all along them, so that the sky looked like the score for some avant-garde piece of music. There were kites flying too, not kite-shaped but square, like tiny black pocket-handkerchiefs or tethered bats dipping against the thickening dusk.

  Our round guide led us on into the antiques district and we followed him through the stalls of his friends and relatives, but it was a mechanical exercise. There was much dross, and neither Phil nor I had Howard's appetite for searching out what was not. Nobody pressed us to buy, and everyone was courteous and graceful. At last, from a bewilderingly oblique direction, we emerged from the sensory overload of the bazaar right next to our friend's parked taxi. He accepted our thanks and money with a serene smile.

  Yes, he said, in answer to Phil's questions. Lahore was a very good place to live. Best in Pakistan.

  Back at the hotel a bulletin had been posted. Because so many people had suffered severe delays leaving India yesterday, yet another day's times had been neutralised. There was no change in the order from Delhi.

  'Every time we have a good day,' Phil muttered, 'they fucking cancel it.'

  We forged on from Lahore to Multan. The overdrive still didn't work, so on long, dull stretches of road there was the tiring and monotonous sound of the engine straining. The cassette player was finally working loose from its mountings and it began to fade and then sporadically cut out. We had listened to every one of the tapes we had with us over and over – everything's gonna be all right – until they ran inside my head almost as insistently as the beep, but music was still essential.

  'I'll have to fix it,' Phil vowed.

  It was very hot, and a dry insistent wind sucked the moisture out of our skin and made us perpetually thirsty. The flat countryside was brown and grey, mottled with scrubby bushes and eucalyptus trees and broken up by canals and the relentless straight line of a railway. Sometimes it seemed to waver, but it was only the heat haze and a trick of tired eyes.

  The few towns we passed through were dusty little clusters of single-storey shops and houses, where the people squatted at the roadside to watch us pass through. The traffic was less dense than in India, but there was the same reckless disregard for any conventions of the road. Most beautiful, but also most alarming because of their size and speed, were the great painted wagons. They had towering fronts with curved tops, and every inch of this great barque was gaudily painted with fantastic designs and stuck with mirrors and magic eyes and golden beading. The effect was like a runaway fairground roundabout bowling down the crown of the road towards you.

  'They travel the Karakoram Highway,' Phil said. I imagined how stirring these great glittering monsters must look, hauling their way across territory almost as high and bleak as the way we had come over the Himalayas.

  In the remote rural areas there began to be groups of children, gathered at the sides of the road in loose clothes the same colourless colours as the landscape. The first time I saw a huddle of them with their hands raised I thought they were waving and I began to wave back, but then there was a sharp rattle and a heavier clang from the side of the car. They were throwing stones at us. A few kilometres further on a handful of grit flung through the open window stung my face.

  It was disturbing to be stoned, but the resentment that must have underlain it had been gnawing at our consciences ever since Tibet. Our outrage at the repeated assaults was double-edged with guilt.

  We reached Multan, with a clean card, at the unusually early time of four in the afternoon.

  'So probably they'll cancel the day for some reason,' we sighed pessimistically to each other.

  The heat was tiring and dispiriting, but we stood up to it better than some. At one of the day's time controls I had bumped into the smaller of the toothbrushless American women. (Or maybe they had restocked their oral hygiene supplies at Lahore).

  'I hate this,' she told me. 'I just hate it.' She looked all in. But remembering the Tibetan plateau and the temperature of –15 degrees at the Tuotuoheyan camp, I decided that for myself I would rather be too hot than too cold.

  The oldest city in Pakistan, Multan was reputed to be rich in dust, beggars and burial grounds. Melissa was full of energy and always eager for the next diversion, and we had no sooner arrived in the hotel than she was mustering a fleet of taxis and persuading us all to go sightseeing. Dust and beggars were certainly in generous supply in the surrounding streets. We toured a couple of imposing mosques, which were decorated in the characteristic local cool turquoise and aquamarine tiles, and intruded on people's prayers with our video cameras and tourist stares. Some of our party were still wearing shorts, and it made me uncomfortable to see the way that eyes followed their freckled, hairy-blonde, stilt-like bare limbs. I didn't in any case like invading other people's places of worship, especially when they were the central focus of as many lives as the ones in Multan, and I was glad when our sprawling group shifted itself onwards to the bazaar.

  We discovered that it was almost as lively as the one in Lahore, but there were too many of us trying to stay together and too much time was spent standing on corners asking each other where Chris and Howard had gone. I wished that I had come just with a single companion, like the night before.

  In the end, we were separated and hopelessly lost in the maze of alleyways. Phil and Carolyn and I found the nearest exit and hopped into an exuberantly decorated tuktuk for a ride home. It was exactly like being in a video game. Super TukTuk Kart. Wherever three or more roads converged, half a dozen of the little machines would whirl at top speed into the middle of the junction, playing chicken until the last instant, and then somehow swerve and rattle past each other before darting on to the next intersection. We made it home to dinner with a score of 8,500 points and all our lives still intact.

  With Dan and JD we chose the first restaurant we came to for dinner, and then realised too late that it was Chinese. No one wanted to eat a Chinese meal ever again, but somehow when it arrived we managed to dispose of it. For the first time the talk turned to Paris, and the Ball to celebrate our arrival there, and who each of us was hoping would be on the finish line to meet us. I knew why. Multan was the half-way point in distance and time and our perspectives had suddenly changed. Instead of looking at the rally like a great peak to be climbed, it was as if we were peering from the summit at a downhill slope. It was beginning to be conceivable that it would all end, some day, and there would be no more road and no more beep and Phil and I would go our separate ways again. Covertly, I watched him eating sweet and sour chicken. I knew just as much about him, I thought, as he had been prepared to let me learn. And at the beginning when I had been sharing out the Prince Borghese attributes, I had thought that I was the controlling one.

  In the morning we were up early to carry out the checks on the car that we had recklessly neglected the night before. There was no more leaking from the rear wheel bearing, no leaks or cracks visible anywhere else, and apart from the overdrive and the tape deck everything appeared to be holding up well. Evidently Tony Barrett had done some sound thinking and Noddy and Geza and Phil had followed his ideas through with great thoroughness. We were optimistic again.

  We left Multan in 37th place, heading westwards through Baluchistan to Quetta, almost on the border with Afghanistan. We had 622 kilometres to cover in four stages.

  In the first hour of the first stage we overtook the familiar numbers ahead of us in the order. Phil was resentful about it today.

  'Why are we way back here in the list when we have to overtake all these slower people every time we set off in the morning?'

  'I don't know. It'll change soon.'

  We made the first stage within our allowance, and waited a further half-hour for a new restart minute because the vintageants were being given more space and time to complete the difficult section ahead. Phil paced around like a bear in a cage. The time control was a dusty café in the flyblown little town of Sakh Sar
awar; I made him drive a kilometre back down the road to somewhere in the scrubland where I could have a pee without an audience of forty little boys and spitting old men, and all the time he kept looking at his watch as if some malign force would send the hands spinning forward and lose us our place. It was very hot. The sun fried the tops of our heads and dried our throats.

  We were still ready on our minute. We had 34 minutes to drive 45 k. Beep.

  'This one is going to be a bitch,' Phil said.

  The road was unmade, steep and potholed and blasted with oncoming traffic. The huge gaudy wagons swept down the middle of the rudimentary track, spraying stones and dust with their great tyres, and drawing in their wake cars and suicide scooters. None of them ever gave any ground. Phil had to watch the roadside each time for a place to steer into, missing the rocks and the ruts, and wrench the wheel to bring us back on course before the next act of split-second evasion was forced upon him. We skidded two-wheeled past the overloaded buses, all of which had staring faces bursting out of their windows like bunches of overripe fruit hanging on a wall. Every pothole jarred the car, every time we hit a rut we waited for the new sound under the familiar cacophony of shrieks and rattles that would tell us a part had split or cracked or broken. I hunched in my seat, half willing something to happen that would force us to slow down, half maddened by the fact that we couldn't go any faster. The timer flicked implacably. Even before we had covered half the distance it was obvious we couldn't hope to clean this section.

  Phil overtook a ruck of vintageants, the yellow Morgan Plus 8, even one of the Iranian Peykans.

  'How far?'

  'Twenty k.'

  'How long?'

  'Not long enough. Just keep going.'

  The beeper went and I slapped the button. No one overtook us. Every bend became a screaming rear-wheel skid. Choking dust billowed everywhere and partially blotted out the oncoming traffic.

  We reached the control and I ran to the desk, 14 minutes over time. Who could possibly have gone fast enough to cover that distance, over that road, in 14 minutes less than Phil had managed?