Empires of the Indus

by Alice Albinia

  We go to bed at nine, in wooden string beds under the stars. The house takes a long time to get to sleep: there is a second sitting of dinner at ten for the men who have come in from the mosque, and an aged aunt who moans in her sleep. Lanterns move to and fro across the terrace. Eventually everything is quiet. When I wake at dawn, mine is the only bed left in the courtyard.

  After paratha and tea–a deliciously greasy and filling fried-bread breakfast–two shepherds lead us over the Karakar pass by a short cut that avoids the police post. ‘That is the Malandrai pass,’ says Aslam, pointing through the trees, and across the wide valley below, to the faraway hills. It is the Malandrai pass that Alexander is said to have galloped over with his elite Companion Cavalry.

  We climb down through the pine forest, and out on to a tarmac road. We are now in Buner district, a place considered by Swatis to be wild and uncouth. The morning light and shadow falls sharply on the hills, and we turn off the main road, into a maze of quiet hedgerows. At ten, we are walking past a village teashop, when Aslam is recognized by a lorry-driver friend from Swat. He stands us tea and biscuits. I am sent inside to the filthy curtained women’s section; outside, the lorry driver says to Aslam, ‘Do you need a lift? Why are you walking? Do you want me to lend you some money?’ He hasn’t heard of Sikunder-e-Azam either.

  On we go, treading marijuana underfoot as the road becomes narrower and less travelled. For two hours the only vehicle that passes is a tractor blaring sermons (‘Do the work of God, be good to your neighbours’). Finally we turn off the jeep road, and by midday are walking on a grassy track around the village of Kohay, when Aslam notices that we are being followed. Two young men–with that under-occupied village air which I will learn means trouble–announce that they have something to tell us. We follow them to their hujra, and here the horror stories start.

  The next village is very, very dangerous: ‘More dangerous than Al-Qaeda.’ Sons assassinate fathers, uncles murder nephews. They will sell you for fifty rupees, or kill you for the contents of your handbag. I am sceptical, but now we are stuck: it is too hot to walk on till three or four o’clock. I resign myself to being taken into the house, and introduced to the women. From there I am led down to the village well, and exhibited like an exotic creature.

  Back at the hujra, I wait for Aslam, who has gone down to the mosque for prayers. He comes in looking grim: ‘The people in the bazaar are saying there is 100 per cent risk,’ he tells me. ‘And there is another village, Yaghistan, near the Indus where we are going, which is just as dangerous.’ My scepticism wavers. At five o’clock, somebody locates the school caretaker, who is from the dangerous village: maybe he can take us? But not today, tomorrow. And so the village boys have got their way. We will have to stay the night in Kohay.

  Kohay means ‘well’ or ‘spring’ but here, as in most Pakistani villages, there are water issues. The villagers farm the land for subsistence not trade, and such is the distance from the road that local employment is difficult to come by. The man who owns the house in which I stay is away in Malaysia; and his son, who has no job, rarely leaves the village–hence his fear of the neighbours.

  In the morning, there is more drama in the hujra. The school caretaker has been warned by his father not to help us. Instead, our absent host’s brother, Abdul Ghaffar, who has heard of Alexander, comes over and tries to reason with me: ‘Sikunder rode on a horse?’ he asks. ‘Yes, Bucephalus,’ I say. ‘Well, not even a goat could get over Malandrai,’ he replies. But by now I don’t believe anything they say–and it is already six in the morning. ‘Let’s go,’ I say to Aslam, and the hujra leaps collectively to its feet. ‘I am coming with you,’ says Abdul Ghaffar.

  We walk jubilantly away from the village, and for an hour follow an old riverbed east, past a well where women in flowing, coloured headscarves crouch down beside their water pots, their faces turned away when they see us coming. By seven we have reached the foot of the pass. It is an easy half-hour climb; I eat tiny strawberries all the way up. ‘That is Chorbandah,’ says Abdul Ghaffar, pointing to a small village in the valley below us. Chorbandah means ‘thieves’ in Urdu; was that innocent-looking village what all the fuss was about?

  We sit at the top of the pass, looking down across the plain, with its wavy marks of rivers, and the straight, man-made lines of fields, as Abdul Ghaffar tells us the true (but brief ) story of the most dangerous village in the district. Last year one of the Chorbandah youths took to hiding in the Malandrai pass and robbing travellers. Eventually, says Abdul Ghaffar, his exasperated uncle shot him dead; but now everything is saf (clean).

  We begin our descent, and I find that Abdul Ghaffar is right, Buchephalus would never have got over this pass. Even I barely make it. I am wearing the stupidest pair of shoes, my football-playing trainers, which, between the last time I kicked a ball on London Fields, and the moment when I slip down the marble-smooth cliff face and almost fall to my death, have lost all their grip. I pick my way cautiously along the grey rock, marvelling at the shoes that Aslam is wearing–a pair of second-hand brogues he bought in the Barikot bazaar for fifty rupees. ‘I don’t like your shoes,’ says Abdul Ghaffar to me. It takes two hours to climb down the slippery rock and on to the solid mud path. ‘Alexander must have crossed the Ali Peza pass,’ Abdul Ghaffar says. ‘It’s just over there. You could take a car over that one.’

  Abdul Ghaffar has relatives in the village at the base of the pass, who live in a mud-walled house, with a stream running through the middle of the garden. They sit us down in their small stuffy hujra, with a big glass display cabinet on one wall (containing golden high-heeled ladies’ shoes, a gun and an enamel teapot). The tea and biscuits come–and with them the horror stories, all over again. We want to walk to Rustom, a town perhaps an hour away; but ‘Nobody walks to Rustom,’ say the men, in shocked voices, ‘it is too dangerous.’ I catch Aslam’s eye. ‘What is the danger?’ ‘In this heat,’ they say, ‘the animals in the fields go mad. There are mad dogs. Mad donkeys.’ And then a word I don’t understand. I look at Aslam. He translates with a deadpan face, from Pashto into English: ‘Mad foxes.’ And I burst out laughing.

  Our hosts, however, are on the verge of tears and nervous exhaustion: they want to be rid of the responsibility we present. The truth is also that Abdul Ghaffar has trudged a long way with us this morning; now that we have reached a motorable road he would understandably rather ride than walk to Rustom. So we are escorted to a truck that is taking a load of wood into town. I lean out of the window looking for crazy foxes, and barely twenty minutes later we arrive in Rustom.

  Abdul Ghaffar leads us down the quiet back streets of the town, to the shade of his cousin’s hujra. As the women cook lunch, we examine the map. From here, we will walk south-east to Hund, the ancient river-crossing where Hephaestion set up camp while the rest of the army campaigned in Swat, and where Alexander came before turning north to Pirsar.

  Again, Abdul Ghaffar’s cousin pleads with us to accept a lift; and again, Aslam explains that we prefer to walk. The cousin gives us the name of a man in Hund with whom we can stay, and in the afternoon, after I have thanked the women, we leave the house.

  An hour passes, and then the ridge of Shahbazgarhi, where Ashoka put his inscriptions, emerges from the landscape to our left. This once-busy Buddhist trade route is now deep in the heart of Pashtun country. The women wear all-enveloping spotted chadors, the roads are good, and there is constant traffic between the villages. But here in the plains it is hot. Aslam’s village in Swat is snowed in for several months a year, and he hates the heat. ‘I can’t believe I am doing this,’ he says as we walk. I love it–the constant, un-English sweat, the simple need for shade, water and self-control. The road is absolutely flat, and I think gratefully of whoever it was who planted avenues of trees. (Ashoka’s boasts about the mango groves he planted suddenly seem justified.)

  Every hour or so Aslam asks directions, and every time the response is the same: ‘A bus is just coming’ ‘It w
ill only cost you three rupees.’ ‘Tell them I get car sick,’ I say eventually. But that doesn’t work: ‘Give her an injection and put her in an open car,’ shout three men from a horse and cart. ‘I bet no one said that to Alexander,’ says Aslam, and I stand with my back to them, my shoulders shaking with laughter. At five o’clock a man goes past on a motorcycle. ‘Are you mad? It will take three days to reach the Indus,’ he says. At six, two NGO workers from Peshawar stop and give us a lecture on the instability of the area. At seven, three ‘undercover’ policemen follow us to the outskirts of a small village called Chota Lahore, a royal capital in Alexander’s time. ‘We knew you from your chaal [gait],’ they say smugly. ‘You walk too fast. People here don’t like the English and Americans. Be very careful.’

  In the fields around Chota Lahore it is tobacco-harvesting season. The tobacco leaves are huge, like elephant ears. Hayricks stand in rows like families. We reach Hund, on the banks of the Indus, late at night.

  Hund, so significant a place when Alexander came here, lost its importance during Mughal times after the fort was constructed at Attock. Today it has only a concrete Corinthian column as testament to its former glory. The government has just built a dam above Hund taking water out of the Indus for three months of the year and diverting it through a power-generating station. Last time I was here you could walk across the river. But now, to my pleasure and surprise, it is full again, and though we reach Hund when it is dark, the air cools as we approach the riverbank, and I can feel the river, a dark mass of water, just below the house where we will be staying.

  Abdul Ghaffar gave us the name of a Syed (one of the descendants of the Prophet, and thus presumably the owner of a big house). Brazenly, we turn up on his doorstep and announce ourselves. Nobody has called ahead to warn them of our arrival, but I hear the servant call indoors to the Syed, ‘Your guests have come’–and we are taken in without a second glance.

  Our host is a busy man. He has land along the river, a cloth shop in Peshawar, and the fish business when there is water–his hujra stinks of the fish which he sends in ice all over the country. At night he comes into the house carrying a gun. ‘Shikar [hunting]?’ I ask, but the women laugh: ‘No, just a blood feud.’

  The next day at noon, I swim in the Indus. It is wide, blue, cold–and very fast; I have to swim near the bank for fear of being swept away. The huddle of women washing their clothes on the banks of the river are gold-panners–‘low-caste,’ say the Syed’s women, who never leave the house. In the afternoon, some neighbouring women come to visit, taking me up on to the roof to look at the river and tell me how constricted their lives are. ‘Even if my heart says no,’ says one, ‘other people decide things for me.’ ‘You have been married for five years and have no children?’ another asks me. ‘No children,’ I agree, and feel the usual, dislocating sense of not fitting into their notion of gender. ‘What do you use?’ they ask next–and suddenly, I realize the reason for their secrecy. These women aren’t disapproving, they wish to ask me about contraception. There is a lady doctor in the nearby town who says condoms are best, but their husbands refuse to wear them. The ‘medicines’, they have heard, will do odd things to their ‘menses’.

  Downstairs in the courtyard, the Syed’s young and beautiful sister-in-law, who was married three months ago, is quite clear about what she wants. ‘Sons,’ she says. ‘What is the point of being a woman? Even if the whole world moves on, this place will always stay the same. Nothing will change in a hundred years.’

  The next morning at dawn, I have a last cup of tea with the women, and then Aslam and I set off north again. If this was the Ganges or Yamuna, the riverbank would be crowded with Hindus offering prayers to the goddess and taking a snan (holy bath) in its waters. In Hund, one of the great pleasures for men is sleeping next to the river, but in the morning the bank is almost deserted. I watch as the Syed’s fisherman paddles out into the freezing water, floating on a tractor’s inner-tube–the modern version of the ancient practice of crossing the Indus on inflated animal skins. There is one other man having a wash, silhouetted against the sunrise.

  All morning, we walk up the path that runs parallel with the Indus, following Alexander’s route northward along the river to Pirsar. We are now a third of the way through our journey and Aslam is pleased, for we are walking well, eight hours a day, thirty to forty kilometres. Every day we drink litres and litres of water–from springs where possible, from wells and taps mostly–and hourly cups of tea, or cold bottled sugary drinks.

  It is lunchtime when we arrive in the small town of Topi, on the south side of the massive Tarbela dam, which, after its completion in 1974, cursorily displaced thousands of farming families from the river’s banks. We are sitting in the purdah section of a roadside restaurant, when a man slips under the curtain–thus outraging my newly-acquired modesty–and introduces himself as a member of Pakistan’s ‘CIA Police’. He, too, knew me by my chaal, my walk. It seems that I walk too fast. He doesn’t ask my name but he tells me to be careful. Three female suicide bombers have just been arrested in Swat. ‘Did you think I was one?’ I ask. He laughs.

  After lunch we walk for an hour across the Gudoon district industrial estate. It is, as Aslam says wearily, a sunsaan jagah (deserted place). There are no villages, just factories in the distance. Suddenly, Aslam comes to a halt. ‘It is too dangerous,’ he says. ‘We are taking a big risk. We know nobody ahead.’ Pakistanis, by virtue of living under a succession of military dictatorships, can be a paranoid people; but it is also true that hitherto we have been passed on from one friend to another, and now the chain of acquaintance has been exhausted. I stand there, thinking: we can turn back, go forward by car, or…‘Let’s go to the police station,’ I say. Normally we avoid the police, but under the present circumstances my suggestion is inspired.

  We reach a small town, and walk slowly through it, looking out for the familiar blue and red stripes of Pakistan’s police stations. When we finally see it, I pull off my headscarf, and step up to the door, hoping that the complications of the police register will not detain us. The policemen–all three of them–look pleased by the visit. They usher us into the head office, look at my Alexander route map, and come up with the solution to our problem. They have a friend in a village some fifteen kilometres ahead. He is a retired Police Inspector, and an upstanding member of the village Islamic Morals Committee. Everyone smiles in relief. A junior policeman is directed to show us the short cut to the hill road.

  Soon we have left the town behind us, and Aslam, who can see the hills now, is happy. We pass a madrassah, are overtaken by a bus and a tractor, and climb slowly into the hills. But as usual there is confusion about how far ahead our destination lies: few Pakistanis know walking distances any more. ‘A day’s walk,’ says the farmer on the tractor. ‘You won’t get there till Wednesday,’ says the motorist. An hour later, we turn a corner in the road and see the village, with its white flat-roofed houses, spread out along the hillside.

  The retired Police Inspector’s family are tidy, studious people. Two of his sons are teachers, one is a shopkeeper. They speak Urdu with the twangy hill accent which over the next ten days I will grow to love. Months later, when the shopkeeper rings me in London, I am transported back immediately by the sound of his voice, its shallows and depths, to that peaceful, secluded place. That night, I sleep next to his wife and children in the courtyard of their house. I am woken at dawn by a light rain but it evaporates almost as quickly as it falls on our beds.

  The next day, the gradient of our journey rises steeply, as we walk up into the hills along the only road. ‘Keep walking on it till it runs out,’ says the Police Inspector, ‘then you will be in the tribal area.’ ‘What tribal area?’ Aslam asks–and then remembers: ‘The place called Yaghistan that the men from Kohay warned us about’ and simultaneously I recall Yaghistan from colonial British texts–that wild ‘unadministered’ area along the Indus which all of Victorian imperialism was unable to tame–a ‘sealed
book to European travellers’ throughout the nineteenth century, marked on maps as ‘Unexplored Country’. It is Yaghistan which appears as a blank patch on our modern Pakistani maps.

  All day, we walk through small terraced fields ploughed by spotted oxen–perhaps the same highland breed that Alexander so admired (he ordered his troops to steal 230,000 of them, and sent the best home to Macedonia). The farm holdings around us are sturdy buildings made from local materials–stone, wood and mud. Unlike in Sindh and the Punjab, the only fertilizer is manure; big agri-business has not yet arrived to multiply production, increase costs and reduce peasants’ self-sufficiency. But ‘water is a problem’, farmers complain; it is too high for the canals from Tarbela to reach these fields. Central government does not help; people here depend on nature.

  Normally Aslam and I rest at noon, but today we keep walking up through the hill villages, along the winding road that curves ever upwards, under trees, past springs, small shops, and the occasional police station. Only one bus passes us during the whole day, and it stops so frequently that we soon overtake it again. By the afternoon, we have left Gudoon district behind us, and are now in Amazai, where we will spend the night. We have been given the name of a friend of a friend of the Police Inspector–he is a Malik, an important man it was stressed, the leader of his tribe.

  We are following the narrow grassy path through a village, when Aslam sees something in the field ahead. ‘Look,’ he says. I have told him how excited Alexander and his men were to see ivy growing in this region–proof to them that the god Dionysus or Bacchus had come here centuries before, bringing his ceremonial plant and revelling followers with him. I follow Aslam’s pointing finger. For the first time on our walk there is ivy spiralling up a tree. I climb over the fence and run towards it. Hedera himalaica, the Himalayan ivy.

  It was during this very journey, from Hund to Pirsar, that Alexander’s army saw ivy growing in the hills around ‘Nysa’, the Indian city which, following Greek mythology, they thought Dionysus had founded here. The Greeks, emotional at the best of times, wept on beholding this botanical souvenir of their homeland. They ‘eagerly made wreaths’ and ‘crowned themselves’, Arrian writes, and raising ‘the Dionysiac cry’, ‘were transported with Bacchic frenzy’.