Empires of the Indus

by Alice Albinia

  In Arrian’s history, the people of Nysa beg for clemency from Alexander by claiming to be the descendants of Dionysus’ soldiers. But other historians were divided on the veracity of the Dionysus story. Eratosthenes, whose account is lost, thought it was a cunning fiction. Others credited it, and repeated the key events: that Dionysus had taught the Indians how to cook, plough, play the cymbal and drum; that between Dionysus and Alexander the Indians counted 153 kings, a duration of 6,042 years. Arrian was undecided about the story’s truth but he recognized it as propaganda of the highest order. Now that the Greek army knew it was treading on hallowed ground, nobody could refuse to march on into India.

  One clue to the actual whereabouts of Nysa might be the cedarwood coffins which, according to the Roman writer Quintus Curtius, the Macedonians found on a hillside one cold night, chopped up and burnt as firewood. Even today the Kalash in far north-western Pakistan still place their dead in exposed wooden coffins, and modern historians have tended to assume that Nysa must be located in this region. But in the fourth century BCE, this Kalash (or ‘Kafir’) culture stretched over the entire area between Jalalabad and the Indus. Babur himself drank wine brewed by the Kafirs of Bajaur, in the sixteenth century CE. Instead, Arrian makes it clear that Alexander found his Nysa near the River Indus, between Hund and Pirsar–somewhere along the route that Aslam and I are now walking.

  Dionysus was an apt patron for Alexander’s Indian journey. His cult had important devotees–not least Olympias, Alexander’s mother–and an ancient eastern association. Euripides’ play The Bacchae opens with Dionysus newly returned from ‘Bactria’, the ancient Persian province that stretched from Afghanistan to the Indus:

  Overland I went,

  across the steppes of Persia where the sun strikes hotly down, through Bactrian fastness and the grim waste of Media.

  To the Greeks, the ivy must have seemed like final corroboration of what many had already suspected–that the religious cults of north-west India, with their orgiastic practices, proclivity for vines, goats and serpents, were quintessentially Dionysiac. When Megasthenes, Greek ambassador to the court of Chandragupta Maurya, visited India a quarter of a century later, he divided the Indians into two religions: those who worshipped Hercules, and those who followed Dionysus. Centuries after that, when Philostratus (born in 172 CE) came to compose his biography of the Pythagorean sage Apollonius of Tyana, he explained that Indians who lived near the Indus believed there were two Dionysuses, one the son of the River Indus, and the second a Theban Dionysus who became the Indian’s disciple. In this story, the Dionysiac cult came from, rather than being brought to, India: such was the ancient influence of India on Western culture.

  When they saw ivy, Alexander’s men drank lots of wine and danced around the hillside singing ‘Ite Bacchai, ite’ (On, Bacchai, on) as if they had escaped from Euripides’ Chorus. I have no wine. But I pull out the ‘intoxicating confection’ given to me by Hakim Ayub, and Aslam and I sit down under the ivy-wreathed tree and eat a glistening lump of majoon each. It is sweet at first (that must be the honey), then sour. ‘What is that strange taste?’ I ask Aslam, ‘the camel intestines?’ ‘Opium,’ Aslam says. ‘It’s ninety per cent poppy.’ Poppy. The one ingredient Hakim Ayub forgot to mention.

  By the time we reach the Malik’s hujra my head is spinning and I am seeing things. ‘I feel strange,’ I tell Aslam, ‘the majoon has made me ill…’ ‘We ate it on an empty stomach,’ he says; ‘we were walking uphill, so the blood is moving fast around your body. It will soon pass.’ Against all the rules I lie down in the hujra (I should as usual have joined the women in the house). This worries the Malik, and later that evening he gives me a lecture on tribal mores and the bad reputation I will get if…But I don’t care. Right now I think I am dying. As men from the village queue up at the door to stare, I lie covered in my chador, imagining how my organs will fail, one by one, in this miserable village without even an aspirin, let alone a doctor. Was Hakim Ayub trying to kill me? I remember what Hafizullah had said in Jalalabad: is it an elaborate plot by the Pakistani Army? They failed to get me at the Nawa pass–now they are doing me in on a Bacchic hillside days’ and days’ walk from a functioning hospital.

  Eventually the paranoia passes. I live. By evening I am well enough to go into the house.

  A man can invest in his hujra and produce an aura of wealth. Thus the Malik’s hujra is a cosily decorated room with specimens of local weaving on the walls. But in the house itself there are only two rooms for twenty people, the toilet is a hole and there isn’t a bathroom. The Malik is very young to be the leader of his tribe, and the responsibility weighs heavily upon him. This area was prosperous once–when the villagers grew rich from poppy–before the Tarbela dam submerged fertile land in the valley below, pushing the farmers into the desiccated upland. The villagers, who have exhausted their life savings in failed harvests, say that ‘the government never comes here.’ The Malik’s family look miserable and unkempt. His wife, who has ‘gynaecological impediments’, has given him just one daughter, and it is not enough: the Malik is getting married again next week. ‘They are so poor,’ I say to Aslam later. ‘What is the point?’ But Aslam, who has eleven children, understands. ‘The Malik needs an heir,’ he says.

  All night, the women of the Malik’s household toss and turn. One of them tries to massage my legs before I go to sleep. Another (the Malik’s wife) goes outside to be sick. They leave on a green bulb and watch Urdu films on a tiny black and white television. I have strange dreams and fitful sleep.

  In the morning, the by-now familiar horror stories start in the hujra. Ahead, in the tribal area, the Malik says, we will need to seek permission–that is, protection–from the local jirga to cross it safely. ‘It is a ferocious place,’ he says. ‘Be careful not to stray too far west as you walk. Avoid the hill of Mahaban.’ He shudders. ‘Over the Indus to the east, there is snow on the hills. In the Kaladaka [Black Mountains] people are still living in caves.’ A typical jirga punishment, say his friends, involves putting the offender into a hollowed-out tree trunk head first and leaving him there for three days. ‘We are Mughals,’ says the Malik. ‘We came here five hundred years ago from Abbottabad. Where you are going we cannot help you.’

  I stare at a poster of a sunset on the wall and wonder if it was in those strange, remote hills where the Malik fears to go, that Alexander found Nysa. Maybe the dreaded hill of Mahaban was the mountain where Dionysus held his rituals, which Alexander called ‘Mount Meros’ (possibly confusing it with Meru: in Hindu cosmology the mountain from where the Indus rises).

  The Malik lends Aslam a white Sunni cap. ‘And you,’ he points to me, ‘wear your burqa.’

  That morning, we climb with the Malik through village after village, along the edges of fields, around small mud-daubed houses, higher and higher into the hills. We stop to drink tea with an embittered farmer, who shows me the names of the traitorous American charity workers who in the 1980s promised him compensation for eradicating his entire poppy crop, and also the business card of his local politician, son of Pakistan’s first military dictator, who ‘only comes here during electioneering’.

  The Malik walks with us for an hour, until he meets a headmaster on the path who can take us onwards to his school. There, after tea with the teachers, two senior boys are pulled out of lessons to show us the path to Kallilard where the Malik has a friend, another leader of a local tribe. ‘Tribal people are very nice, good, clean,’ say the teachers in the school, contradicting their neighbours. ‘Have no fear.’

  We climb for an hour along the winding hill path to Kallilard. There, young girls out herding goats point to the house of the Malik’s friend, Muhammad Khan, and we have to tip our heads backwards to see it, perched right at the top of this steep hill village.

  With his large beard, two wives, many offspring and large amounts of land, Muhammad Khan is a powerful and cheerful man. ‘I convene the local jirgas,’ he tells me, and points down the hill, across t
he green terraces to a smudge of brown in the valley below. ‘My house will have easy access to the new jeep road the government is building.’

  After lunch, he places a row of chairs in the elegant mud courtyard and calls his wives and children for the photoshoot that I am directed to conduct. Then he walks us down to the road. ‘Follow this track round the hill,’ he says. ‘Where the road stops you will see a bulldozer. Go downhill from there until you get to the village of Chanjelo. Ask for Muhammad Rasool Haji. Chanjelo is the last village before the tribal region.’

  As we trudge along the dirt track through the pine trees, I find that Aslam has grown worried again. ‘This is the most dangerous walk I have ever gone on,’ he says. ‘But Aslam, that’s not true,’ I tell him. He once walked across the Pakistan-Afghan border into Nangahar where the Taliban chased him over a glacier. ‘You’ve forgotten how dangerous it was because you survived,’ I say. But Aslam says: ‘Then I knew the area. Here we are guessing.’

  We have trouble finding Chanjelo village. The bulldozer has moved, and the road runs out sooner than expected. It is getting dark as we scramble down the hillside, me slipping and sliding as usual. We skirt a mud field above the village school where some boys are playing cricket, and follow the terraces to the edge of the hill where a villager points out the house of Muhammad Rasool. It sits on a cliff, facing the Black Mountains. Somewhere below us is the Indus, hidden from view by layer upon layer of crevassed blue hillside.

  The owner is out. He went to the bazaar by the Indus three days ago, but he may return tonight. His adolescent sons–heavy eyeliner-users–crouch in a row on the edge of the roof where we are sitting, and stare. There is no electricity; the light fades, and moths circle around the paraffin lamp.

  Night comes, and a plate of local vegetables is sent up from the house below. Then the boys show us to our beds and I am shocked: for the first time, Aslam and I have been put to sleep in the same room, the male-only hujra. ‘Why have they done this?’ I ask in English through the dark. Aslam is the voice of reason: ‘It may be difficult to accommodate you in the house. They are poor. They probably all sleep together. Don’t make a fuss.’

  But in the morning, we discover the true reason. Five village elders assemble in the hujra to tell Aslam that they suspect me of being a missionary. Does the government know what I am doing? I make a polite speech in Urdu about the purpose of my book and the great Alexander, their venerable ancestor. They explain their worries about charities and foreign-funded NGOs. A few years ago, they say, NGO officers came from Islamabad, took the women of the village to meetings and tried to emancipate them. Emancipation, they say, is against both Islam and Pashtun culture. Muhammad Rasool’s father combs his white beard; the younger boys, growing restless, rearrange themselves around the room in languorous poses. The elders grow more heated; angry Pashto words are exchanged. ‘I’ll explain later,’ Aslam says to me quietly.

  After much discussion, Aslam and the elders come to an agreement. Two of the men, Noor Muhammad and Noor Gul, will escort us out of the village, through the tribal area and down to the Indus.

  Noor Gul (Flower Light) is debonair with his slicked back hair and emphatic make-up; Noor Muhammad is a blunter man, who dispenses theological lectures. As we walk out of the village, over the stream and into the tribal area, he tells me about Allah the creator. He speaks about Adam and Hawa (Eve)–‘we have that story in our book,’ I am pleased to inform him. ‘Your mullahs have added sweet things for your own enjoyment,’ he replies, unfairly. He explains about God’s laws for human beings (the most important of all Allah’s creations), laws that lay down one work for men and another for women. ‘Women’s most important work is to do what men cannot,’ he says. ‘And what is that?’ I ask. ‘To have babies and look after them till they are two,’ he says. He tells me about heaven and hell: even if I commit the worst sins (theft, adultery, alcohol) I just have to get one of my children to learn the Qur’an and they can take me to heaven with them. An alim (theologically learned person) takes along one hundred sinners. ‘So that’s why there are so many madrassahs,’ I say to Aslam.

  ‘You should convert,’ Noor Muhammad tells me. ‘The Qur’an is total revelation, your Bible fifty per cent only.’

  As I am being lectured, we crunch over field after field of felled blond poppy stalks. Discarded poppy heads still lie in the parched furrows, three razor slits marking where the sap was bled out. ‘Here in the tribal areas,’ says Noor Gul, ‘opium was harvested a few weeks ago.’

  We reach the village where Noor Muhammad’s sister lives. And now at last we see the river just as Alexander saw it–the mighty Indus below us in its natural form, a wide blue-grey lake between the hills, undammed, unmolested.

  Noor Muhammad’s sister lives in a one-storey hut with a buffalo in the yard and four chickens in a basket. She sits us in the cool of her bedroom and cooks us a delicious breakfast of eggs scrambled in animal fat. After tea, the Noors say goodbye to us on a poppy field below the house. Noor Gul poses for my camera, mobile phone pressed to his ear (there is no reception), the Indus in the background. We look down at our destination, Darbund. It is there that the Nazim (Mayor) of the Black Mountains lives. Darbund is in the settled areas, but we must ask for permission from him to cross tribal Kaladaka as far as Pirsar.

  On the way downhill, Aslam tells me the full story of female emancipation and the elders of Chanjelo. A few years ago some NGO workers came from Islamabad, called the women of Chanjelo into a room and said to them: ‘Are you happy in the house?’ ‘Yes,’ said the women. ‘Are you happy with your husband?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Does your husband love you?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Does he do sex with you?’ ‘…Yes.’ ‘What kind of sex?’ At this point, Aslam says, the men lost their tempers: all of them had seen naughty sex films in the bazaar; they knew what kind of dirty things the foreign-trained NGO workers were meaning. And sure enough, the NGO workers showed the innocent women of Chanjelo how they should suck this thing, lick that, go on top of their husbands. ‘But Pashtuns don’t do sex like that,’ says Aslam. So the elders confiscated 10,000 rupees from the NGO women and sent them packing. ‘That’s why the elders of Chanjelo wouldn’t let you meet their women,’ Aslam says. ‘In case you tried to teach them naughty tricks.’

  The path down is steep and hot, through a jungle of stunted trees in which monkeys sit, screeching. We cross over a stream–back, says Aslam, into the ‘settled’ areas–and walk downhill to the river. The sun is beating down on our heads as we hire a small, painted wooden boat to take us across the Indus.

  Darbund is actually ‘New Darbund’: the old one was submerged beneath the waters of the Tarbela reservoir. New Darbund is a makeshift, sandy place, with clouds of flies in the bazaar. We walk slowly up from the banks of the Indus to the Nazim’s house but the servant woman who comes to answer the door refuses to admit me. So we go next door, to his hujra, where any petitioner however humble is permitted to sit and wait. There is a water fountain and a clay tumbler. I sit down in the shade and fall asleep.

  I am woken when the Nazim returns, and relocated immediately to the main house. The women who refused me entry earlier now give me tea and wash my filthy clothes. The Nazim takes me upstairs to the large panelled room where they hold jirgas. His cousin gives me a photocopy of a British-era map of Kaladaka, and one he has drawn himself, with the names of the tribes along the Indus. Later, in the hujra, the Nazim says: ‘You will go by boat to Pirsar.’ Aslam looks at me concernedly: he knows I would rather walk. But the Nazim’s cousin says: ‘Alexander went by boat, didn’t he?’–and of course, he is right. According to Arrian, after the siege of Pirsar, Alexander found ‘a wood, good for felling, near the river’ which he had ‘cut down by his troops, and ships built. These sailed down the Indus.’

  The next morning we buy places on a local taxi-boat which is taking passengers the five or so hours upstream to Kotlay, where Khaliq, the Nazim’s servant, and now our escort, lives. Our boat, each board of which has been painte
d a different colour, is the brightest in the harbour. Here, where the Indus is hemmed in by high hills and the villagers are forced to live according to the river’s changing moods, it is not hard to imagine those oar-powered longboats which Alexander constructed from Kaladaka wood for the ride downriver. We make regular stops, to drop villagers, with their bazaar-bought packets of sugar, tea and mangoes, on the rocks below their homes. After an hour and a half Khaliq calls to the boatman to stop again so that he can show me the rock where, high on an empty hillside, Alexander left his two-metre-tall handprint. Later, we pass women washing clothes in the river–they turn away their faces–and boys noisily bathing. The Nazim’s family come from a village near here, high up in the tribal areas. ‘We go back to our village in summer by boat, when the water is high,’ the Nazim’s wife told me last night. ‘It cuts three hours off the journey.’

  By noon, all the other passengers have been offloaded, and the taxi is far beyond its usual run; but we are still two hours’ walk from Kotlay. The boatman now claims that the water is too low for his craft to go any further, and though it is midday, the time Aslam and I usually avoid, we have no choice but to get out and walk. We walk for an hour along the riverbank, the sand of the Indus grey beneath our feet. At a wooden madrassah we stop and rest; and the students bring us murky, ice-cold river water to drink.

  At last we reach the Kotlay crossing-point, just as some smugglers are rescuing a load of wood that has been floated down the Indus. Three boys take us across in their boat, and on the other side, in a bankside hujra belonging to Khaliq’s friend, we stop and sleep. You can tell that we are in the tribal areas again, I think as I drown in tiredness: the houses have shooting towers.