Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples

by V. S. Naipaul

  Father and son were both very disappointed. The father said, “You can’t help it. It’s God-given.” He thought then that Rahimullah should become a doctor. And for two years and more Rahimullah studied science, at first locally, and then at a Parsee-founded science college in Karachi. In the examinations Rahimullah missed the first division by a mark or two. This meant that he couldn’t get admitted to a medical collage.

  It was at this time that Rahimullah’s father became a prisoner of war. Only part of his salary was paid to the family (the rest was kept back for him). Rahimullah had to give up thoughts of his own career and go back to the village to look after the family. It would have been a dark moment for him; it would have seemed that the world had altogether closed up. But then, when his father came back, the world slowly opened up again, and in a way that no one could have foreseen.

  When he was a student in Karachi—and living with an older cousin—Rahimullah, to pay his way, had worked from six in the evening to two in the morning as a proofreader for a newspaper. This had earned him a hundred and eighty rupees a month, nine dollars, and had left him free to go to classes during the day. He had got in this time to like the idea of newspapers. And now, out in the world at last, and with the established professions closed to him, he looked for jobs on newspapers. He became a sub-editor; he did reporting. He moved between Lahore and Karachi; he changed newspapers; he worked his way up slowly.

  The Afghanistan war, and the long factional fight afterwards, was his great opportunity. As a Pathan and a man of the frontier, he knew the issues and the personalities. He was in demand; he did much work for foreign organizations. He thought he had become one of the best-paid journalists in Pakistan.

  Though there was nothing in Rahimullah’s eyes to match the glory of the army officer, he could feel that he had redeemed himself. Now, on land near his ancestral village—the village that twenty years or so before had rejected his father at the local elections—Rahimullah and his younger brother had built a big and stylish house for their big joint family. The house had been built away from the village because the village was over-crowded. It had been built twelve years before, when Rahimullah was only thirty; so, in spite of checks, he had moved fast.

  The wall was of unrendered concrete, and decorative: a series of upright oval cartouches with raised edges that made a scalloped pattern top and bottom. The main gate was tall and imposing. It was painted green and yellow, and there was a spiked railing at the top. The pillars were faced with marble. Below the spiked railing SHELTER was carved in Pushto, the Pathan language; and the names of Rahimullah and his brother were carved in Urdu on the pillars.

  A second metal gate protected the inner family courtyard with its big two-story brick house and water tower. The outer courtyard was the general reception area. There every Friday village people who had needs or wanted certain things done came to see Rahimullah. Rahimullah was now based in Peshawar, a couple of hours away by car; he made a point of being in his house every Friday for these meetings. In this social-political work Rahimullah was consciously following his father and honoring his memory.

  The family had made an immense journey during the century; and the family houses here were almost like stations in that journey. The ancestral village was only two miles away, in the mountains. In that village, and high up (and without water), was the small and poor house where Rahimullah’s father had been born. Much lower down, next to the mosque, was the more spacious house Rahimullah’s father had moved to after he had retired from the army. Still lower down was the courtyard house—once a Hindu shop-and-house: always in these villages these reminders of the cleansing of 1947—where Rahimullah’s father had had his cowpen and storerooms; later they had built six shops there and rented them out.

  Rahimullah’s father had been to Libya, Egypt, London, Bangladesh; Rahimullah had moved between his village and Peshawar and Lahore and Karachi; Rahimullah’s younger brother had done well in the United Arab Emirates. They had needed the world outside; they had fed on it; without it they would have rotted here. But it was to this sacred, choked place—where fields and distances were small, and where both Rahimullah and his father had been forced to change their house because of the overcrowding—that they wished to return, to shake off the world, as it were, and to be truly themselves; and to be buried.

  There were burial societies among Pathans in the big cities and even in the foreign countries where they had migrated. The graves here were decorated, and not as plain as Islam said they should be; and women, yielding to old tribal feeling, broke the strict purdah of the Pathans to go to the cemetery to recite verses from the Koran and to leave money for the poor to pick up later, and sometimes also to leave colored flags and pictures and salt on the graves of people they especially honored.

  They—Rahimullah and his brother—had built this big new house about two years after their father had died. So, though Rahimullah didn’t say, the father had died with the knowledge that his eldest son had, after all, done well. The house was on the edge of a five-acre plot, and they had bought the plot because it was near the main road and the irrigation canal. In all they owned about twenty-five acres. Not all of it was irrigated; much was barani land, rain-fed land, which gave only one crop a year.

  The courtyard for strangers was to the left of the main gate. The guest house was set at the end of the big dirt yard. The verandah or loggia had brick pillars and brick arches and a patterned marble floor. It was like a much richer version of Rana’s uncle’s guest courtyard—Rana the young country-born lawyer—in the village near Lahore; as often in the subcontinent, it was possible to see in a small area the living peasant origins of more princely building ideas. Where in the poorer place the floor of the principal room, beyond the verandah, was of dirt, here it was terrazzo; where in the poorer place there were big nails on the wall and niches, here there were high wall cupboards with glass doors. Where two or three string beds were the only furniture, here there were two proper wooden beds with decorated headboards, and, in addition, a big dining table with a set of ten chairs, and side tables with a set of six armchairs.

  Rana’s uncle felt far away, in style and confidence. And yet Rana’s uncle had land, was a man of influence in his own way, with people in the village who depended on him. So it was possible in Rahimullah’s male guest house to get some small idea of the layers of reverence in the country, and to understand the great distance he and his father had traveled. It explained the quiet coming and going in the courtyard that Friday morning. Some people stood outside in the early-winter sun; some stood in the verandah; some sat easily in the armchairs in the inner room. It was as if there were accepted levels of familiarity. The visitors didn’t talk directly to Rahimullah for very long, and most of them didn’t really need to; Rahimullah would have known what most of them wanted. What these Friday-morning visitors were offering was their presence.

  Rahimullah talked of crops and the weather. The monsoon had brought good rains, but now people with barani land were waiting for rain, so that they could start sowing wheat. When things became bad people went barefooted to the fields and prayed for rain. There were special prayers that were said in fields, mainly to bring rain, but sometimes also to keep off disease. There were other, older rituals.

  “If you blacken someone’s face and take him round to the houses, and collect alms and cook some food and give it to the poor, it may bring rain. It may be done very soon. There are very superstitious people here.”

  Rahimullah’s younger brother, and Rahimullah’s eldest son, brought in tea and biscuits and a sweet cream-of-wheat dish. The brother was pink-faced, big and broad-shouldered. He said, “Are you happy?” It was his greeting, part of his courtesy. He said no more, stood about civilly for a while, then withdrew.

  A small dark mustached man came in and, without saying anything, sat down in one of the armchairs. He was wearing the flat pie-shaped felt cap of the frontier and the mountains. He was the nai, the barber, Rahimullah said, and he had
come to find out whether anyone in the house wanted a trim or a shave. His name was Qaim Khan. He came every Friday, and sometimes on other days as well; there were certain households that he served. This explained the ease with which he had come in and sat down, while others appeared to wait. He was in a pale blue shalwar-kameez with a raw-cotton gilet. Rahimullah and his brother and his son were in pale peach; the color spoke of cleanliness and sabbath rest. For the barber, though, the sabbath was a busy working day, and the blue he wore could more easily disguise dirt and wear.

  And, indeed, as Rahimullah began to tell me, the barber didn’t only cut hair. He had other duties, and he was available all the time. He could act as a cook when there was a wedding or a death; he would bring his big pots and tubs and cooking implements to the house, create a cooking place in the yard, and cook rice and other simple things in quantity. He was also a messenger; he took round wedding invitations; he broke the news of deaths. He could do circumcisions. Qaim Khan had an extra, inherited skill. He could sing and play on the flute, and people sometimes asked him to perform. His wife also sang. She and Qaim Khan’s mother and sister were also always on call, to serve the women of the households in certain ways, taking messages for them, or accompanying them when they went out.

  In the transplanted Indian community in Trinidad, on the other side of the world, the village barber (where Indian villages existed) had ritual duties like this (though not all of them). This went on up to fifty years ago, when I was growing up. So what Rahimullah was saying was half familiar to me; and I thought it remarkable that in a shaken-up and much-fractured colonial community this ancient kind of messenger and go-between and matchmaker should have reappeared; and that in that other world people of this caste calling, not a high one, should have declared themselves.

  The nai Rahimullah was describing was also, I thought, in some ways like the village coum of converted Java: the handler of dead bodies, and also the cook, a man of low Hindu caste absorbed into Islam. Though the coum had been given the dignity of leading the Muslim congregation in prayer—as if in this new incarnation he destroyed older caste ideas—his other functions were still, after five hundred years, recognizably part of the old Hindu order.

  In some such way, here in the frontier, the nai, as Rahimullah was describing him, seemed to be part of the Hindu past, a thousand years after conversion. (Though here, too, there were fantasies and a general neurosis about racial origins and the history.) Sitting in Rahimullah’s guest house, considering Rahimullah and the blue-suited nai, the one man big and scholarly-looking and gracious, the other small and dark and with respectful eyes, I felt I could see how, when the older religion lost its footing, the antique social order had been lifted with small adjustments into the new religion. It was as though in the subcontinent the idea of caste was ineradicable.

  Qaim Khan had no land and no house. Many nais had become well off now, but few of them had their own house. Qaim Khan would have loved to buy some land and build a house, but he had no money. To earn money he would have to go away. He wouldn’t mind going to local towns like Mardan and Peshawar. But—he was speaking through Rahimullah—he didn’t want to go too far. What he really wanted was to live and work here in the village.

  When I asked—Rahimullah translating for me—whether he wouldn’t like to go outside the village and open his own barbershop, he fixed Rahimullah with his eyes, familiar yet respectful, as though the question was Rahimullah’s own, and he began to look very small. He said that if he went to Peshawar or Karachi and found a job in a shop he would make thirty-five rupees a day at the most, less than two dollars. With that kind of wage he wouldn’t be able to save. A number of his friends and relations had gone to Karachi. He himself had once gone to Karachi. He worked for somebody who had a barbershop, a richer relation from the village. He was the servant of this family, and he got twelve hundred rupees a month, sixty dollars. It wasn’t enough for him, so he came back.

  He had gone to school until he was eight or nine. He had reached the third class. He had had one daughter, and she had died. That was his story. He had nothing else to say, and he was content after that to sit in the armchair and say and do nothing.

  Rahimullah took me to see his family courtyard. It was a great courtesy; purdah was strict here. But two masons were at work on the family house, and proper purdah arrangements would already have been made. The house, for fifteen people altogether, was of brick and on two floors. On the lower floor—I was considering it from a distance—there were four rooms at the back of a big verandah with a marble floor and brick arches. The water tower (with the television aerial) and the upper floor were reached by open concrete steps on the left. The women’s quarters were on the upper floor, and the verandah there was screened by pierced and patterned concrete blocks.

  The yard was unpaved and dusty. It was full of fruit trees, planted apparently at random and not creating the effect of an orchard. Between the trees were a number of beds and tables and drums and baskets and junked pieces of furniture. A miniature hut was where the chickens roosted. There was a well in one corner of the yard; it had a concrete cover and an electric motor. The kitchen was in another corner, with chopped wood on the flat roof.

  Separate from this, and in its own little cleared area, was a traditional clay-walled cooking place of northern India, the chulha: something again which the Indian immigrants of a hundred years before had taken to Trinidad and which I had known as a child. So for me in Rahimullah’s family courtyard, though the chulha here had another name, it was a little bit like finding pieces of my past. Even the disorder—the bed, the drum, the basket—was like the disorder I had known in my grandmother’s houses.

  I asked Rahimullah whether the masons who were at work on the house were also going to pave the yard. I asked that because of the apparent disorder; it seemed temporary; it seemed that soon everything in the yard was going to be put away again. But Rahimullah said no; what was there was good enough. And though it seemed strange then, a little later I understood: the people in the house would know where to find everything.

  Rahimullah’s younger son came out of the house and ran up to me, firing an imaginary pistol. He said in English, “You! You! You are a British policeman!” It might have been the effect of television, or my jacket; or his father might have told him about their guest.

  The animal pens were at the back of the main house. Just outside the walls were the dung heaps and the fields. The family’s five acres here, irrigated land, were sharecropped. Sugarcane, corn, fodder, vegetables: half of everything was for the family.

  We—Rahimullah and I and the little party who had attached themselves to us—began to walk towards the main canal. We walked on the new concrete walls of the feeder canal or drain, between sugarcane fields; sugarcane here was the most profitable crop. We saw, some fields away, the sugarcane patch of another family and their low mud-and-brick house. That was a barber’s house, they told me. Not Qaim Khan; another barber.

  I said, “Rich family?”

  No, no, they all said in a kind of chorus, as though the poverty of that family with the mud-and-brick house was very well known.

  The main canal was smaller than I expected. But it looked clean and controlled, a sudden touch of order, and the flowing water was refreshing to see. It was lined with young trees. The government looked after the canal; the government even looked after the trees. Water and trees in the foreground and the well-kept, variegated fields stretching away in sunlight made for deep, romantic views. The openness and distance was a surprise after the crowded sabbath roads and the cluttered shops and the bicycles and the people walking to market. And yet that sense of crowd remained, in the aspect of the precious irrigated land, parceled out in small pieces.

  I asked whether the barber, Qaim Khan, was of the Yusufzai clan. Rahimullah said no; Qaim Khan had no land, and land mattered. Only the blue-blooded Pathans were landowners, and they preferred to buy land here, high as the price was, rather than buy a house in a tow
n like Peshawar, though the house in Peshawar was the better investment. Until quite recently barbers and other artisans, carpenters, blacksmiths, goldsmiths, washermen, weavers were not allowed to buy land. They were able now to buy land for houses, but it was rare for them to own agricultural land. They were not considered part of what Rahimullah called the mainstream; the mullahs were above them; and the blue-blooded Pathans were at the top. Rahimullah didn’t make much of it; but it was interesting in this account to find the mullah slightly downgraded.

  Rahimullah said, “Since the nai is living among the Pathans, and has to survive in this male-dominated and very tough society, he actually has come to regard himself as part of it, and he strives to live by the same standards and principles. An artisan might say, ‘We are Pathans.’ And they might be accepted as such outside the province, but the blue-blooded Pathans will not accept them as such. They will not let their daughters marry them.”

  So we talked, as our party picked its way along the concrete walls of the smaller canal back to Rahimullah’s house, and the outer courtyard. When we were in the guest house again, among the beds and the armchairs, he talked of the Pathan idea of honor. He was proud of this idea. When we had first met, in the hotel in Peshawar, it was what he had talked about. He had told a story about a Pathan girl who had run away with a male servant of the family. The couple had been hunted down—no place in the frontier for them to hide—and tied to a tree and shot; the police had stood by and done nothing.

  Rahimullah sought now to codify the Pathan idea of honor. Language, home territory, hospitality, sanctuary, revenge: honor extended to all of these things. Though in some of its details the code here would have been purely of the region, there was a general, related idea of honor in the subcontinent. It was something I had always understood, growing up in the Trinidad Indian community. It was one of the things that had given that community a reputation for murder in the 1930s. I knew, though, that murder wasn’t always simple murder. When men know in their bones that governments are malign, and that there are no laws or institutions they can trust, the idea of honor becomes vital. Without that idea men who have no voice or representation in the world can become nothing. The poor, especially, need the idea.