Horse Girls

by Halimah Marcus

  Gulgee’s body appeared to expand as he confronted the emptiness before him. His brush, already coated with a variety of colors from the messy palette, quivered in his hand. From my spot on my stool, facing the same direction as Gulgee, the space on the canvas looked like a challenge.

  And then with a jerk and a leap, catching me by surprise, the old man transformed into a dancer. In the blink of an eye, his small figure in his stained white shirt dashed across the canvas twice his size, twisting this way and that, with shocking flexibility. Before we knew it, Gulgee returned to us, the same soft-spoken, smiling, hunched-over figure; and behind him, a riot of colors told stories in every curve, of faith, histories, myths and legends, and places that existed only in his imagination.

  Much has been written about Ismail Gulgee, and I had a rare glimpse of the genius at work. Yet I knew so little of what really was going on. Watching Gulgee paint, I felt envy, admiration, and an inadequacy that continued to plague me throughout my life.

  In 2007, Gulgee, his wife, and a domestic worker were found dead of asphyxiation in his home in Karachi. The police suspected their chauffeur and another member of their domestic staff of the murders. Though the evidence pointed directly at them—they were caught with Gulgee’s car, a camera, and two of his paintings—the case lingered for almost a decade in court. Eventually, the two men were sentenced to life imprisonment.

  I think often of the artist, who once insisted on gifting one of his paintings to my mother, saying, “You’re like my daughter, just take it.”

  What could have happened that made those men kill such a kind man? This is where my story stalls, limited by my imagination and the biases ingrained in me from my childhood.

  Of course, questions grew, from Karachi to Nathiagali’s well-heeled community of summer residents. I overheard comments that meant little to me as a child, but took on new meaning in adulthood. The murderers were footnotes, two aberrations who cut short the life of a great man.

  “They just wanted some money, and something went wrong.”

  “They were tempted by the paintings.”

  “A typical crime story where employers are killed by the servants for money.”

  One of Gulgee’s paintings could be sold for millions of rupees, or thousands of dollars, a few years of a good life for someone who has nothing. And as such stories go, Gulgee’s killers languished forgotten in a prison cell, while Gulgee and his paintings were immortalized.

  Whose stories are we telling? People like Gulgee—people like me—self-appointed storytellers are often held back by the limitations of our gaze. Gulgee’s paintings immortalized princes and presidents, tyrants and humanitarians alike. Perhaps his gaze, like mine, chose not to look at the troubling layers within ourselves, the ones we carefully cover up with time.

  Living in New York City today, I still frequently look at images of the horses he chose to portray. Some of them are wild, and some are pressed up against each other in the midst of a polo game. Underneath their majesty is a frantic dark energy that sets my skin on fire, because I can’t imagine ever being that free, that brilliant, that reckless. The world that surrounded me when I was a child, during those summers in Nathiagali, with its military orderliness, its quietude and beauty, carried the same darkness; only it was invisible to me.

  My cousins, brother, and I rarely planned our destination when we set off on horseback every afternoon. There were not many to choose from. Sometimes we took the pagdandi, the wooded, broken pathway down to the Governor’s House, a remnant of British rule on the Indian subcontinent. Other times, we took the road that twisted around the mountain and that also ended up at the Governor’s House.

  Like all city folk, my family visited during the summer, when snow did not block the roads, confining villagers to their homes. Escaping the extreme heat of the plains, we emerged in the cool mountain air, availing ourselves of the local bazaar and hiking amongst the pines. Nathiagali is a small holiday township, surrounded by a smattering of villages and situated on one road that circles the mountain. A few offshoots branch into walking paths or clusters of old summer homes. On sunny days, when looking for a challenge, my family and I hiked the fearsome Miranjani mountain, its tip visible from every vantage point of the hill station, or the smaller Mukshpuri known for its fields of daisies and a mythical witch who was said to have haunted its pathways.

  We began to frequent this sleepy hill station in the sixties when my maternal grandfather, an officer in the Pakistan army, brought his children and grandchildren to the numerous cantonments that populated the region. I was introduced to Nathiagali for the first time in 1991, when I was six months old. We drove up from the city of Rawalpindi, where I was born in a military hospital, and where my grandparents still live. In one photograph, I squint angrily against sunlight and bitter cold, my head wrapped in a wool cap. My father, holding up my tiny body, is kissing my cheek, his prickly beard no doubt irritating me.

  In 1996, my uncle had a summer home built for the family on the edge of the mountainside. The house, perched along a winding road, used to be filled with children, cousins, aunts, and uncles, often staying four or five to a room for months at a time. Fourteen years later, my parents built another house on the same road. My father’s law practice was flourishing, and by then we were firmly entrenched in the group of affluent families with property in the hill station.

  Our house, which is still there today, is made of gray stone, with a green tin roof and a long verandah snaking around its exterior. It sits on the edge of the mountain overlooking a forest. Beyond the verandah, a steep drop filled with pine trees that slope down, down, down. Our front door opens onto a small winding road. One end of this road is at the Pakistan Air Force cantonment, and the other direction leads to the heart of the hill station, toward the bazaar, the historic church, the park, and more homes.

  I was six months old when my mother first carried me on horseback in Nathiagali. The horse’s owner, Shakoor, came from the nearby village of Namli Maira, and for the remainder of our childhood and adult years, we would not ride on anyone else’s horses.

  These were horses for day-trippers, regulars like us, and hikers who wanted to go to Miranjani or Mukshpuri. Shakoor was the designated leader of a coterie of his brothers and friends. Maqsood, Mustafa, Pervez, all young men with the same sunburnt skin and infectious grins, would guide us up and around the hills on horseback. Rival groups of ghoray walay, horsemen, roamed the area, but my family was loyal to Shakoor’s crew, who had been taking them around the mountains for decades. They gave us unlimited riding times, and we talked them up to other visitors to get them more customers.

  As I got older, my cousins and I were dispatched every afternoon with Shakoor’s group of horsemen to roam the roads and paths. I was usually last in line, the frequent butt of jokes, and always quick with my tears.

  Offhand comments about my horselike nose sent me on a spiral of self-loathing. I believed I was undesirable, awkward, and unsociable. I had a nose too large for my face, eyebrows that were too bushy, thin hair that remained cut close to my ears. The girls surrounding me, all my cousins, had long, thick hair, small delicate faces, narrow noses, and wellsprings of confidence. We loved each other excessively, fought with even more fierceness, and focused our emotions on the validation only girls can provide each other. The harsh words we often exchanged left marks on my ego.

  Self-loathing also appealed to me in an odd way. To hate myself excused me from upper-class guilt, it excused me from doing anything about it. It made me focus on my studies and refuse to rebel. But in Nathiagali, I could escape a world that fed that self-hate.

  Back home in Lahore, I studied at a private all-girls school, where schoolteachers constantly reminded us about the breakable nature of a reputation. News about a girl spotted in a car with a boy would make its way into the school staffroom, where, over cups of tea, teachers would analyze the failings of her parents, her entire family background, and all the decisions that led to the fatefu
l day she got in the car with a boy.

  Nathiagali was the only respite from the stifling heat and gossip of Lahore. Boys and girls from big cities like Lahore, Karachi, Islamabad, and Peshawar also collected there in the summer. How easy it was to walk outside and bump into a large group of kids, or invite people to a bonfire in the backyard of my aunt’s house. And so, I interacted with more young boys there than I ever did in the city. But even there I was too shy, and attached myself to my cousins who were able to navigate all social situations with an ease and confidence I only began to manage as I approached my thirties.

  In our early teens a group of us girls would hitch rides in the back of construction workers’ trucks because we were too tired to climb uphill to get home. We bought mini-firecrackers from the market past the air force base, in boxes inexplicably decorated with images of Jack and Rose from Titanic. If we arranged them in a circle with their wicks facing each other and lit one, the rest exploded in loud pops that frightened the tourists walking past.

  But nowhere did I feel a deeper sense of calm than during the daily ride spent on the back of a horse. Lulled by the steady rhythm of a horse’s trot, the sound of wind brushing through the vast branches of the deodar trees like a stream of water, the heaving, breathing mountains that rushed past me the faster I rode, I momentarily forgot my anxieties, petty arguments, insecurities, and inadequacies. And for a time, the feeling of freedom even helped me let go of guilt, even as that freedom came with a history.

  After the East India Company established their foothold in India during the eighteenth century, many British commissioned paintings from Indian artists, portraying their idyllic life in this new world. In one such painting by Shaikh Muhammad Amir, an English child with her face covered by a bonnet is seated on a pony, surrounded by three Indian servants, one of whom holds an umbrella over her head. In another painting by an unknown artist, British officers and their wives take refreshments at a table, waited on by Indian servants.

  The British re-created this life in Nathiagali. They arrived from administrative centers like Peshawar or Lahore, across the northwest of India, and enjoyed tea in wooden cottages overlooking manicured lawns with magnificent views of the Himalayas.

  After the subcontinent was violently partitioned in 1947 and Pakistan was born, our military inherited the rituals, structure, and rigidity of colonial life, and my mother’s family inherited a military life. My grandfather was in the British Indian Army before independence and brought a British sensibility to his children, who studied at schools set up by Christian missionaries. My mother’s family spoke English with a British tinge, settled with ease into the emptied cottages that once belonged to their colonizers, and gathered in the afternoon for tea just as the British had done before them.

  I realize now that I spent my childhood trapped in personal grievances and anxieties, mired in a selfishness that blinded me to the role my family played in larger events, leaving unacknowledged the privileges that were handed to us as well as those that were hard won.

  Amir and similar artists specialized in painting commissions for officers of the East India Company, creating visual representations of their numerous possessions, lifestyles, and the servants who surrounded them. But we were now the creators, the commissioners, and the centerpieces of the idyllic paintings that were once presented for the white man’s gaze. Groups of servants still circulated around the little girl, but now we could see her face, and her skin was brown.

  The military jumped so firmly into the power vacuum left by the British that if you threw a rock on a piece of land in Pakistan, they likely had some claim to it. They ruled Pakistan openly for a few decades, and more recently as a quietly powerful big brother managing an inept civilian democracy. And they carried on the work of their colonizers across Pakistan, with my grandfather as one tool in their vast machine.

  Nathiagali played a small role during a key moment of history. One story goes: in 1971, Henry Kissinger was brought to the hill station to recover from a mild case of the “Delhi belly” during a visit to the subcontinent. This story was a lie, part of Kissinger’s cloak-and-dagger efforts to bring the United States and China to the negotiating table. At the height of tensions between East and West Pakistan that later divided the country into Pakistan and Bangladesh, Kissinger arrived in Rawalpindi to meet with the then president, the notorious alcoholic General Yahya Khan. Khan reportedly suggested that Kissinger recover from his fake illness in the nearby mountains of Nathiagali. “In Rawalpindi, we disappeared for forty-eight hours for an ostensible rest (I had feigned illness) in a Pakistani hill station in the foothills of the Himalayas,” Kissinger wrote in On China. He instead caught a Pakistan International Airlines flight to Beijing, where he met for secret talks with Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai. Meanwhile, the West Pakistan–led military continued its assault on East Pakistan in an attempt to suppress their independence movement, resulting in millions of Bengali refugees flooding into India, mass rapes, a war with India, and a genocide, which goes unacknowledged by Pakistani rulers to this day.

  My grandfather, an engineer and colonel, spent one week in East Pakistan before war was declared between India and West Pakistan. He was there to report on the state of the army’s equipment and was sent back when his orders changed and the war began in earnest. I found it difficult to ask him about a time that so many Pakistanis have effectively erased from memory. Khan was a drunk, my grandfather told me in his soft voice, and made many poor decisions.

  I felt deep relief when I learned that simply by virtue of chance he wasn’t an active participant in the horrors that were taking place in East Pakistan. But I also wondered about the little ripples that extended further than our eyes could perceive: the equipment he oversaw, the guns, vehicles, the reports he handed over to his superiors, all part of the vast and cruel machinery of war.

  What a luxury it can be to question our past, without understanding the role our passivity played in those dark histories. The same military that continued its colonial legacy, that committed unspeakable crimes against a population and suppressed civilian democracies, also introduced us to a home in the mountains and granted us good fortune.

  The horses approached our house each afternoon, the clip-clopping of hooves growing louder and louder, the soft tinkling of the bells on their bridles transforming into a cacophony of sound. They were a small group of varying sizes and colors, some bedraggled and diminutive, others proud and imposing. They had bells, colorful beads, and ornaments dangling from their bridles and around their mouths and ears. Pink, yellow, orange, and blue balls of woolen string hung under the horses’ heads like fat dandelions twining around their long necks.

  We raced up the stairs outside our front door and were confronted with these majestic beasts shaking their manes, grunting, stomping, like large cars revving up their engines. Shakoor, with his big smile and high voice that emerged from under his full mustache, called out to us.

  Shakoor was usually one of the first faces one saw upon driving into Nathiagali. We’d find him perched on the edge of the road, on one of the stone barriers erected at curves to block cars from careening down the mountain. His brown kameez fluttered in the breeze, and the tips of his feet in their dusty, worn-out sandals or sneakers, depending on the day, curled over the edge of the barrier as he peered out at the mountains in the distance. He was confident, even so dangerously close to the edge. He and his brothers had the ease of those who have traversed these hills and mountains their entire lives.

  I assumed that all the years spent with Shakoor and his brothers meant I knew them well. But our communication was limited to the daily hour spent on horseback, where we focused on navigating each path, trying to overtake each other, laughing when someone’s horse stopped, lifted its tail, and let loose a stream of dung. Shakoor answered our questions about each horse with the patience of someone used to repeating himself to naive city folk, who was aware of the power dynamic that shaped our interactions long before I was. But we never t
ruly spoke to each other.

  As I grew older I understood that my connection with Shakoor boiled down to memories that grew dimmer the longer I spent away from Nathiagali. I called him a few times this year, knowing he was frequently ill. After I identified myself, he launched into an excited stream of questions, asking after me, my parents, my grandparents. Shakoor was bemused when I told him I was writing a story about Nathiagali, horses, and my childhood. I pressed him on details about his own childhood, questions I should have thought to ask years before.

  Shakoor’s father was also a ghoray wala. He took tourists up and down the hills for an hourly fee, relying on his earnings and any tips he made to raise his many sons. Shakoor was just a little boy when he first took up the reins. His father used to strap him onto the back of the horse with rope to make sure he wouldn’t fall off. Still, he fell frequently, but the more he bruised his knees and elbows, the more he loved his horses.

  He reminded me how I often ended up with the horse named Kajol. She was a small, gray filly with sad eyes. Or Bubbly, a larger, brown, warmhearted horse who always hesitated before setting off on a trot. Bubbly was one of Shakoor’s favorites; he could leave any of us unattended on her. The horses who ran with them had names ranging from Bollywood stars to royal titles, to some that made no sense. Prince was a brown horse who didn’t know when to relax. Then there was Shehzadi, and the majestic gray-white Ruby Aeroplane.

  We often fought over who would get to ride Ruby, and my eldest cousin usually won. I asked Shakoor how he chose Ruby’s unusual name. “Ruby is a lovely name for a female horse,” he said. “And she was as swift as an aeroplane!”