…..Islamabad …..the expatriate cliché was that the city was
‘twelve miles from Pakistan’, the distance to the nearest ‘real’ city,
Rawalpindi ….. ‘half the size of Arlington cemetery but twice as dead’ was
another witticism….
…Pakistan ….For although a Muslim state, it was riven by the
Hindu caste system its inhabitants disavowed; thus Rajput looked down on barber
and barber on the darker-skinned Christian and lower-caste Hindus, who were
traditionally ‘sweepers’, street cleaners. The North-West Frontier and
Baluchistan were overtly tribal with most matters settled by councils rather
than the courts and administration inherited from the British. Even the feudal,
plain provinces of Punjab and Sindh ran along the lines of tribe and caste. The
writ of the government was feeble in most of the country, which hung together
loosely on a dog-eared colonial structure of cantonments, district
commissioners, railway signalmen and post office clerks. It also seemed to
adhere to the empire’s old prejudices as laid down in its gazetteers………where
ethnic groups and peoples were classified in such categories as ‘Criminal
Tribes’.
The Nawab [of Bugti]
had regaled us with tales of the Baluch, a warrior race who, with the Kurds, he
said, traced their origins back two thousand years to Aleppo in Syria.
Balaach, the greatest medieval Baluch warrior hero, held
that ‘War is looked upon as the first business of a gentleman and all Baluch
are gentlemen.’
…….Punjabi is a language that lapses into profanity
regularly….
….Partition ……..A Pakistani poet, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, wrote,
‘This leprous daybreak, dawn night’s fangs have mangled, this is not that
long-looked-for break of day’.
Much of the country’s officialdom runs on Johnny Walker Blue
Label, despite Pakistan’s law, which forbids the Muslim population to drink
alcohol……….The least remarkable thing about Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the
Quaid-i-Azam (‘Great Leader’), once one accepts that much of the Muslim world
runs on Johnny Walker, is that he ate pork, drank whisky and smoked fifty
Craven A a day. More notable is that through sheer bloody-mindedness he created
a nation-state. ….He was born to a middle-class Gujarati-speaking family of
provincial merchants from the Shia Khoja minority. ……..Although Islamists had
always hated him because of his moderation and secularism, most Pakistanis saw
him as a sainted figure, blessed with the sort of virtues that are praiseworthy
in others but undesirable for oneself…….he was a modern, liberal, stiff,
secular, not very religious type of Muslim of Shia origin and his creation was
a feisty, backward Sunni Muslim state dominated by Punjabis and Islamists.
Pakistanis lionize Akbar as a great Muslim leader, but in
truth his legacy is unpalatable to Pakistanis official view of itself as an
orthodox Sunni state…….there is some doubt whether he even died a Muslim ………he
didn’t believe in the existence of Satan; he found Arabic religious
commentaries on Islam muddled and contradictory; and he questioned the story of
Koran’s genesis, doubting its heavenly origin and treating it as a historic
document in a way that Islamic scholars five centuries later are only beginning
to dare to consider.
The evening bore the usual hallmarks of a decadent Pakistani
gathering. Vast joints of hashish were rolled; vast joints of hashish were
rolled; vats of whisky sloshed down throats; and plans made for a journey that
never took place.
There was much bragging, servility and sycophancy. ………And
small, largely fabricated …….victories were celebrated.
Ghalib………whom many Pakistanis recite with passion and at
length:
Na karda gunah ki bhi hasrat ki milay dad
Ya Rab agar un karda gunahon ki saza hai
Do give me praise for
regrets of sins uncommitted
If there is to be
punishment O Lord for sins committed
…Punjab …..a wheat basket divided by the bloodiest events of
Partition; home to beefy backslapping ploughmen and the supplier of soldiers to
armies for centuries. In spirit, it is earthy, humorous, with a firm grasp of
realpolitik. ‘Don’t eat shit with a spoon, eat it with a spade,’ Punjabis say.
The country’s most affluent province, due to its agriculture
and textile industry, is in many places as backward as any part of the country.
Multan ……its old reputation: a city of heat, dust, beggars
and graves. …….the city’s two main saints’ shrines ……Rukn-i-Alam ……and
……..Bahawal Haq…….
The tomb of Bahawal Haq (also known as Bahauddin Zakariya)
is an immense bastion of fired bricks……Haq’s tomb was erected near an ancient
fire temple built by Hindus. It had once been home to a golden statue of a sun
god which had been smashed by various invaders, several times repaired, and
finally destroyed by the Emperor Aurangzeb in the 17th century. The
fire temple itself was destroyed again and again over successive centuries. Its
last remains were finally extirpated in revenge for the destruction by a Hindu
mob of the Babri Mosque in India in 1992.
……..Even 800 years after his death in 1262, Haq’s direct
descendants own thousands of acres and wield considerable political power
locally and nationally, his sainthood having been handed down from father to
eldest son.
……Haq was benevolent as well as powerful. ‘If you give
something to somebody,’ he once said, ‘you should give it with a flourish.’
It’s that flourish that you see all about you in Pakistan. It is in the salute
to a stranger from a man working in a field; the hand that offers a stranger a
seat or some food on a bus or train … or in the thwack that a minion gives to a
fellow underdog to impress a new master.
Manners, charade, theatre, acting our roles with due aplomb;
in Pakistan these things are as important as water, or more prized than the
truth.
The magnificent dome covering the tomb of Rukn-ud-Din Abul
Fath, known as Rukn-i-Alam, ‘pillar of the world’, gleamed like a white prayer
skullcap. Supported by a brown brick octagonal drum that rests on a colossal,
wider octagonal bastion, all ringed with strata of blue tiles, it is perhaps
the fourth largest dome in the pre-modern world after Hagia Sofia, St Peter’s
and Gol Gumbaz……….
In Pakistan the local name for Alexander, Sikander, is never
far from people’s lips.
………I changed the subject by canvassing his views on
politics………It was a game I often played in cities, asking for opinions about
politicians, partly because I was always surprised by the forthrightness of the
replies, and partly for the pleasure in seeing that the urban masses were under
no illusions about their leader. In the countryside, where feudals exerted influence
on every aspect of life, people were more circumspect……
He was the master of the Pakistani florid introduction………..
When he’d finished eating, he stood up to leave for some
midnight appointment – here people work at all hours except the morning.
Everybody instantly dropped their bowls, plates and forks ……and followed…….A
scene that could have played out at Louis XIV’s court, it revolved around the
Punjabi worship of power – nobody wanted to appear less than the most loyal of
fawning disciples, nor to miss out on a morsel of favour that might fall from
their lord’s hand.
…..the village. It was the usual Punjabi contrast of
immaculate interiors and exterior squalor…..
Millions of Pakistanis were living in a state of medieval
superstition, ripe for manipulation by mullahs,
politicians and bogus holy men.
…..gouging one of his ears with a car key, as many Pakistani
drivers like to do.
….the disregard with which well-educated
….the disregard with which well-educated Pakistanis so often
treat their poorer compatriots.
…the old mixed culture of Pakistan, whose tolerance of
heterodoxy was particularly strong in Sindh, a place suffused with Sufi spirit,
where the lines between Sunni and Shia, Muslim and non-Muslim blurred.
….Chitral falls within the Pathan-dominated North-West
Frontier Province …….the locals, ethnically , were Kho, speakers of Khowari.
Known as Agha Khanis, they belonged to the Aga Khan’s Nizari Ishmaeli Shia
Muslim sect, which here had adopted some of the ancient shamanism and ritual of
the Hindu Kush and become a faith apart. Locals viewed both Shia and Sunni with
some ambivalence. They believed in the transmigration of souls and they had
their own mystical, ethical and metaphysical books (mostly written by their
mystic, Khusro). Any elder could perform a marriage ceremony; people freely
drank wine; and they were not fussed about the manner of slaughtering animals.
……now, Siraj said, an increasing number of Pathans were migrating to Chitral,
raising fears that they would bring their violence with them.
…..the fairy-abode mountain of Tirich Mir stood
centre-stage, a reference point for all Chitral. It was the stunning tower of
rock ……The British traveler Wilfred Thesiger, recalling a landscape visible
from its peak, of grassland, brown patches of bog and glittering water, wrote
not long before he died .
The vast majority of the twelve million or so Christians in
Pakistan traced their ancestry to the ‘untouchable’ Hindu Chuhra caste from Sialkot,
Punjab, where mass conversions took place during the 19th century
under British rule.
Its never long before a visitor to Pakistan is regaled with
the following stanza, which is sometimes, probably erroneously, attributed to
Khushal Khan, a great Mughal-era Pathan poet and warrior: There is a boy across the river/whose arse cheeks are like the
pomegranates of Kabul in spring/alas, the river is wide and I cannot swim.
In his The Lives of a Bengal Lancer (1905), the British
soldier-turned-yogi Francis Yeats-Brown ……..noted while serving on the frontier
in Waziristan, that ‘Sex life is more necessary in a hot country. The hysteria
which seems to hang in the air of India is aggravated by severe continence of
any kind. At the end of Ramadan, for instance, my fasting squadron used to
become as lively as a basket of rattlesnakes.’
…..a Graham Greene line: ‘Scruples of cleanliness grew with
loneliness like the hairs on a corpse.’
I set off …….to the shrine at Buner on the edge of Swat, the
resting place of Pir Baba, a saint madly popular among the Pathans. ……..taking
refuge in the fabulous gurdwara at
Hasan Abdal ………shrine of Pir Baba ………The saint’s history is obscure…now Pir
Baba is revered as a cave-dwelling philanthropist and mystic who had set up a
leper colony in these hills….when the militants arrived ……They had driven out
the area’s Sikhs and Hindus, who till recently had united with Muslims in
gatherings, which included women of all those faiths, to worship here through
the night in bewitched vigils of chanting and devotion.
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