Where the Indus is Young (4 page)

Around Islamabad, the daily life of the peasants remains unchanged by the proximity of their sophisticated new capital. I spent a day walking alone over the nearby hillsides and the villagers’ astonishment
on seeing me indicated that Islamabad’s foreign colony does not often take to its feet. A still, grey day it was, reminiscent of late autumn in Ireland, and I reflected gloomily that in such weather there would certainly be no flights to the Northern Areas.

During the afternoon two young women shyly invited me into a stone hut – the first Aryan invader of the subcontinent would have found it familiar – and insisted on refreshing me with green tea, which took almost an hour to brew. Only a few villagers have acquired a little newfangled cement to mix with the mud normally used to pack crevices in stone walls.

From one hilltop I watched a line of ten women slowly ascending the path below me, each balancing two ochre pitchers of water on her head whilst helping to drive a communal herd of goats and kids – the goats wearing ‘bras’, to conserve their milk. Then I looked from the low, oblong huts nearby, over a furlong of level grazing land, to a wide, smooth ring-road along which sleek CD cars were swiftly purring past ingeniously-designed villas incorporating every conceivable mod con. Between these villas, lining the distant streets of Islamabad, stood hundreds of slender poplars, their branches retaining enough orange-yellow leaves to make them seem like rows of giant candles glowing through the late afternoon greyness. I returned home across an expanse of thinly-wooded land where the sound of axes rang out from every side as branches were lopped off for evening fires. By five o’clock a long band of crimson was flaring above the western horizon – a startling sight, after the uniform dullness of the sky all day – and moments later it was dark.

From Islamabad we went up to Murree for two days. Murree is the only one of British India’s hill-stations to have gone to Pakistan; it is 7,500 feet above sea-level and we found it thickly covered in snow. We stayed in a ramshackle hotel which charged Rs.5 a night for what might be hyperbolically described as ‘a double room’, and on our return to Islamabad one of my young Pathan friends, who takes an unusual interest in the world beyond her own circle, asked me wistfully what it felt like to stay in a doss-house. The undertones of envy in her voice made me consciously value, as nothing else had
ever done, my own freedom of movement. We European women take this completely for granted. Yet no Pakistani woman, however independent-minded or strong-willed, could possibly travel alone through her own country sharing the life of the poor. Granted, not many Pakistani women would ever want to do such a thing. But suddenly I found the fact that they
could
not strangely disturbing. Antipathetic as I am to Women’s Lib, its indirect influence may yet do some good in Asia.

Early on 15 December we got back to Islamabad from Taxila, where we had spent five days exploring what was once the centre of Gandhara civilisation. During the previous night the longed-for rains had at last come and we were reminded of the worst sort of cold, wet, dark, Irish winter’s day, with the added disadvantage of mud hock-deep throughout the city. Obviously we were not going to get to Gilgit on 16 December. This time we were staying with the Aurangzebs and on the seventeenth I set off alone – in brilliant sunshine – for a day’s scrambling through the foothills.

I followed an ancient, precipitous path not much used in this motorised age, when peasants go forty miles
around
by bus instead of ten miles
over
on foot. Until one has crossed the first ridge urban noises ascend through the still, clear air in an almost uncanny way: the blaring of horns, the high-pitched cries of street vendors, the preaching of some modified Trade Union gospel from a van with a loudspeaker. Then suddenly the city becomes invisible and inaudible. All day I saw only two people – carrying huge loads of firewood on their heads – and this rare degree of silence and solitude gave me a chance to try to sort out the impressions I had received since landing at Karachi three weeks earlier.

The previous evening I had met an elderly gentleman who, on hearing that I had recently visited India, asked eagerly for news of Delhi. An hour and two whiskeys later he was confessing that the older he gets the more he longs to see once more the Moghul capital. For over five centuries his family had lived in Delhi and on one level he spoke of the city with nostalgia and love: but on another level it was the enemy capital. Tangled are the roots of Pakistani nationalism.

He declared that to his children’s generation, too, Pakistan must always be to some extent a place of exile; and I was reminded of my West Punjabi friends in Delhi, who still speak of Lahore as ‘home’. But there is one significant difference. ‘Pakistani’ Indians tend to regard Pakistan’s creation as a massive robbery, organised by the British and the Muslims and condoned by the world. ‘Indian’ Pakistanis, on the other hand, tend to regard partition not angrily but sadly. They have no wish to see it undone, but some of them still deplore that spectacular deterioration in communal relations which made it essential. As Ian Stephens has more than once stressed, in his thoughtful books on Pakistan, ‘something describable as a joint Hindu–Muslim or Indian culture did exist, both under the British régime, and more genuinely perhaps in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries … The point needs emphasising, to keep a correct balance. Over long periods, the two religious systems have functioned
alongside
one another without overt antagonism, and sometimes with mutual sympathy.’

Sitting on a level ledge of ground under a clump of pines, I found myself wondering, ‘Should Pakistan exist?’ A silly question, in the 1970s. Yet it continues to occur to foreigners more often than they could tactfully admit to their Pakistani friends. Does this indicate that the ‘joint Hindu–Muslim or Indian culture’ is stronger than anything an exclusively Muslim state can create on its own in the godless twentieth century? Or does it simply mean that no hastily improvised new nation can give a convincing impression of
nationhood
after less than thirty years in existence?

It is easy to forget just how hastily Pakistan was improvised: for years Jinnah was as opposed to the idea of Partition as any Hindu. In 1916 he became known as the ‘Ambassador of Hindu–Muslim unity’; twenty years later he was being commended by the Governor of the Punjab for having successfully reconciled warring factions of Sikhs and Muslims, and not until 1940 did he accept the inevitability of Pakistan. So there was no long historical gestation, no era of frustration during which the Muslims of the subcontinent dreamed impatiently of their own Islamic state. And this must be why one senses so little genuine regret, in present-day Pakistan, about the
loss of Bangladesh. The ordinary man in the bazaar naturally resents the humiliation implicit in that loss and spits fire when he thinks of the part played by India. But his emotions seem not to have been seriously involved – as they are on the Kashmir issue – when half his nation was amputated. There was never much mutual sympathy, interest or wish for understanding between the ordinary peoples of East and West Pakistan. They were of different ethnic stock, they wore different clothes, ate different foods, spoke different languages, built different houses, grew different crops, kept different animals and lived against utterly different cultural and geographical
backgrounds
. Only religion united them, and even their interpretations of Islam – the results of quite different historical experiences – were not identical.

Many Pakistanis said outright to me – and there was no tang of sour grapes in their voices – that they feel their country is better off without Bangladesh, that now they can get down to making something
worthwhile
of what remains. I was surprised by this widespread willingness to admit that Pakistan, as originally conceived, had been a mistake. One young army officer said to me, ‘You can’t found a nation just on a great big ugly negative – the inability of Muslims, Sikhs and Hindus to live peaceably together. There has to be something more positively unifying, even if it’s just geographical.’

However, the change in Pakistan’s mood that struck me most on this return visit was not very positive. It has come about through the growing-up of a generation with no lingering shred of affection for the rest of the subcontinent, nor any awareness of being linked to it by countless bonds forged throughout centuries of shared history. I met many members of this first-born generation of Pakistanis – doctors, farmers, laywers, merchants, teachers,
bank-clerks
, journalists, civil servants – and the majority seemed to feel for India only a contemptuous, uncomprehending hostility. Unlike their parents, they have no memories of growing up with Hindu neighbours, taking part in Hindu festivals, seeing pictures of Hindu gods and goddesses in the bazaar. I found them disquieting, for they represent a considerable increase in the world’s sum of hate. They were enormously disconcerted when told that we had spent the
previous winter in India and met there with nothing but kindness. They did not really want to know that beyond the border were other ordinary men and women, as generous and helpful as themselves.

One might expect embittered prejudices from those who have personal memories of murderous clashes with Hindus or Sikhs, but in fact the older generations show much less animosity towards India. They knew the Indians as human beings, capable of ferocity and compassion. Nor have they forgotten that when the chips were down there was little to choose between the ungovernable savagery of Muslim and Hindu mobs. Their children, however, know Indians only at second hand, through prejudiced media, and so merely see them as dehumanised symbols of greed, cunning, injustice and cruelty. It was this development which occasionally tempted me to wish that Pakistan had never been created, that some other way had been found out of the 1947 impasse. But of course that was over-reacting. It is understandable that while the Kashmir dispute continues Pakistani chauvinism will flourish. And perhaps the flowering of that noxious weed is an inevitable stage in Pakistan’s cultivation of a national identity.

At noon, as I was walking along the crest of a ridge, the Gilgit plane passed directly overhead. Looking up, I could see its propellers revolving in whirrs of whiteness against the deep blue sky. It was the third plane to have taken off that morning for the Northern Areas, so I began to feel hopeful about our chances of getting away on the nineteenth.

I can hardly believe that at last we have arrived. And it is good to be back, despite the many changes that have overtaken Gilgit town since 1963.

The fifty-minute flight from Pindi is complicated by a rule
forbidding
planes to take off unless they can be sure of returning at once: otherwise they might be lying idle here for weeks. So two hours of clear weather are needed, allowing twenty minutes for unloading; and on every ‘possible’ day one has to wait at Pindi airport because there is rarely time to telephone would-be passengers when Gilgit signals ‘Take-off!’

This morning we sat for five suspenseful hours in the newly-built Northern Areas Waiting Room. It is a desolate, dusty hall, permeated by the stench of its own neglected latrine, and just outside a
concrete-mixer
was mixing and a pneumatic drill was drilling. Cascades of electric wires poured from holes in the walls and flowed across the floor, restricting Rachel’s movements. Occasionally two
worried-looking
young men dashed in, fiddled vaguely with these cascades, abused each other vehemently and dashed out again. Soon our mouths seemed full of concrete dust but as there was no loudspeaker system we hesitated to go to the far-away restaurant. When at last we risked it the worst would have happened but for a young Hunzawal who pursued us across acres of builders’ chaos and dragged us on to the plane seconds before the door shut. All our fellow passengers were male: soldiers, government officials, merchants and several schoolboys starting their long winter holiday.

This flight is said to be the second most dangerous in the world – after Skardu – but PIA has a proud record of only two crashes in twenty years. Today, in clear winter light, I found it both more beautiful and more comfortable than on my very bumpy midsummer trip eleven years ago. But my feelings have not changed since I wrote – also here in Gilgit town, on 4 June 1963 – ‘this was the wrong approach to a noble range. One should
win
the privilege of looking down on such a scene, and because I had done nothing to earn a glimpse of these remote beauties I felt that I was cheating …’

We picked out Murree and Abbottabad as we droned at 16,000 feet and 300 m.p.h. over a crumple of brown foothills. Then quickly the hills became higher, sharper, whiter and nearer – much nearer – until we were not over but among the mountains. Soon Nanga Parbat appeared, another 10,000 feet above us, half-hidden by her personal veil – the only cloud in the sky. And along the horizon stretched the almost unbearable beauty of the Karakoram-Himalaya, the greatest concentration of high peaks in the world.

I pointed out to Rachel the Babusar Pass, scarcely 3,000 feet below us and already snowbound. ‘You must have been dotty to cross
that
on a bicycle!’ said she scornfully. Then we were over the barren Indus Valley – a fearsome sight from the air – and I gazed down at that threadlike track along which I had bicycled to Chilas, where I collapsed with heatstroke and was tended by the locals with
never-forgotten
kindness. Minutes later we were descending towards a width of flat, cinnamon fields only varied by dark clumps of leafless trees and by the olive-green Gilgit River, which we had just seen joining the Indus.

About fifty men – plus countless children – were awaiting the plane and everybody stared curiously at us. The first change I noticed was a severe airport building of grey stone which seemed to have grown out of the sheer mountain behind it. As we stood on the sandy edge of the airstrip Rachel surveyed the giant surrounding rock-walls and said, ‘This place is like a cage!’ She was a little
disappointed
not to find herself at once waist-deep in snow. It rarely snows here and only a few white summits are visible above the walls of the cage. But one splendid, sharp, triangular peak shone to the
north-east like a silver torch against the cold blue sky. It was catching the sunlight that already, when we landed at 2.25, had been cut off from the valley.

Most people wait to watch the plane’s departure. Flying out of Gilgit is even more difficult than flying in and from the airstrip one fancies the little machine is heading straight for a towering mountain. Then suddenly it climbs, seeming to be
on
the precipice like an insect on a wall, and moments later it has turned sharply and disappeared into a narrow cleft between two other towering mountains.

A PIA minibus took us into the bazaar, past a neat new signpost saying: ‘Islamabad 400 miles: Chilas 90 miles.’ Then we saw two petrol pumps, a gaily painted Peshawar trader’s truck, a motor-van, several tractors and many jeeps being driven at criminal speeds. What a transformation! Yet the changes are not so drastic as I had feared. To travel on the embryonic Indus Highway is still precarious and so something survives – at least in winter – of Gilgit’s traditional remoteness. Moreover, the many additions to the bazaar and its environs are of well-cut local stone and perfectly acceptable. For the foreseeable future transport costs seem likely to preserve this region from multi-storeyed monstrosities.

On the outskirts of the bazaar we found a ‘Tourist Hotel’ built in dak-bungalow style around a dusty quadrangle. At first Rs.60 were demanded by the smooth young manager who speaks passable English and is obviously dedicated to fleecing tourists. As every room was vacant he soon climbed down and for Rs. 30 we have a cell with dirty bedding, no table or chair, a fifteen-watt bulb, no water for the reeking Western loo and no heating. (A few moments ago I had to stop writing to sit on my hands for long enough to thaw them.) The PTDC unwisely encourages this sort of overcharging. In their Tourist Bungalow near the airstrip a basic room with no mod cons costs Rs. 75 a night.

On the plane we had met a doctor who knew a man who might have a pony for sale. So our first concern was to find Abdul Khan, who lives in one of Gilgit’s agricultural suburbs. But alas! the pony was bartered last week for 300 litres of Punial water (a strong local
wine). To console myself for this near miss I bought one litre – good value at Rs.10. Abdul, using his adolescent son as an uncertain interpreter, said that few non-polo ponies remain in the Gilgit area. Oil and petrol are government subsidised so it is cheaper to hire jeeps than to feed ponies. How quickly men abandon what has served them so well for so long!

Abdul’s home was one of a group of small but substantial dwellings built of mud and stone and surrounded by seven-foot-high compound walls. Near the crudely-made wooden door in each wall stood a tall, gnarled, leafless tree packed with golden maize straw for winter feed. Not even the most enterprising animal can pilfer these ‘storage trees’ and no more elaborate ‘barn’ is needed where rain so rarely falls.

Walking along narrow alleyways, with quick-flowing irrigation channels at one side, we attracted a delighted mob of children – laughing, curious, ragged and unwashed. They were wildly excited to see Rachel and eager to touch her silky hair and examine her
fur-lined
boots and feel her fat rosy cheeks – so unlike their own pinched, pale little faces. She found their boisterous attentions a bit much. Clearly she is not going to mix as well with her contemporaries here as she did in south India. South Indians make gentler playmates and in any case six-year-olds are less spontaneous than five-year-olds.

As we returned to our hotel the sun was close to setting and that magnificent triangular peak swiftly changed from pale to deep gold – and then to a faint rose-pink.

We abortively discussed pony sources in the hotel manager’s cramped and kerosene-impregnated office and then emerged to look for a tea-house. In an otherwise empty dusk-blue sky the crescent moon was shining above the western mountain-wall, beside a brilliant Venus. ‘Look!’ exclaimed Rachel. ‘The Pakistani flag!’ And I relished this symbolic celestial coincidence. Eleven years ago Pakistan had not quite made its mark on this region but now it most certainly has – for better or worse.

The few bazaar stalls not yet shuttered and padlocked were lit by dim kerosene lamps which cast no light on to the uneven street. At the far end of the town we found a filthy tea-house where lukewarm tea cost fifty paise a cup, as compared to thirty-five down-country.
The smoke-blackened ceiling of this big, twilit room was supported by six tree-trunks and the floor was of beaten earth. Several men, wearing Chitrali caps and wrapped in blankets, were noisily using thick chapattis to mop up meagre helpings of stewed goat in
chilli-hot
gravy. They spat pieces of gristle on to the floor and viewed us with amused contempt. My memories of Gilgit town’s particular brand of passive unfriendliness were immediately revived.

We walked back here by bright starlight through a deserted bazaar. The snow-mountains glimmered like live things above the black bulk of the valley walls and occasionally, in yard or compound, we saw a little huddle of figures around a tiny fire. All afternoon it had been no colder than a normal December day at home but once the sun sets the temperature drops dramatically and the Gilgitis get ready for bed. Fuel is a major problem in these unforested areas. Gilgit when last I saw it in midsummer seemed Paradise-on-earth. Now it is no less beautiful in quite a different way, but without our luxury clothing it would seem Hell-on-earth tonight. Yet most of the locals go about barefooted, or sockless in open leather sandals, wearing only cotton shirts and loose pantaloons under their blankets – if they are lucky enough to possess blankets. And judging by appearances the majority are also inadequately fed. No wonder the death-rate soars during winter.

I am writing this from within my astronaut’s blanket, a weird object six feet square yet weighing only fourteen ounces. When first it was drawn to my attention it aroused considerable sales-resistance (the name was enough) but now I see its invention as ample justification for all that lunar lunacy. Allah only knows how it is made. Certainly its colour and texture are all wrong, psychologically, for one side is ice-blue and the other silver and it feels and sounds like tinfoil. You wrap yourself up – a joint for the oven, as it were – and Hey Presto! within moments you are oven-warm. Very odd … But this evening I bless the salesman who overcame my resistance.

A happy day, though I must confess I would not now come here in summer, when by my toffee-nosed standards the place swarms
with tourists: at least a dozen a week, according to the PTDC. Actually I do feel that travel-snobs, of which I am such a shameless example, are much less blameworthy than most other kinds of snob. If one of the objects of a journey is to observe how the other half lives, then it is essential to travel in areas where the other half remains uncontaminated by one’s own half – if you follow me. (You may well not follow me very far this evening, as I am now three-quarters through my bottle of innocent-sounding Punial ‘water’.)

We were up with the sun, craving bed-tea, but none was available. So we wrapped ourselves to the noses and went forth along an icy road – bustling with people at 7.10 a.m. – to find a
chi-khana.

Instead we found the Jubilee Hotel, scarcely two furlongs away, and I soon realised that this is Gilgit’s most respectable non-tourist doss-house. Its grubby restaurant is some forty feet long and the half-glazed door has a smashed pane and a broken handle which deters all but the initiated or the very hungry. Leaning against the outside wall is a large board inscribed ‘Jubilee Hotel’ in faded lettering. It was evidently meant to be above the door but one feels nobody will ever actually erect it and this little touch made me feel quite homesick. Around my own house are several objects in just such a state of suspended efficacy. Behind the restaurant eighteen small rooms enclose a yard on three sides, looking not unlike stables. In fact they are better furnished than the Tourist Hotel’s and are heated by smelly little kerosene stoves. Moreover, they have no stinking loos attached – there is a communal latrine at the end of the yard – and the charge is only Rs.20 a night, heating included.

After a delicious breakfast of crisp paratas and fried eggs we moved our gear, despite awful flea-warnings from the smooth young Nagarwal. Here the owner-manager is a burly, unshaven Hunzawal who spends most of his time sitting at an improvised cash-desk just inside the door wearing a threadbare English-tailored tweed overcoat, two scarves, one glove and a leather cap with
earmuffs
.

At ten o’clock we called on the Resident: an old friend who, as Political Agent, welcomed me to Gilgit in 1963. Tea and biscuits were
served in his office – a museum of Imperial days – and he recalled Roz (my bicycle) leaning against the giant mulberry-tree on the Residency lawn while I devoured fresh apricots as fast as they could be provided. He thinks we have very little chance of buying a pony here and advises us to go by jeep to Skardu, where horseflesh is more plentiful.

On our way downhill from the Residency we were joined by two nineteen-year-old schoolboys, sporting fine moustaches. They had several more years to do at school because they had to help herd sheep until they were ten; then younger siblings took over. One boy, Behram Khan, spoke enough English to give me this information and invited us to lunch with his married sister in a hamlet near the airstrip. His face lit up with joyous pride when I accepted.

We arrived at noon and sat on an untidy child-filled verandah basking in hot sunshine. At this season the Gilgitis tend simply to relax, enjoying free warmth, during the midday hours – and who can blame them? Today was so hot that I had to take off my heavy ex-German Army parka, yet within moments of the sun’s
disappearance
we needed gloves.

Lunch consisted of hot chapattis, pickled green chillies and a big enamel bowl filled with lumps of tasty braised beef. It was served only to us: lavish helpings of meat do not form part of the normal diet of the locals. Behram informed us that he had eight brothers and six sisters, all of the same mother and all living. The eldest, our hostess, is twenty-two and already has a son and two daughters, the youngest of whom is three. Through Behram, his good-looking but already worn sister enquired if it was true that people in the West had medicine to stop babies coming. I confirmed this rumour,
half-expecting
to be asked to send some by post, but our hostess looked pitying and puzzled rather than envious. Behram said she couldn’t understand how or why the rich people of the West were unable to afford all the children they wanted.