Where the Indus is Young (16 page)

This incident would not have been worth mentioning had I been alone, but to behave thus in a child’s presence was reprehensible – and utterly untypical of a Muslim. ‘Damned impertinence!’ I fumed aloud as we returned home. Rachel had by then recovered from her embarrassment and thought the whole thing a huge joke. ‘But
why
did he kiss you?’ she asked. ‘Did he like you very much? Has he no wife to kiss? Why don’t you get angry when men like Aurangzeb and Uncle Jock kiss you? Is it because they don’t take so long? Would you hit them too if they did? I didn’t like him either –
why
do you think he liked us so much?’

Then I, too, saw the funny side. A more unlikely sex object than myself at the moment it would be impossible to imagine. Unwashed for five weeks; in filthy shapeless garments; greying hair stiff with dust, sweat and grease; nails black and broken; hands like emery paper and cracked and bleeding; face so weather-beaten that I must look closer to seventy-three than forty-three – enough, one would have thought, to turn any man’s mind towards celibacy as the lesser of two evils. It was not hard to forgive Captain Haroon. He has been posted to Skardu for two years and cannot bring his wife and young family to this fringe of civilisation, and Skardu as yet has no
red-light
district. It is often assumed that in such situations Muslim men find their own sex amply consoling, but I doubt this. Although
homosexuality
is perhaps commoner and certainly more ‘respectable’ in Islamic societies than in our own, it does not follow that a man accustomed to a normal sex-life can become happily homosexual
overnight. And I am told that any man who attempted to contact a Balti woman, married or unmarried, would soon get a knife between his ribs – despite the Baltis’ reputation for gentleness. If this is so, times must have changed since de Fillipi reported sixty years ago – ‘Balti girls marry at ten or twelve, and become mothers before they reach their full growth. There appears to exist also a sort of temporary marriage which may last from a week to several months, and is really a legalised prostitution. For the rest, adultery is common, by the connivance or at least the indifference of the husband.’ Undoubtedly the marriage age has risen slightly, to fourteen or fifteen, and it may be that the husbands have become less permissive in reaction to the great numbers of unattached
non-Balti
males now loose in their land.

When I woke last night to use our ‘commode’ (that same bucket in which water is fetched during the day: of such unsavoury details is domestic life in Baltistan compounded) – when I woke at midnight I heard in the distance sounds so uncanny that my skin prickled. Then I realised that this was merely the wailing and lamenting of Skardu’s population, which stays up all night on the eve of Muharram
preparing
thus for the culminating ceremonies. In other parts of the Shiah world Muharram processions are often magnificent affairs, involving gorgeous pageants and elaborate rituals. But impoverished Baltistan knows no such pomp and splendour and, as a result, the central – mourning – purpose of the occasion is emphasised to an alarming extent. The only ‘props’ are multicoloured ragged silken standards, tied to long poles and borne in the centre of the
procession
, and a horse shrouded in a white cloth who carries on his saddle two turbans, symbolising Hussain and Hassan. These must be of white material, interwoven with red to represent blood, and they are repeatedly touched by weeping mourners who then reverently pass their hands over their faces and heads.

Skardu’s main procession starts soon after sunrise from the large village of Hussainabad, four miles east of the town, which we have twice visited in the course of our rambles. By 8.30 we were on our
way to meet the mourners, walking through thin clouds of icy vapour as the sun lifted them from the Indus; the river’s course was just visible, far below, marked by its own pearly mist. (Later on the weather was perfection: long hours of warm golden sunshine, a deep blue sky overhead, gauzy white veils draped around the summits and sparkling miles of snow in every direction.)

We approached Hussainabad across a flat, glittering snow-field broken by occasional gigantic black boulders. Then far away we heard rhythmic shoutings – ‘O Hassan! O Hussain!’ – accompanied by what sounded like muffled drums, their regular beat amplified by a sheer mountain-wall that rose from the plain nearby. When the
procession
at last appeared there was something unexpectedly touching about that minute patch of darkness on the snow. Man and his griefs seemed so puny and ephemeral, set between the colossal backdrop of those indifferent mountains and the timeless flow of the Indus. Yet only man has the power to keep alive the memory of fellow-beings who died 1300 years ago. Seen thus, today’s procession of simple peasants, moving slowly across the valley’s vastness, was a triumphant assertion of spiritual strength.

It was Rachel who first realised that the muffled, rhythmic thudding was being produced – incredibly – by the breast-beating of some fifty men at the centre of the procession. These were thumping their chests with all their strength, like angry gorillas, while gazing fixedly at the tattered banners and lamenting their murdered heroes. Many were naked from the waist up, though the temperature was still below freezing point, and already their chests were bruised and reddened. (The average Balti torso is as white as a northern European’s, without even the Latin swarthiness.) Frequently the leading mullah halted the procession to declaim passionately and then the entire crowd – some 200 men, the majority quite young – breast-beat zealously, as though each were trying to prove that he could thump harder than his neighbour. We were standing on a rock-slab some ten yards from the edge of the track, where we could see all without getting in the way, and as the procession passed at a funeral pace no one even glanced in our direction though normally every Balti we meet stares at us intently.

We followed at a discreet distance, as the procession rapidly gathered strength. It must have numbered at least 500 when it left the track to cross a field three feet deep in snow. It was converging, with two other similar but larger processions from different parts of the valley, on a little mosque called ‘The House of Wailing’. At every pause the mourners’ grim refrain grew more frenzied. Now thousands of men were frantically drumming on their chests while chanting, ‘O Hassan! O Hussain!’ in voices hoarse and choking with grief. And faintly the mountains threw back those sacred names, seeming to fill the valley with muted, ghostly echoes.

As we were about to turn off the track towards The House of Wailing a scowling young policeman appeared and curtly ordered us home. I had already been assured by our good friend the Chief Superintendent that foreigners are allowed both to follow and to photograph these processions, so I firmly declined to be bullied. But in the tense atmosphere that has been built up by the last day of Muharram it seemed wisest to compromise, especially as the PC was fingering his
lathi
as though he longed to use it on the impious foreign females. Therefore we made a detour which took us out of sight of the irate PC but allowed us to keep The House of Wailing under observation. Throughout the day the many police on duty repeatedly tried to shift us from our chosen vantage points. Perhaps some were being protective towards us – Muharram crowds are notorious for turning nasty at the slightest provocation – but without doubt the majority personally resented our presence, whatever their Chief Superintendent may think.

We paused about 100 yards from The House of Wailing, into which each procession briefly took its banner and its horse, though most of its followers could not squeeze into the small building. They stood outside, some leaning exhausted against the wall, others
continuing
to chant and chest-bash with undiminished vigour. As we were waiting I decided to photograph Rachel on Hallam and at once, misunderstanding my target, six small boys, wearing curiously adult expressions of rage, began to pelt us with pebbles and to try to throw snow at the camera. So I quickly put it away.

We next made for the Police Bazaar to watch the united
processions passing towards their final destination – a mosque near the New Bazaar. But this was a point at which for some reason trouble was expected, either between rival factions of mourners or between the mourners and the down-country security forces. We therefore found ourselves amidst a concentration of senior army officers, armed troops, senior police officers and PCs with
lathis
. The Chief Superintendent was sitting on a shooting-stick trying not to look flustered; he is a sensitive, gracious, bookish gentleman, not at all suited to controlling riots. He advised us to go ahead of the procession for another mile or so, past the Chasma Bazaar, and there to climb a low hill from which we could observe it in safety.

Having tethered Hallam to a tree in the sun, well away from all the excitement, we sat on the hilltop to await developments. When the procession reappeared an hour later, in four groups, it must have consisted of about 3,000 men. The expected trouble had not broken out but even from our hilltop the sight of that distraught mob seemed slightly ominous. We descended to track level and saw that now many men had stripped to the waist. Their battered chests were the colour of mashed raspberries – but still their arms were being flung up and brought down with all possible force on heaving rib-cages, to produce that unforgettable drum-like effect. Other mourners were scourging their own naked backs – literally tearing off strips of flesh – or were cutting their scalps, necks and chests with knives or razor-blades, so that blood poured down their torsos. As the joint procession slowly moved forwards, halting frequently, the whole valley reverberated with the chanting, moaning, roaring, shrieking and groaning of these demented creatures who had worked themselves into a state of insensate grief. And much as I admire many aspects of Islam I found myself being switched off by this display.

At the foot of the hill a few score veiled women were standing some yards away from the track and others were hurrying to join them – groups of four or five stumbling over the whiteness on one of their few outings of the year, holding brown shawls across their faces with one hand and with the other trying to keep gaily-coloured pantaloons out of the snow. (The burkah is not worn by Balti women.) To watch
the procession’s ultimate stage we joined a gathering of women on part of a disused aqueduct that bridges the track. It felt odd to be amongst so many women in a region where they so rarely appear. In their extremity of grief most soon dropped their veils from ravaged, tear-swollen faces, and as they gazed at their frenzied menfolk they struck their temples with clenched fists and sobbed uncontrollably. Had their own children just been murdered they could not have displayed more heartfelt and devastating anguish.

One Hussainabad youth, whom I had first observed at 9 a.m., looked on the point of collapse as his section of the procession passed below us. It was now 2.15 p.m. and he had almost scalped himself. The skin hung in strips from his shaven head and his back was criss-crossed with ugly red welts, oozing new blood, while his chest was covered with darker dried blood. His eyes were glazed but still he kept on breast-beating like an automaton and shrieking hoarsely. There were several others in as bad a state or worse; two unconscious figures had been dumped at the side of the track. None of these ‘extremists’ had Mongolian features, which may not be a coincidence.

A perilous degree of mass-tension had been generated by this stage and when I photographed one of the horses a woman beside me tried to seize my camera, struck me hard across the face and screamed abusively at me. Luckily Rachel did not notice this incident. She happened to be talking just then to three young government clerks from Lahore – Sunnis, who were watching the proceedings with the smugly appalled expressions that some Irish Catholics wear while watching an Orangemen’s parade on the Twelfth.

I now decided that we had observed enough. During the last lap many men whip themselves to the limit of their endurance, and sometimes beyond, but I felt no eagerness to witness that crescendo. And Rachel would have been badly frightened had some section of the maddened crowd suddenly turned against the bare-faced female heathen.

On 11 December 1913 de Fillipi saw that year’s Muharram
procession
in Skardu – it is a movable feast – and since then there seem to have been three major changes. He mentions a group of women
preceding, or leading, the procession, whereas today the women merely watched and lamented on the side-lines. He also mentions two mock-biers – wooden frames covered with red material – being carried by bearers, one of whom was the Raja of Skardu ‘arrayed in pure white wool’. But today there were no biers, and I have been told that the multi-coloured silk standards now serve not only as the focal points for each village’s procession but as symbolic biers. Finally, de Fillipi observed no bloody flagellations, which he could scarcely have missed had the custom then been fashionable in Baltistan. Yet he noted that ‘The spectacle of a whole population displaying such violent and immoderate despair is truly extraordinary. This grief and piety are so real and moving one forgets that it is all a play.’

I must admit that my own reactions were not so sympathetic. A decade ago they might have been, but in Ireland during the past several years we have had our fill of unbalanced religious fervour. And we have seen too many tragic results of emotionally dwelling on the past and keeping old grievances alive. I am not imputing to these innocent Baltis any of the viciousness of the extremist Catholic and Protestant thugs of my own country. But I cannot help thinking of the frightful consequences if such primitive, powerful religious feelings were harnessed by political agitators – as they so easily could be, among simple people.

On our way home I struggled to understand the ‘truly
extraordinary
spectacle’ we had just seen. Some critics, including many Sunni Muslims, assert that Muharram processions are simply a public indulgence in a sexual perversion; and they add that it is not safe for any woman to be out alone when the excited mobs disperse. But now, having seen a procession close to, I simply do not believe this. No doubt a few men are adversely affected, yet baffling as it is to us, and distasteful as we may find it, none can dispute the authenticity of the grief manifested today. Probably in Europe’s Ages of Faith Christians felt similarly about Christ’s sufferings and death.