Where the Indus is Young (2 page)

The large notice over the reception desk in Rawalpindi’s fashionable Flashman’s Hotel was exactly as I had remembered it from 1963: ‘Visitors are requested to leave their weapons at the desk before entering the restaurant.’ Those are the little touches that make one feel spiritually back in Pathan-land, though Pindi itself belongs to the Punjab and the Frontier Province lies west of the Indus.

The Pakistan Tourism Development Corporation has its head office at Flashman’s, presided over by the Director of Tourism – a tall, youngish Pathan with auburn hair, green eyes and no great interest in people who want to do untouristical things like spending a winter in Baltistan. However, he courteously explained that the Indus Highway had been closed to foreigners months ago because of Chinese pressure and that we would have to fly to Gilgit, if we could manage to get seats on one of the few planes that do the trans-Himalayan trip during winter. I heard later that an American couple, travelling to Gilgit by jeep, had stopped – in defiance of Islamabad instructions – to photograph the Chinese soldiers who are building the road and who deeply resent being photographed. As a result the Chinese insisted on all foreign travellers being banned.

From Flashman’s I proceeded down the Mall to Pakistan
International
Airways’ imposing offices. A side entrance leads to a special Northern Areas department and the staff here works in an
atmosphere
of permanent crisis, with which I was to become only too familiar during the weeks ahead. But I never heard one of them utter an impolite or impatient word to even the most slow-witted peasant or peremptory army officer. The passengers seen in this
booking-office
are very unlike the affluent Pakistanis who frequent the main part of the building. Most are fair-skinned, with a scattering of Mongolian types. Some have racking coughs, a few have huge goitres, too many have an eye missing or useless. The majority wear woollen, roll-rimmed Chitrali caps, that may be turned down to protect
forehead and ears from frost, and quite a few are self-consciously proud of their high-class mountaineering garments, acquired from some expedition and not really the most appropriate garb for the plains. Others wear loose shirts and baggy trousers; an occasional youth sports a cheap lounge-suit tailored in the bazaar; a few elders from Gilgit look regal in gaily-embroidered ankle-length robes of homespun wool. And the Baltis often carry heavy goat-hair blankets neatly folded and draped over one shoulder.

While awaiting met. news one sits for hours in this large room on long back-to-back seats, upholstered in jade-green leatherette, and all around cigarette-ash accumulates on the grey tiled floor, and some men eye the lone foreign woman a little uneasily. I never saw another female in that booking-office. Women of the Northern Areas rarely come down-country and the few women who do fly – the wives or daughters of government officials or army officers – invariably send servants to attend to their tedious ticket business.

On my first visit a very tall and debonair official behind the high counter shook his head and said smilingly, ‘I’m afraid you’ve left it too late. We can’t take tourists into the Northern Areas during winter – you might not get out till April!’

‘But we don’t want to get out before April,’ said I. ‘We mean to spend the winter in Baltistan.’

The young man stared at me – a trifle apprehensively, as though he fancied I might at any moment become violent. ‘Do you know where Baltistan
is
?’ he asked. ‘Even the Baltis wouldn’t spend the winter in Baltistan if they could help it!’

‘Never mind,’ I said soothingly, ‘we have lots of warm clothes. How soon can you get us into Gilgit?’

‘You are travelling with your husband?’

‘No, with my daughter. So I want one half-fare please. She’ll be six next week.’

The young man shrugged, conveying that this further evidence of instability removed me from those realms in which rational discussion is possible. He glanced down at a thick ledger. ‘You will be number 287 on our waiting-list. You have no chance of a seat before 10 December. And it could be 10 January, if we get the winter rains now.’ I paid then
for our tickets which cost only five pounds because flights to and from the Northern Areas are subsidised by the government.

Walking back towards our host’s house, near the National Park, I decided to go to Saidu Sharif in two days’ time. Swat stood high on the list of places I wanted to revisit, eleven-and-a-half years after my first journey through Pakistan.

We were staying with Pathan friends a few miles outside Pindi. Their village lies well west of the Indus, their luxurious, brand-new
city-house
stands on a hilltop, in the shadow of an old fortified dwelling. From its flat roof we looked down on level farmland, and the
evergreen
trees of the National Park, and a wide stretch of reddish, fissured wasteland which daily becomes more fissured as earth is removed for making bricks. At the end of a November which had provided no winter rains the land looked ominously parched, yet our friends’ new garden was an exuberant, improbable dazzle of colour. Like most peoples of Central Asian stock, the Pathans are ardent gardeners: an unexpected and disarming trait in a race of warrior tribesmen. Equally unexpected is their interest in poetry, though even today the majority are illiterate. Pushtu is a rich, flexible language and over the past three or four centuries almost every tribe has produced a major poet, whose descendants or followers are still highly regarded.

In Karim Khan’s household I had an uncanny sense of being at home again, rather as though I had been a Pathan in some previous incarnation. In my experience Pathan hospitality is unique. Its blending of complete informality with meticulous attention to every tiny need makes one feel simultaneously an honoured guest and a loved member of the family.

Our host had himself designed his rambling, flat-roofed
mini-palace
, every detail of which bespoke enormous wealth regulated by instinctive good taste. ‘We don’t often stay in houses like this,’ observed Rachel, standing ankle-deep in an olive-green carpet and looking from the carved walnut doors of our bedroom to the gilded moulding on the ceiling. Every mod con was available, from a huge box of Lego on Rachel’s bedside table to the latest type of Swiss electric hair-drier in the bathroom. Here, one might think, was a
family that in all essentials had completed its transition from East to West; but in fact this transition affects only the inessentials. Behind the façade of Westernisation, Pathan life proceeds as usual with rifles to hand, women in purdah, children married to first cousins, prayers said regularly, goats in the backyard, feuds simmering, bodyguards on the alert, and dozens of poor relations from the village being given food, shelter and affection. But ‘façade’ was an ill-chosen word, since one of the Pathans’ most attractive characteristics is their utter lack of pretence. When they can afford the material comforts and conveniences of modern civilisation they seize them with both hands, yet even the younger generation – with few exceptions – is not concerned to appear Westernised on any other level. To me, this seems both remarkable and consoling in the 1970s.

Next morning Rachel was taken to visit the family village near Nowshera and I went shopping. A riding-cum-pack saddle cost the exact equivalent of £6, plus £1.50 for a girth and crupper, all new. The leather was inferior, and the saddle’s mulberry-wood frame had a few woodworm holes, but as these purchases would have cost at least £60 in Ireland I was not disposed to complain. (From England we had brought a hard riding-hat, with safety chin-strap, and irons suitable for a six-year-old.) I also bought a large canvas zip-bag, which could be worn as a rucksack if necessary, five yards of strong rope, a Chitrali cap for myself, a woollen balaclava for Rachel, a kerosene-stove (£1.25), a kettle, a saucepan and two electric-blue plastic bowls out of which to eat. Only our emergency supply of tinned food was expensive: over £7 for a dozen small tins of meat, fish and cheese.

These purchases took up most of the day; bazaar shopping is an essential antidote to staying with a family whose wealth and education set them apart from 95 per cent of their countrymen. I collected much fascinating gossip – especially from the young
leather-merchant
, who claimed to have a cousin working on the international telephone exchange. His scandalous stories about the love-lives of Asia’s leading politicians (and their wives) would undoubtedly involve me in several libel actions if repeated here. For over two hours I waited in that tiny shop, surrounded by piles of suitcases,
handbags and saddlery, while finishing touches were being put to the cotton-padded girth. The smell of new leather mingled with the smell of spices and frying onions from a small, shadowy eating-house across the way, and at intervals our detailed consideration of cosmopolitan sex was interrupted by the arrival of customers. Many were tall Pathan tribesmen from the hills, with splendid hawk faces and untidy turbans. These carried perfect Afridi-made copies of Enfield rifles over their shoulders and invariably wanted to purchase holsters, bandoliers or tack. They were very hard bargainers. The merchant spoke Punjabi, Urdu and English but most of the tribesmen spoke only Pushtu, so there were occasional misunderstandings during which Pathan eyes flashed. Then the little merchant would look nervously around at me – sitting in the background between cliffs of suitcases – as though I were a remnant of the Raj and somehow capable of defending him from his unpredictable compatriots.

We left for Swat at noon next day, having spent two hours sitting in a full bus that had been supposed to start at ten-thirty. Pakistan’s bus-services are less well-organised than India’s. By this stage our gear formed a daunting pile: my big rucksack, Rachel’s small rucksack, that large canvas bag, a cardboard carton securely roped, a heavy saddle made of wood, iron and leather and a two-gallon plastic jerrycan. For the first time in my life I was travelling with more luggage than I could carry single-handed and a great nuisance I found it. But in that battered bus, full of Swatis on their way home, everybody was extra helpful because we had been driven to the
bus-stand
in a friend’s car – and that friend was Aurangzeb, son and heir of the recently deposed Wali of Swat.

Between Pindi and Nowshera the countryside looked like a
semidesert
– grey-brown, cracked, parched. The farmer sitting beside me stated with curious precision that if no rain came within six days next year’s wheat crop would be ruined. For me this journey awoke many memories. On my way to India from Ireland, I had cycled along the Grand Trunk Road in June 1963, against a scorching headwind that kept my speed down to five m.p.h. And now my daughter, undreamt of then, was sitting beside me excitedly pointing out various objects
of interest along the route – which she had travelled over the day before on her way to and from our friends’ village.

The attraction of the Frontier Province is quite extraordinary. As the red-brown-grey landscape became more broken and rugged and harsh, and the mountains became more distinct along the horizon, and the houses became more fort-like – their windows mere slits, the better to fire through – I felt a surge of nostalgic excitement.

At Nowshera we turned north towards the Malakand Pass and beside an octroi post stood a freshly painted notice saying – among other things – ‘Foreigners are advised not to travel by night and to carry no valuables in this territory’. I had cycled over the Malakand through a deluge and seen nothing, but now we enjoyed a dramatic bronze and smoky-blue sunset as our overloaded bus chugged slowly into the hills. From Pindi to Mingora is 165 miles so it had been dark for half an hour when we arrived at the bus-stand, loaded everything into a covered motor-cycle rickshaw and went bouncing noisily off through the cold black night.

At the empty Waliahad – all Aurangzeb’s family were in Islamabad – I was touched to find myself remembered and warmly welcomed by the senior servants. Since my last visit a lot of water had passed turbulently under Pakistan’s political bridges. In 1963 Swat’s legal status was that of a princely state within Pakistan: the Central Government had a right to intervene only on foreign policy and the Wali administered justice according to custom, Islamic law and his own common sense – which was abundant. I had stayed with Aurangzeb and his wife Naseem, eldest daughter of the late
Field-Marshal
Ayub Khan, who was then at the height of his power as Pakistan’s benevolent military dictator. And I had been impressed by the efficiency of Swat’s non-bureaucratic administration and by the state’s comparatively high level of prosperity.

In April 1974 Ayub Khan died in Islamabad, five years after the collapse of his régime and his resignation as President of Pakistan. Meanwhile the new parliamentary government had abolished all the princely statelets: Swat, Dir, Chitral, Hunza, Nagar, and the numerous tiny chieftainships of Baltistan. Hunza, Nagar, Baltistan and the former Gilgit Agency are now known as the Northern
Areas, while Swat, Dir and Chitral are administered by a District Commissioner who has his headquarters at Saidu, just across the road from the Waliahad. Aurangzeb still represents Swat in the National Assembly – as a member of the opposition, naturally – and is on the friendliest terms with Captain Jamshed Burki, the very able and charming DC who has been appointed by Mr Bhutto to replace the Wali. To me this seems a measure both of Aurangzeb’s fair-mindedness and Captain Burki’s tact.

I have no head for politics and I cannot pretend to any deep understanding of political developments in Pakistan over the past decade. But most knowledgeable commentators seem to agree with Gilbert Laithwaite’s assessment that ‘Ayub was concerned to establish for Pakistan a halfway house to democracy – a democracy that could be understood and worked. His eleven years as President were marked by substantial achievements in the fields of economic advance, of Pakistan’s standing in world affairs, of order combined with progress …’