Among the Believers (21 page)

He said, “In the beginning men worshipped stones. Then fire. Today we find those practices funny. Wouldn’t men tomorrow find the practices of today funny?”

Ahmed let him say that. Then he spoke for his son again. “When people come around to ask for money for religious causes, you know what he tells them? He tells them it is better for people to give blood for the sick.”

The son nodded, looking down, acknowledging what his father had said, but shrinking from the tribute.

The dinner was brought out by Ahmed’s wife. Ahmed and I were the only people who were going to eat. The son was just going to sit with us; and so, too, was another man, who now arrived. The talk turned, as it so often did in Pakistan, to the situation of Pakistan.

Ahmed said: “I will tell you the story of this country in two sentences. In the first quarter of this century the Hindus of India decided that everything that was wrong had to do with foreigners and foreign influence. Then in the second quarter the Muslims of India woke up. They had a double hate. They hated the foreigners and they hated the Hindus. So the country of Pakistan was built on hate and nothing else. The people here weren’t ready for Pakistan, and people who don’t deserve shouldn’t demand.”

It was what many conservative Muslims said: that the Muslims of India, as Muslims, hadn’t been pure enough for a Muslim state.

Ahmed said: “Then they began to distribute the property of the Hindus who had left Pakistan. So many of the people who came here from India got something for nothing. That was the attitude in the beginning. That is the attitude today. But I am too old to be unhappy now. It happens, you know. You find you are old, and you just stop worrying about certain things. It is for young people to worry. I am fifty-nine. At that age life is just death in instalments.”

There came into the house a very big man, an overgrown peasant, he seemed, and Ahmed’s irritability vanished. He got up to greet his visitor and solicitously led him in. The newcomer was immense, well over six feet, and built like a wrestler. At the top of this bulk was an incongruous baby-face: a face unmarked by passion, rancour, expectation.
He was in Pakistani country clothes, not especially fresh, and he wore a flat Sindhi cap. For a man so big he moved very quietly, and with small steps. He spoke no English, spoke scarcely at all; and when he sat at the table—sitting well away from it—he still seemed distant.

Ahmed said, “You remember I told you about an old shrine in the interior of Sind that I want you to visit? I told you about the people there who have given up the world to serve the poor—you remember? He comes from that place.”

But the face was less the face of someone who had chosen to serve than the face of someone lost and patient, a man from whom some essential human quality was missing.

Ahmed said, “I will tell you a story about this man. He developed a tumour on his leg and the doctors said he had cancer and there was nothing they could do for him. He went to the homoeopathic people. They wanted him to have an injection of snake poison: he would have to let the snake bite him.”

I made an exclamation.

Ahmed’s son said, “A snake bite is like an injection.”

(Some weeks later I read in the paper that the police were looking for a man who specialized in snake-bite injections.)

Ahmed said, “But he couldn’t face the idea of the snake bite. So he went back to his shrine and prayed. He prayed for days. And one day the courage came to him. He took a knife and cut off the tumour. And he’s been all right ever since.”

Ahmed spoke in Urdu or Sindhi, and the big man pulled up his loose trousers to show the scar on the inside of his firm, elephantine thigh. The scar—irregularly shaped, the skin shiny and seamed—was six inches long and in places about an inch wide.

Ahmed’s son went and looked.

He said almost at once, “It wasn’t cancerous. It was a benign tumour. See—he has another on his head, here.”

The scar was there; the act of courage remained. But the embarrassment—together with the placid giant, who continued to sit at the table but couldn’t follow English—was set aside in renewed talk of Pakistan.

Ahmed said, “Everybody fools everybody else here. Politicians, civil servants, everybody.”

And Ahmed and his other visitor (who had so far said little) agreed that people were turning to Islam because everything else had failed.
Even at the universities the Islamic wave was swamping academic life.

But wasn’t that, I asked, the special trap of a place like Pakistan? Couldn’t people now accept that they were Muslims in a Muslim country, and that Pakistan was what the faith had made of it? Did it make sense—after the centuries of Islamic history—to say that Islam hadn’t been tried?

Ahmed became grave. He said, “No, it has never been tried.”

  3
The Little Arab

F
orty miles east of Karachi was the little town of Banbhore, an ancient port site dating back to the first century
B.C.
Banbhore had become important because excavations there had uncovered the remains of what was thought to be the first mosque in the subcontinent, a mosque built in the first century of Islam, shortly after the conquest of Sind by the Arabs in 712
A.D.
Ahmed took me there on the last Friday of Ramadan, which was also the last day of Ramadan.

The Ramadan month ends, and the Id festival is proclaimed, when the new moon is sighted. Ramadan was expected to end on the Thursday; but the government moon-sighting committee hadn’t sighted the moon. So Ramadan in Pakistan lasted an extra day, and Mr. Salahuddin, the newspaper editor, had to hold back his festival supplement and hurry through a non-festival editorial. If it had been Id on the Friday, Ahmed would have been busy receiving and paying visits and wouldn’t have been able to take me to Banbhore.

We didn’t go there right away. We went first to a mosque to find some people Ahmed thought I should meet. They weren’t there. We drove around the sprawl of Karachi for a little. Then the time drew near for the noon prayers, and Ahmed became restless and decided to drive back to his neighbourhood mosque.

I asked him whether he believed literally in the afterlife.

He said, “Oh, yes.” He widened his eyes and nodded, just as he had widened his eyes and nodded when he had said that Islam hadn’t been tried. “Oh, yes. I am curious about it. You see, I’m like a child in some ways.” Then he sought to explain his belief. “People die. But they exist in my mind while I remember them. I cannot say they have vanished while I remember them.” It was in some such way that he expected to be remembered—but in the spirit—until the remembering agent disappeared. Simpler people had their own ideas: they believed in a paradise that duplicated this world, but with everything put right, and—with the women. But in fact, Ahmed said (or so I understood him to say), the women in paradise were to be without periods: they were to be pure.

I would have liked to hear more of this idea of purity, but I felt that Ahmed, with his sensitivity about women and sex, would have thought the interest prurient. So I didn’t press; I thought I would save it for later.

The mosque, in a hot, dusty street, was new, of concrete, and undistinguished, its walls ochre and chocolate. The street outside was spread with rugs for the overflow crowd. It was time for the main Friday prayers; the mullah had finished his Koran reading. Ahmed took his prayer mat from the car and knelt with the crowd in the street, in the sun. I waited in the car.

Later, as we were driving through Karachi, I saw printed posters:
We Sacrificed for Pakistan Not Bangladesh
.

Ahmed didn’t tell me what group was responsible. But the posters—with their hint of further divisions and animosities in his country—made him irritable. He said, “They sacrificed nothing. If there was no Pakistan I would have been a third-class clerk. Big jobs came to people like me when we got Pakistan.” Later he said, “In two hundred years it will be the same here.” And still later, the irritation continuing to work on him, turning to a kind of gloom, he said, “When I was a young man I was told that my country was Hindustan and that it was the finest country in the world. The poet Mohammed Iqbal told me that. Then one day in the 1930s I was told that my country was no longer Hindustan and the people I had thought of as my brothers were my enemies. Then I was told that my country was Pakistan. Then I found that that country had shrunk. Now I can feel it shrinking again.”

For seven years, until the creation of Pakistan in 1947, Ahmed had served in the Royal Indian Navy, the navy of undivided, British-ruled
India. He had taken part in the Bombay naval mutiny of 1946. But, thirty years later, his naval memories were not heroic or political; they were memories of sin. He drank. “Whisky was three rupees a bottle. Beer was free.” And there were the women. “My friends and I used to form cooperatives. And we would buy a woman for the evening and make love to her in turn.”

I wanted to hear more of those cooperatives—I liked the word, apart from everything else. But it was the sabbath; Ahmed was in a penitential mood, scourging himself for his past and also, it seemed, scourging himself for the state of his country.

I said, “Age takes care of the passions.”

“You think so, you think so?”

I liked him for that.

He drove fast; he always did; there was in his driving something of the release and excitability of his speech. Karachi was enormous. The city had spread over the flat desert; there were many housing developments, and some of them looked grand; the remittance economy could suggest a rich country. At last we were out in the desert: the early-afternoon heat, the openness, the flat scrub of useless trees. Without the Indus River and the lake-reservoirs there could have been no Karachi.

I said, “What were you saying about the cooperatives?”

He said irritably, at once explaining and punishing himself, “We did it more for the wickedness than for the pleasure.”

It was clear he was going to say no more. I couldn’t ask again, and I wished I had followed my first instinct and saved the matter for another day.

Desert. But the land of Sind was old: seventeen miles from Karachi we came to a necropolis of many acres on an eminence in the wide wasteland: tombs two to four centuries old, of decorated soft stone, block set on block, unmortared, to form little stepped pyramids: a dead tradition, perhaps enshrining older mysteries, but now, in modern Pakistan, just there, in the desert.

Modern Pakistan. The road led past the enormous area reserved for Pakistan Steel, the country’s first major industrial project—a steel plant and a new port—a controversial project (as I discovered later), costing millions a day, and possibly in the end uneconomical, since everything would have to be imported. The Russians were building it. On the other side of the road, at some distance, were the apartment blocks for the
Russians. But the port was named Bin Qasim, after the Arab commander who had conquered Sind and brought Islam to the land.

After this, still on the road to the ruins of Banbhore, a lesser oddity: a large model village, line upon line of two-roomed huts with concrete walls and red roofs, but absolutely empty, empty since it had been built six years before, and now beginning to crumble. Had the village been built too far from where people were? Hadn’t people wanted to live in that bureaucratic fantasy of straight lines and red roofs? Ahmed wasn’t precise and didn’t want to say too much. He said only the houses hadn’t been “allocated.”

They had been built six years before. That would have been in Mr. Bhutto’s time; and Ahmed was one of those who hadn’t got on with Mr. Bhutto. He had in fact left the government service when Mr. Bhutto came to power in 1971. Mr. Bhutto “carried grudges,” and Mr. Bhutto felt he had a score to settle with Ahmed’s family. So Ahmed resigned; he would have been sacked by Mr. Bhutto anyway; his name was on the list of two thousand people Mr. Bhutto wanted to sack. Ahmed said he had only a few rupees when he resigned. He was building his house, and that had taken up most of what he had. He borrowed and lived on borrowed money for a year, doing a variety of little jobs, until he got a job as adviser to an industrialist.

He advised the industrialist on the procedures of government departments. Previous advisers had claimed to be spending large sums on bribes. Ahmed bribed no one. He used his authority and knowledge of the rules to get the industrialist’s work done; and the industrialist was amazed and grateful. Ahmed was soon getting a prodigious salary. He finished building his house; he paid off all his debts. And then, feeling himself near the end of his active life, he thought the time had come for him to think of others. That was why (after Mr. Bhutto’s fall) he had gone back to government service, where he earned a quarter of what he had been getting from the industrialist. Ahmed loved and admired the industrialist still. He was a truly religious man, Ahmed said, a devout Muslim who followed the Koranic injunction and set aside a percentage of his wealth for charity.

A sandy track off the main road led to Banbhore. It was a short run, but the track looped and forked through beach vegetation; and Ahmed had to ask the way of a barebacked peasant who was dragging freshly cut branches. To come upon the excavated mound of a walled town
with semicircular bastions was suddenly to feel far away: a rough outpost at the eastern limit of the Arab empire, a place of exile.