Among the Believers (29 page)

Step by step, out of its Islamic striving, Pakistan had undone the rule of law it had inherited from the British, and replaced it with nothing.

  7
Basics

S
ix or seven hundred miles northeast of Karachi—after Sind and the plains of the Punjab, at the end of the wide valley watered by the Indus and its tributaries—the Himalayas began. In the foothills were the small “twin cities” of Rawalpindi and Islamabad.

Islamabad, “the city of Islam,” the capital of Pakistan, was new. It had been built about twenty years before by a military government for no apparent reason except perhaps that a new, well-laid-out city, separate from the messiness of Asia, appealed to the military mind, and the sudden setting down of a Western-style city (like the importation of
United States arms) gave the illusion that the twentieth century had been finally dealt with on its own terms, and that both Islam and Pakistan were on the march.

Rawalpindi, twenty miles away, was the older city. In one direction it sprawled towards Islamabad; but in the centre little had changed. In the bazaar there were still the high, dark-timbered, verandahed and latticed houses of the Sikhs and Hindus who had predominated in the little town before partition and had then been displaced. The old British Rawalpindi club was still in business—the ceiling lights a little dimmer, the walls a muddier yellow, the uniforms of the waiters a little grubbier, the atmosphere at mealtimes more highly spiced.

The British had ruled here for under a hundred years, and more than thirty years had passed since they had left, but old Rawalpindi remained a town of British India: in the Mall, a street of hotels and gardens; in some of its old-fashioned shops on the Kashmir Road; in its military and administrative residences.

In one such residence lived the doctor. He was the chief medical officer of a small oil company that operated in the Himalayan foothills to the west. The company, once British-owned, was now Arab-controlled; but old dignity adhered to the company’s senior residential “compound.” The house of the chief medical officer had a big lawn, a semicircular drive, a chunky-pillared portico. The sitting-room, with thick walls and a very high ceiling, was kept cool only by fans and open doors, which gave glimpses of the green just outside.

The doctor, a man of fifty, small and fine-featured, was aware of the dignity of the house. But he was not dwarfed by it: such dignity as had come to him, he said, had come to him because of his faith. The doctor was a Shia. The Shias—supporters of Ali and Ali’s defeated cause (in its beginnings a political cause, an anti-Arab cause within the expanding Arab empire)—the Shias were the minority sect in Pakistan. And it was of his “internationalist” faith, as he called it, that the gentle doctor (as though wishing to play down the excessive dignity of his residence) began to talk to me on this Friday sabbath morning.

One of the doctor’s two sons was there; he was a medical student of twenty-three and, the doctor said, a “rebel” and a rationalist. There were two journalists and their wives; they, too, were Shias. The sabbath gathering was more than the social occasion I had been led to expect.
For these Shias it was an occasion for serious—and that meant theological—discussion.

The doctor said he had been strengthened, even in everyday matters, by his faith as a follower of Ali. There were five points in his faith: the oneness of God, justice, a belief in prophethood, a belief in imam-hood (the reign on earth of an imam as God’s regent and spiritual successor to the Prophet),
jihad
or holy war. Not the holy war the mullahs spoke about, the doctor said; the holy war he had in mind was “the constant struggle in yourself to fight evil.”

I asked how articles of faith as abstruse as prophethood and imam-hood strengthened him in day-to-day matters.

He said, “I’ll tell you. I am now chief medical officer of the company. I wasn’t that always. I used for some time to be the assistant. Then the chief medical officer retired. For six months the post was vacant. But no appointment was made. The appointment should have come to me. I had done a lot of work. My work on bites was well known to my old superior, and I knew he had written a favourable report about me. Bites—it was my field. Snake bites, scorpion bites, dog bites, donkey bites, dog bites on donkeys—all these things I had done work on. Poor people suffer from these things, and I had done a lot of work among the poor. Rich people don’t go about barefooted and get bitten by scorpions. They don’t have to worry about dogs biting their donkeys or camels. So I had done all this work. I had treated so many people who had got bitten by snakes. They come with the blood pouring out of their nostrils and mouths. You can cure these things. That is the viper bite I’m talking about, I should say. The cobra and the krait are different.

“So I went to the GM, the general manager, and told him about the position, about this vacant post and my qualifications. He didn’t give me any satisfaction. He suggested that what I really wanted was the salary and this big house. Well, these things are important. But not that important. And besides, a doctor can make a living anywhere. It was my faith that comforted me at that moment, in the GM’s office. And when the GM said to me that if I wasn’t happy I should resign—and he passed a sheet of paper across the desk to me—I wrote out my letter of resignation. He thought he was frightening me. But I had my faith. If I didn’t have my faith I wouldn’t have written that letter. The GM saw that. He rejected the letter I had written. That is why I am here.”

But the doctor hadn’t mentioned the afterlife or hereafter as one of the articles of his faith. Wasn’t that essential for a Muslim?

“I don’t know about the afterlife. Sometimes I believe. Sometimes I lose my belief. But I feel I must believe. I’ll tell you. My elder son—not the boy here: his older brother—he was studying chemical engineering. We are that kind of family, scientifically inclined. Well, this boy had done very well in the ‘matric,’ but in the ‘inter’ he began to do badly. It worried me. It worried me a lot. How could a boy who had done so well in the matriculation do so badly in the inter? That was a serious business; it was going to affect his future. I thought some minister was responsible. It’s the kind of thing they do here. They want something for their own son and they get people to throw away the papers of other people. It happens.

“One night during this time I dreamt I was below a big and beautiful tree. There was a musical instrument. I remember only the black wood of the instrument—when I woke up I couldn’t remember any more. Out of this came music of a sort I had never heard before. And my father appeared before me. But he appeared in the form of my uncle. Because my father died when I was two, and I had been brought up by my uncle. He said he had come to solace me. In the dream I began to cry, and when I woke up I found that my pillow was wet with tears.

“I went to my son’s school that day. I met his teacher. And he told me that although my son had lost so many marks in the earlier papers, he had done all right in the examination as a whole. He had made seventy-eight percent. And just at that time, out of the school building there came a man who was absolutely like my uncle in the dream. I ran to him and embraced him and said, ‘You don’t know how happy I am to see you. I met you in my dream last night.’ ”

That incident—and others like it—made the doctor believe in the afterlife. But he was at the same time proud of the rationalism of his younger son, the medical student, who also wrote poetry in English (some of which was, at that moment, being shown to one of the journalists). In what way was the son a rationalist? The son—called over by his father to speak for himself—said that his attitude to the Prophet was historical. The great and good man existed; people added the divinity later.

The son, Syed, was taller and heavier than his father. Glasses made him look like a student; with his father’s guests he had the manner of
a privileged student son. He was more socially secure than his father, intellectually more adventurous, but he was conscious that he was building on the achievement of his father.

Syed said he felt isolated from his friends at the medical school. They just wanted to pass the examinations, to become doctors; they weren’t interested in intellectual matters. They just wanted the skill; they weren’t interested—as Syed was—in the civilization that went with the skill. (But Syed didn’t put it like that.) How had he arrived at his intellectual interests? Well, he had the advantage of his father’s medical background—that put him a generation or two ahead of most of his fellows. He had spent a year in England. And he had read a lot in English.

It was about his English reading that I got him to talk. And I was so taken by his account of his approach to the outer civilization—a pioneer journey in many ways, and a contrast with the blanket dismissal of “the West” by people who often, even after travel and a picked-up profession (a single, isolated skill), had the thinnest idea of what they were dismissing—that I asked for paper and noted down Syed’s words.

He was twenty-three, and he thought he had so far read about two hundred fifty English books—apart from the Enid Blyton, which he had read until he was twelve, and the “Biggies” books, which he had moved on to from the Blyton and had read until he was fourteen. The reading breakthrough came then, at fourteen, when his father gave him
The Good Earth
. That got him onto adult books: James Hadley Chase, Harold Robbins, Ian Fleming. Did he enjoy those books? Weren’t they too strange? He said he couldn’t follow the Ian Fleming; but he had read the books because they were famous, and the same was true of the Harold Robbins. He wanted to read; he was told it was good to read; the problem for him was finding things that made sense. He used to go through the best-seller list in
Time
, hoping that there might be something for him. But it wasn’t always easy for him to know what the books were about.

At this period—he was fifteen or sixteen—Steinbeck was a find.
East of Eden
made a great impression. “I loved it. This girl wanted to break away from her family, and a house burned down. That is all I remember now. It was a revolutionary book to me.” Then came his year in England. He saw the Perry Mason series on television, and read twenty of the Perry Mason books. Wasn’t the background too hard for
him, too far away from what he knew? No; he understood the books completely.

It was strange, the popular English reading that had given order to Syed Hussain’s expanding, shaken-up world: mechanical fantasies for the most part, making the foreign manageable, offering a mixture of the modern and the archaic, disorder and ritual: Enid Blyton, the Biggies books, Pearl Buck, James Hadley Chase, John Steinbeck, Perry Mason.

And sex. Out of the two hundred fifty books he had read, he would say that about thirty had been sex books. He read them “to become stable.” People who didn’t know sex books became overexcited when they ran across one; and they wanted to look at
Playboy
. His literary sex course cured him of that. “I also read sex books of the academic sort.
Married Happiness
. That kind of thing.”

But nine years after he had read
The Good Earth
, Pearl Buck remained the charmer for him. He had read about six or seven of her books—and he regarded that as serious reading. “Then I liked a lot Graham Greene’s
The Wall Has Two Sides.
”

“Felix Greene, you mean?”

“Maybe. Greene something. No, Graham Greene was
The Ugly American
. I get the names mixed up. I’ll tell you a story. One time I was travelling to Lahore on the train. It was at the time of the revolution in Iran. There was an American missionary on the train. He asked me to sit down, and we began to talk. He wanted to know what I thought about Iran. And I told him—I am like that—that the Americans were going to get out of Iran, that they were going to go to China instead now. He didn’t like what I said. Maybe he was an agent.”

I didn’t follow the story. But it was important to him, perhaps for that vision of the dangerous American: life answering literature, literature clearing up the world.

When he was done with the story of the American on the train he said: “In between all these books I got into pop songs and Western music. I really went for them. Not the rock-and-roll noisy types. But the ones which really carried a message. Not only the Western ones, but the local Urdu ones. I liked very much the Carpenters, a brother-and-sister group. They sing about the basic innocence. That’s how I get it. There are lots of songs I get which carry a message about religion, a mention of God, beliefs.”

“Beliefs?”

“Like doing something because you really believe in it. Like love. Basics.”

“But I thought you weren’t a religious man.”

“In a way I’m not religious. But everything has got to have a message.”

“What was the last book you read?”

He couldn’t say. It was six months ago; he couldn’t remember. To keep the conversation going, he said, “The best writer I have read is still Pearl Buck. She writes about the poor. I won’t say Chinese or communists—just the poor. She writes about the poor and the basics in human relationships.”