Among the Believers (65 page)

In August, in the gardens at the back of the Intercontinental, I had seen men using a bullock-drawn grass-cutter to cut the grass. Now there was no grass to cut; but the men were still at work, pulling a heavy roller over the heathlike ground.

I said, “When will it rain?”

“In June. Or July. Next month it will start getting hot. Then there will be a water shortage. Everybody talks about Afghanistan now. But when it gets hot and there is a water shortage, people will talk of that first.”

This was more like the journalist, the columnist. But then he said, “There’s the question of banks and interest. That’s what the economists should be thinking about. That’s what we have to work out, how to create a banking system without interest. Right now, when I get my two hundred and forty-eight rupees from the bank I get so happy, getting this money for nothing. And my wife says, ‘I don’t know why you should be so happy.’ And she is right. It is wrong. My wife is a good Muslim. And, as you know, I am a bad Muslim.”

“You can’t say that. When we met you said that Islam and the hereafter were the most important things to you. Do you remember?”

“But I was educated in a secular school. I don’t always say the prayers.”

Later he said, “I feel they must feel I am all right.”

“Who are ‘they’?”

“Civil servants, bureaucrats. They change, I know. But the file remains. So I meant the file—my file—must be a good file. God has his own ways of being kind. When certain things happen you have to believe. Think of my luck, meeting you the last time, getting your message this time—I didn’t intend to go to the office until late that afternoon. And now having lunch with you and talking with you. Think of all the links in that chain.”

I looked at his distressed face. I said, “I think you should go away for a little. Go to another country for a little. You are beginning to fight phantoms.”

“No, no. If I go, I should go for good.”

“You should take a rest.”

“You are right. I am doing too much. Only this morning I thought, ‘If you go on like this, you’ll fall ill.’ What’s worrying me now is that I don’t like people. I don’t see anyone, you know. I came here only because it’s you. I can hate people. Get irritated by them. Like the other morning. I went to a slum colony in Clifton, not far from the Bhutto house. For a long time I’ve wanted to write about them. I should have been sympathetic to those people. I wanted to be sympathetic to them, and I am sympathetic to them. But I found myself getting irritated with them. How could they live in those conditions for thirty-two years? Just two minutes from Mr. Bhutto. Why didn’t they march to his house? So I got irritated and I didn’t like myself for getting irritated. That was the mood I was in when I went to the office and got your message. That was why getting your message just then was to me a piece of luck.”

He had brought a file of the columns he had written over the last few months. He did a kind of gossip and comment column once a week for the
Morning News
. He wanted to make a book of the pieces and wanted me to look them over. He thought they were a record of an important period.

They were not that. But they were the work of a professional. There was nothing in the columns that referred to his own troubles during this time. He wrote of social events; he wrote of his pleasure in the Karachi cold weather, getting out his tweed jacket; he wrote of the sugar shortage. There was something about “girlie” magazines—unsuitable
in “these changing times”: that was the closest he came to his own troubles.

A column that began with a paragraph about a public flogging turned out to be a piece about the inadequacies of public transport. People couldn’t go to the flogging because there weren’t the buses. There was no irony. In Nusrat’s writing, as in Nusrat himself, in spite of the apparent jauntiness, there was a certain humourlessness. It was part of his candour, his attractiveness. There was no question, with Nusrat, of self-censorship. Nusrat was an accepter: he lived with his country and the faith of his country. Pakistan, committed now to the way of Islam, was an ideological state. Nusrat accepted the ideology. He was a citizen of an ideological state, a believer, just the kind of man who would have been tormented by being cast out. The distrust of his fellows would have been punishment enough for him.

I told him when I saw him again that I didn’t think his newspaper pieces would make a book. He didn’t like that.

I said, “It leaves everything out.”

“But people like Art Buchwald bring out their articles in books.”

I asked about his wife. I remembered that she hadn’t been well in August.

He said, “She had an operation for an ulcer. I try to avoid discussing the negative side of human existence with her. For instance, I wouldn’t tell her what you think of the columns.”

“They are good newspaper columns.”

“If someone were to beat me up today, I wouldn’t go home and tell her. Of course, if I went home battered and bleeding I wouldn’t just sit in a chair and say nothing. I would have to say something. But normally I wouldn’t. She really gets a little more worried than I do.”

So during all his crisis he had had no one at home to turn to. And yet, as his editor noted, he hadn’t broken down. He hadn’t tried to influence any of the important people he knew; he had kept on doing his work. It was only at the end that he had broken down. After the government inquiry was over, and the matter had been laid aside, Ghauri, the editor, asked him home to dinner.

Ghauri said, “It’s all over now. The paper will continue. But tell me, did you do it deliberately? I give you my word that whatever answer you give, I will take no action against you. I just want to know.”

Nusrat didn’t understand that the question was being seriously
asked. When he did he burst into tears. The idea that the editor, who had risked so much to defend him, might have had some doubt about him was too much to bear. Ghauri didn’t press; his question had been answered. Mrs. Ghauri had to comfort Nusrat.

I
saw the offending article. It was illustrated with a nineteenth-century European painting, by an unnamed painter, of an Arab woman, unveiled but fully clothed, reclining on a settee. The illustration had been taken, with the article, from
Arab News
. But what could pass in Arabia now was still provocative in Pakistan. There was little in the article itself that couldn’t be found in Philip K. Hitti’s
History of the Arabs
, a standard textbook. But the woman in question had been the Prophet’s great-granddaughter; and there were people in Pakistan—of both sects—who felt that even to say that she was beautiful was to show disrespect.

The faith was pushing men to extremes. With only the Koran and the traditions as a guide, no one could ever be sure that he was good enough as a Muslim; no one could ever be sure that he had completely submitted to Allah and that he was entirely selfless. Men like Nusrat made greater and greater demands on themselves. To a man anxious to submit, to be pure in heart and mind, the world was full of traps: like Nusrat’s joy in his 248 rupees interest from the bank, his irritation with his fellow Muslims in the slum colony.

I said, “You are accident-prone, aren’t you, Nusrat?”

I had touched something. He said, “I went to a mosque to attend a wedding last week. A friend’s sister. The bridegroom was late. It was prayer time. So my friend said, ‘Let’s go and pray.’ So I did the ablutions. It was a cold evening and the water was cold. I picked up a straw cap or hat—a topee—from the mosque and put it on my head and began praying. When I bowed down the straw hat came off and I thought: ‘God knows I hadn’t come prepared to pray.’ I saw a hand move and I thought someone was about to interrupt me. But it was only a hand putting the cap on my head. When I bowed down again it fell off again, and I saw it roll towards the corner. I said to myself: ‘The prayer can be accepted even without the cap, if one’s intention is to pray.’ The incident went unnoticed. But why do these things happen to me? It is amazing I haven’t had a road accident And I think this is God’s mercy or blessing or whatever.”

I asked him about the journalist in Rawalpindi who had been sent to jail for a year.

He was cool; I was surprised.

He said, “Perhaps he said it too often. Perhaps he shouldn’t have written it for a foreign paper. Some things can be all right in a local paper but bad in a foreign paper. And
vice versa
.”

He still had plans to go abroad and study mass media. But he spoke about it differently now. He was a penitent, and he wished now to serve his country and its ideology.

“We are building our societies anew and we have to shape the media accordingly. We have to see how far, if at all, the Western, liberated concept of the mass media integrates with the developing countries in general and Muslim countries in particular. Maybe it does. Maybe it doesn’t.”

But buried in that new personality was still the man who read Art Buchwald and wished to bring out books like Buchwald’s.

The last time we met he said, “No one has noticed that I have gone grey, or mentioned it to me.” And before we separated he said, “Can you arrange for me to go to a place where I can read, write, and study for five years? Because, in five years, if you see me again, I may have become a cement dealer or an exporter of ready-made garments. Where I wouldn’t be able to have time like this, to sit and talk and share with you.”

  2
Islamic Winter

I
n August, at London airport, the Iranian passengers for Tehran had been loaded with the goods of Europe. Later that month, at Tehran airport, the Pakistani migrants going home had been loaded with the goods of Europe and Japan. Goods: they made the
world go round. And now, in February, at Karachi airport, was the complementary sight: Pakistani migrants and their families leaving the land of the faith for the lands of money.

They had their no-objection certificates and their certificates from the Protector of Emigrants. But still they were not certain. They knew only that in a crowd they had to push forward or be lost; so they pushed, and held out their precious papers; and the officials checked. One woman was taking five of her children. Many of the women were in veils, some dingy white (with a kind of cotton grille-work over the eyes), some black.

Women and children filled the no-smoking area of the Boeing 707 and gave it the atmosphere of the zenana, the women’s quarters. The smoking area was virtually empty. I changed seats.

From the air, in August, the wastes of Baluchistan and Iran had been brown and black, but pale in the heat. Now, travelling in the other direction, I woke to snow. Snow covered the mountains. The plains were bare, but every little eminence was dusted with snow. Flying over snow-covered mountains, we came to Tehran, still, in winter, the colour of sand. And the girl said it was zero outside.

Brothers, guests, welcome to the Hijra
[the new century of the Islamic era]
and the revolution
, said a handwritten sign in the arrival hall. There were still the big photographs—from the Shah’s time, and the colours had faded—of Persian antiquities. A colour photograph of Ayatollah Khomeini was taped over one of those photographs at the entrance to the immigration booth.

We were a small queue. Not many of us had come all the way to Tehran. The Japanese ahead of me had given his profession as “correspondent.” This was causing some trouble. He was beckoned out of the booth by another official. And then I was in trouble. I was a “writer.” I needed a visa; without a visa I couldn’t stay.

My passport was taken from me and I was sent to a little room at the side of the hall. It was full of officials, some with jackets and stars on their shoulders, some in shirt sleeves. They were all friendly. My passport lay with three or four others on a table, and no one seemed to be doing anything about them. Officials with jackets and without jackets were milling around; there was a lot of talk.

The Japanese correspondent was saying to someone, “But you’re
a revolutionary people. In Japan we are interested in revolutionary people.”

A big, moustached man in a yellow pullover was saying to two or three Iranian officials, “But you can’t send me to Syria. They won’t let me land in Syria.”

“First plane out,” one of the Iranians said. “The whole world wants to come to Iran.”

“But they won’t let me land in Syria. They’ll send me back here.”

A woman of about thirty, in tight jeans and with a coppery skin and reddish hair (hair and skin suggesting a henna staining), said, “I’m Turkish. I’m Turkish.” As though appealing to Muslim solidarity.

I was in danger of being forgotten. I spoke to the man who had taken away my passport. He was standing behind the table and apparently doing nothing. He asked me—with a smile—to take my Lark bag out of the office, which was indeed a little crowded. I took the bag outside and put it down on the wet floor. A man was cleaning, and after all that I had read about Iran, this seemed surprising: that people were still doing jobs, maintaining things.

I was stunned, passive. The six-month journey I had done had been a series of gambles; what had come my way had come my way. And I had hardly slept. It had been an early-morning flight, and I had had a late night in Karachi. I was content for the journey to end in the way it seemed about to end.