Full Tilt (26 page)

After ten miles I reached this village, to which a jeep penetrates twice weekly, and was sadly back in civilisation – if one may so describe twenty wooden huts plus a PWD rest-house with no mod cons
whatever
. I hadn’t intended stopping here but the road was blocked by a landslide miles farther on, leaving no alternative. Naran is one of Pakistan’s most famous fishing centres so enthusiasts brave what they consider the horrors of the rest-house for sport’s sake, and this week a delightful Karachi family are staying here – husband, wife and five children. In conversation with them this evening I again noticed what is to me a most puzzling feature of Pakistani life. Here was a man educated, intelligent and widely-read far above the average, yet he was a travelling salesman; it’s extraordinary that someone of such talent should be so wasted in a country where trained brains are at a premium.

The Karachi family and I started off for the ‘Blue Lake’ at 9 a.m. and got there at 11 a.m. after a glorious climb. (There is a jeepable road but that’s miles longer.) This lake seems to be a volcanic crater, a mile wide and long, and it reflects all the snow-covered peaks that surround it on three sides. There was a cloudless blue sky above the green water when we arrived so the reflections were perfect. The surrounding glaciers are now melting but remain firm enough to be quite safe for walking so we went right round the shore; then a little
breeze got up and a few clouds appeared and the beauty of the water colouring was beyond words. Just as we were leaving at 1 p.m. a party of young forestry students arrived with gallons of tea in flasks – very welcome – and I spent an hour talking with them and being
photographed
as one of the ‘strange sights’ they had encountered on their excursion. (If you could see me by this stage you’d appreciate the subtle humour of that description.)

I rejoined Roz at 4.30 after a late lunch of bread and hard-boiled eggs. It’s a pity the ‘reward’ of free-wheeling down this valley is being marred by the temperature rising every mile. But each day different beauties surround me – I’ve never seen such tiny butterflies as today. They look like wild flowers taken to the wing, they’re so fragile and delicately coloured.

I met another Afghan camel-caravan this evening and am staying with them tonight. It’s wonderful how hospitable these people are; they saw me passing and signed to me to stop and have bread and tea with them. (They bring their own flour and make much nicer bread than the locals and drinking their green tea out of the familiar little
Jap-made
bowls was a pleasant change from the local brew, which is exactly as we have it in Ireland – strong and milky.) They’re all delighted about the border with Pakistan being open again and are full of praise for His Imperial Majesty of Iran!

The Afghans and I swopped household hints last night: I told them that thyme added to their goat or chicken stew would taste delicious and they told me that the bark of the walnut tree, slightly moistened and used after every meal, was better than any toothbrush and paste. It seems extraordinary that they have never used wild thyme in cooking – they loved it in last night’s stew, and I loved the walnut bark, which makes the gums tingle and leaves the teeth brilliantly white. I’ve been wondering for months how these people have such incredibly good teeth and this must be the explanation. No matter how filthy they may be otherwise, they are most meticulous about scouring their teeth immediately after eating.

We left Kagan at 6.30 a.m. and found the road so blocked by migrant traffic, moving up the valley to summer pastures, that it took us three hours to cover six miles. The road was all downhill, but cycling remained out of the question – one simply pushed and edged one’s way through dense masses of buffaloes, cows, camels, horses, mules, donkeys, jennets, goats, sheep, kids, lambs, men, women and children. Of course, every day since crossing the Top I’ve been meeting these caravans, but today the migration was in full swing. Fortunately all the animals are blasé, widely-travelled creatures who take Roz in their stride. It was difficult for me, and dangerous for the riders, when a bicycle appeared suddenly in those parts where machines are almost unknown, causing horses and mules to shy and buck on the verges of precipices. (Today,
I
almost shied and went over a precipice when I saw my first machine – a jeep – since leaving Chilas a week ago!)

Recently, the government, who want to plant the high pastures with young trees, proposed to the Kochis that they should settle permanently on land in the Punjab, given to them by the State: but the tribes were so devastated by the idea that President Ayub ordered it to be dropped. For at least 3,000 years, and probably longer, these people’s ancestors have been on this trek – up every June, down every October – and any other way of life would be as inhuman as caging a tiger. Actually they are quite well off by Pakistani standards, with their own meat, eggs, milk and butter, and clothing from their sheep and goats. To acquire supplies of flour, tea, sugar and salt they barter their superfluous animals. An incredible amount of silver jewellery is worn by the girls, from two years old and upwards, and by the women; some of it is very ancient and all of it is beautiful. On these long treks tiny babies are carried concealed in cloths on their mothers’ backs, toddlers ride on their fathers’ shoulders or on one of the animals and everything above the age of four walks sturdily, like a good Kochi. Often little girls carry top-heavy loads of pots, pans and miscellaneous household goods on their heads and sometimes little boys are in sole charge of a flock of thirty or forty animals. New-born or delicate foals or calves (except camel calves who can apparently cope with life right from scratch) are tied to some animal, other than
their mother, or are carried on the men’s shoulders. Puppies, hens and chickens go on the buffaloes’ backs; when there’s a halt one sees the fowls flying down and scratching and pecking while the humans make tea and the animals eat their fodder, and then when the signal is given to start again they fly back to their moving roosts. Each kind of animal wears a different-sounding bell and the result is quite symphonic.

It was much hotter today – uncomfortably so at midday, though it’s pleasant again now. I’m stopping tonight at a
very
civilised rest-house, which just stops short of having a bathroom!

We’re back to Hell today, yet we are still 4,000 feet up, so what will the true plains feel like … This afternoon I sadly said goodbye to the Kagan, which I had seen born from out of that high and beautiful lake; it is difficult to believe that this wide brown flow is the very same river we crossed by snow-bridge. It’s quite an experience to follow a river for so long, right from the source, and to see it grow every day.

Twelve miles from Babbacot I joined the Muzzafarabad-Abbottabad road which I last cycled along exactly four weeks ago today. What a change! The countryside, then so green and lovely, is now burned brown and bone dry – you could almost hear it gasping for rain. I slept for two hours in the pine-forest but was afraid to smoke there in case the slightest spark would get amongst the tinder. I’m staying tonight at the American Presbyterian Mission Hospital here with a kindly missioner and his wife.

At last I’m really back to civilisation. It took me nearly two hours in the bathroom to get looking like an ordinary citizen instead of a tribeswoman, and my hostess very firmly took my shirt and pants and put them into the incinerator; they were long past being restored to cleanliness by any means known to mankind. I was dressed in Pakistani costume after the bath and then went off to the bazaar to
get shorts tailored; I’ve suffered much in the effort not to offend Muslims but the heat is now so extreme that they’ll just have to endure me in shorts. I got two yards of best khaki for 5
s
. and took them to a tailor at 6 p.m. At 9.30 p.m. the expertly-tailored garment was delivered to me here and the total cost was 10
s
. Of course I’d have looked like a vulgar picture postcard if I’d worn shorts a month ago, but having lost sixteen pounds in the last four weeks I’m relatively elegant just now.

At last the monsoon seems to be breaking here. I saw my first electric storm this evening and it was a sight of such beauty that I couldn’t take my eyes off the sky for a moment. Then the rain came so forcefully that no one who hasn’t witnessed such a spectacle could imagine it; yet they tell me that this is only a curtain-raiser, not the real thing! Roz has gone to hospital for a new mudguard and a brakes check; the latter were almost useless today after the fearful strain of the past weeks.

I’m staying here with the family who entertained me on my previous visit to this town. As you may remember, Farhat – one of my hostess’s sisters – is a doctor, which has proved fortunate since I woke with dysentery at 2 a.m. and have spent half the day lying on my bed feeling pathetic and the other half on the hop. I’m not surprised – nor is anyone else – by this development. The recent combination of filthy food and flies and heat-stroke and over-exertion was bound to do some damage somewhere; I can only thank God that I didn’t collapse until I got to this delightful family, each of whom is kindness personified and all of whom had the good sense to leave me alone today to cope with my misery in a private suite in their guest-wing.

My host is one of the wealthiest men in the area, and today I’m shamelessly revelling in the luxury of his new, palatial home on the outskirts of the town. Always, of course, there is the formidable ethical problem of such wealth as this co-existing with the poverty I’ve shared during these past weeks – a problem which lies at the back of one’s mind and occasionally stirs uneasily. But ten years ago it would have stirred more often and more vigorously; by now it seems to me that prosperity as the West knows it today and poverty on an Eastern scale are equally harmful to the soul of Man.

This morning Farhat starkly prescribed ‘starvation and
sulphaguan-idine
tablets’. This prescription has been so successful that now my insides seem to be reintegrated and I look with disfavour on the
starvation
clause, having had too much of that medicine lately. But obviously Farhat knows best and I’m resigned to a plate of curds for dinner.

Today I’ve been reflecting on the benefits bestowed by the social anonymity of a traveller ‘in the wilds’. To the peasants and tribesmen here one is merely a human being – outwardly strange but fundamentally one of them – and their spontaneous acceptance and hospitality is extended with an air of full and unselfconscious equality. In contrast, how deep is the gulf between groups of human beings in our society – go into a pub in Connemara or a café in rural Italy or even a posada in the remotest part of relatively unspoiled Spain and you find it impossible to establish the same easy
rapport
. You are at once noted as a non-peasant and are therefore someone to be envied, or admired, or despised, or kept aloof from, as individual temperaments dictate. Probably you will be treated most kindly by the peasants there, but at the deepest level you are automatically isolated because you have (they imagine) more money or more education or ‘better’ manners than they have. So I appreciate the chance to share the people’s lives here for a time without regarding myself, or being regarded by them, as an intruder. Yet I also appreciate coming back to converse among friends who are on my own wavelength.

Today I wandered around the town in the sedate manner befitting my convalescent condition. In fact I felt as weak as a kitten and was good for nothing but sitting and talking, which I did at length with the Irish priests who run a big boys’ college here, with the Irish nurse who has recently come out to the college as matron and who very kindly presented me with a pair of sunglasses to replace those lost crossing Babusar, and with a delightful Belfast Protestant missionary and her team of assistants, who fed me judiciously at lunchtime.

The sky was cloudless again today, after the monsoon’s false start, but the air has been cooled and freshened by that storm and when I returned here at 6 p.m. we spent a very pleasant couple of hours sitting on the lawn drinking iced fruit-juices.

For this family the purdah system is in a state of flux. My hostess and her three sisters – all young women – observe it in Abbottabad, yet Farhat, who has spent some years in England, where she was
accompanied by her youngest sister, obviously leads a European existence when practising her profession in Lahore. The second youngest sister is also married and lives in Mansehra, where I called to see her on my way to Bach the other day. Her husband is Assistant Commissioner there and she has a very congenial lot of in-laws with whom I spent a delightful afternoon, though I had no time to record my visit in the diary that night. The young couple joined us this evening for dinner and, observing them together, I was struck yet again by the high proportion of what are clearly happy marriages resulting from the Muslim tradition of arranged matches.

To me this has been the aspect of Eastern social life most difficult to understand – though one could argue that in a diluted form the custom was, until recently, prevalent in our own society. But since contemporary Western women expect freedom to choose their own husbands, it has taken me a long time to begin to understand the Muslim women’s point of view. I have had prolonged discussions on this subject with a number of educated Muslims. The arguments which they put forward have not been entirely convincing, but the harmonious atmosphere that I have experienced in so many Muslim homes leads me to believe that their arranged marriages are just as likely to succeed as what they refer to, with faint undertones of curiosity and disapproval, as ‘love marriages’.

The Muslim argument in favour of their system is simple. I’ve asked several women (wording my query as tactfully as possible) if they didn’t feel deprived of a natural and inalienable right when someone else made for them what is the most important decision in most women’s lives. To this they replied, ‘No. It is our business to choose partners for our children, not for ourselves.’ And each of them went on to explain, in her own way, that she considered youths and girls singularly ill-equipped to take the serious responsibility of selecting a life-partner. On the other hand parents know what’s needed to make a marriage tick and continue ticking and they also know their own children – possibly better than the children know themselves at the ages of sixteen or twenty. Therefore, four parents in frank consultation are likely to arrange a more lastingly satisfactory match than two
hot-blooded 
young things who can’t see the trees for the sex. The
arrangements
concentrate on temperamental, social and financial suitability and leave the sexual aspect to sort itself out afterwards, with the cheerful assumption that all else being equal two healthy youngsters could hardly fail to enjoy each other physically. Indeed, the majority of women with whom I spoke on the subject assured me that the pattern of their marriages had been a steady growth of love and understanding on both sides. Personally, I can’t help feeling that they miss the best of life’s adventures by not falling haphazardly in love after the manner of us decadent infidels; but I do now understand the psychological mechanism of their system and can see its advantages.

I also discussed this question with a number of men here, who were emphatic that as youths they would have been terrified of the
responsibility
of choosing a wife; this unnatural (to us) attitude underlines the extent to which our mental and emotional processes are conditioned by our environment. Yet among a certain category of men – those who have now been educated beyond the average level of their particular social class – there is a new threat to domestic bliss. In the upper class boys and girls receive comparable educations, and intellectual affinity is therefore easily assured; but those less fortunate men, who may be the only literate members of their families, often find themselves married to women who bore them as companions because of their abruptly widened mental horizons. I’ve met quite a few of these victims of progress, who are usually employed as petty officials in small towns where there is an almost total lack of educated society. Inevitably they seize with tragic eagerness on the opportunity to talk to foreigners, and I sometimes wonder if, despite their inherent intelligence, they wouldn’t have been happier left on an educational par with their kinsmen and neighbours. Mental loneliness is a painful thing and it seems cruel for the State to open a door invitingly and then shut it in a man’s face by stationing him in a remote area. Someone, of course, has to fill those posts, but surely a man with a longer tradition of education and therefore more inward resources would fit them better than a poor devil who has simply had his appetite for learning whetted by a few student years on a scholarship.

A conspicuous feature of conversation with English-speaking Muslim men is the unabashed candour of their approach to sexual matters. This sounds as though I’ve been having a gay time talking pornography with a series of frustrated would-be lovers, and if one wanted to be frightfully Freudian it could be said that their penchant for talking sex with European women is a sublimation of their
religion-fettered
libidos. Yet none of these conversations was intended as a prelude to seduction and the odd thing is that what in a Western context might be regarded as embarrassing, if not slightly shocking subjects for discussion with a male acquaintance, are here rendered comfortably clinical by the matter-of-fact manner in which they are discussed. I find this extremely interesting. For all our Amorality or New Morality or whatever one likes to call it, we Westerners are still too dogged by Puritan obsessions to be able to call a spade a spade without inwardly pausing for everyone else inwardly to recover from the shock, which makes us look slightly immature in this respect compared with Muslims.

I’m reminded now of an incident at a dinner-party in Afghanistan where I was the only woman present; for diplomatic reasons the incident was omitted from the relevant Diary-entry and it has only now recurred to me. I was sitting in the place of honour, assimilating the pilau course and doing no harm to anyone, when the fellow-guest on my right suddenly turned to me and asked in too-good English, ‘Did you ever see a man naked?’ Perhaps there’s a stock answer to that one but I didn’t know it, and the best I could do, from amidst a mouthful of rice, was to say airily, ‘Of course, Greek statues and all that.’ Thereafter my neighbour could be observed silently turning over in his mind the unlimited interpretations of ‘all that’. But his was an exceptional approach – though one I wouldn’t have missed, however unnerving his query at the time. It certainly is a curious experience to be a woman travelling alone in Muslim countries. Most of one’s time is spent in the company of men only, being treated with the respect due to a woman, but being talked to man-to-man, so that in the end one begins to feel somewhat hermaphroditic.

It’s now 1.40 a.m. and for the past five minutes I’ve been sitting with
the light off watching the weird beauty of another electric storm – a spectacle that must surely have inspired much folklore in these countries. I find it eerie enough myself and could almost believe that some demon-god is regulating the display, as vast sheets of quivering blue fill the eastern sky. Even now, with my reading lamp on again, that pallid illumination is perceptible in the room.

This morning Farhat laid down the law on the subject of me and cycling and dysentery and heat-stroke. Her lecture ended with instructions to come here by bus and go on to Lahore by train. She herself is returning today, by air, to her hospital in Lahore and I’ve been invited to stop there. She will then give me another check-up and pronounce on my subsequent activities. Once upon a time I would have violently resented this situation but at the moment there’s nothing I want to do less than cycle to Lahore. Thus are the mighty fallen!

The journey here seemed acutely prosaic when compared with Afghan bus expeditions. A healthy vehicle containing its legal quota of passengers left Abbottabad punctually and proceeded in an orderly fashion, arriving punctually in Pindi at 4 p.m. I was travelling along this route for the third time, and as I looked forward to the pleasure of staying with Major-General Ghawas’ family, and of again meeting the Aurang Zebs, who are now down from Swat, I realised that I no longer feel like a visitor to Pakistan but like an adopted citizen. Everywhere I’ve made good friends, and this country, of all those so far travelled through, has become a true home from home.

Beside me in the bus sat a jubilant young man returning to his village to celebrate the birth of his first son. He told me that two perfect goat kids, of uniform colour and without blemish, would be sacrificed as part of the celebrations and their meat given to the poor of the village. (It’s only one kid for a girl.) I asked him how many children he would like to have and he sighed and said not more than four but it was going to be very difficult as he and his wife were both under twenty and Allah didn’t approve of contraceptives. At each stop
he insisted on buying me an iced fizzy-drink – I never thought the day would dawn when I’d avidly gulp such a vile potation; temperatures of 109° in the shade have unexpected side-effects.

I received a tremendous ‘welcome-back’ from my friends here, and was delighted to find Colonel Shah, whom I’d already met at Peshawar, Bagdada and Swat, among those present. The evening passed in the usual way – sitting on the lawn within reach of mobile electric fans, sipping fruit-juices and talking. Social life here emphasises how nearly we Westerners have lost the art of conversation. Instead of switching on the ‘telly’ or dashing out to a show, how pleasant it is to sit and talk quietly about the books one has read or the people one has met or the places one has seen. And surely the individual exchange of ideas with our fellow-men is more worthwhile than mute dependence on what someone else’s brain has devised for our entertainment.

The grafting of British military traditions on to the Pathan way of life has been more fortunate than most such experiments; possibly because both traditions have a certain affinity to begin with. Certainly the Pakistani army officers I’ve met are without exception the finest type one could be privileged to know; they seem to have evolved a code embracing the best of the two worlds which moulded them. It will be interesting to see whether this code is durable enough to be transmitted successfully to the next generation.