Stranger to History (33 page)
Even as our relationship grew, my father seemed resistant to my efforts to bridge the two worlds. Between my first and second visits, a few weeks apart, when he invited me to stay in his house, the initial openness between us had narrowed. I asked him a question about a time when he had known my mother and he reminded me bluntly, ‘I asked you when we first met whether you had any questions for me.’
On one occasion he mentioned the plane Murtaza Bhutto hijacked and the comment he made to the BBC. I had heard about the event from my mother. To hear of it now from my father filled me with a kind of child’s wonder. It was like hearing about what your parents had been doing just before you were born. In an effort to bring together the two versions of the same story, I asked him where my mother and I were when it happened. My father’s face soured. ‘I don’t know what anyone else was doing at the time. I can tell you what I was doing. I was getting away from the police, who wanted to put me in jail.’
Despite the gaps and silences, our relationship grew over the next four years, during which I became a regular visitor to Lahore. The more I went, the less I saw of the country or even the city. My father’s house became my world in Pakistan. On my first visit I had met three siblings: my elder sister from my father’s first marriage and a younger brother and sister from his present marriage; over the next few months, I met three more. They, and my father’s young, beautiful wife, were full of goodwill and affection for me. Having grown up as an only child, I was so overwhelmed by suddenly having brothers and sisters that getting to know them took up much of my time in Lahore. I managed to sneak into some of the small, exquisite mosques in the old city, saw the important monuments, the museum and that fine stretch of red-brick British buildings, which were like a lesson in civic planning, but that was all. I went with my sister to many more GTs. I met fashion designers, Lahore beauties, and spent more than a few orange dawns eating hot meat in the old city. In summer, we’d end up in my father’s mango-shaped swimming-pool as the mullah’s cry broke over the dark trees in his lawn. In those twice-yearly visits to Lahore, I felt at home and yet not, as if I was in a place I had been before but couldn’t recall.
After university in America, I worked as a reporter for
Time
magazine, first in New York and then in London. During that time, my father and his family paid me a surprise visit in New York, and later I saw them regularly in London. Benazir Bhutto’s self-imposed exile during the Musharraf years and my father’s own electoral failures had distanced him from political life. Though politics was still his passion, he was now a far more successful businessman than he had ever been a politician. Still, some of the old embarrassment at having an Indian son lingered, and he was much more at ease with seeing me abroad than he was in Pakistan.
His embarrassment in Pakistan surfaced in small, telling ways. He prevented my siblings throwing a party they had planned for me; he rarely spoke to me at social occasions and never introduced me to anyone. I interpreted this as a hint that he didn’t want to see me any more, but his family assured me that it was just his way and he enjoyed my visits. Sitting on worn sofas in his TV room, children and servants coming in and out, a drinks trolley in one corner, with an ice bucket on it, I felt that a kind of closeness had arisen between us. My father would often engage me in some long conversation about the great Punjabi Urdu poets of Lahore. His father was part of this milieu but died when my father was a child. Though it was never expressed, there was irony in our shared experience of absent fathers. He also let it be known that I was his only child who was like him – interested in books, politics and history – and though this also contained irony, it gave me great joy to have a kind of male approval I had never known. One last irony was that during a family holiday in Italy in 2005, a few weeks before the London bombings, before my article and my father’s letter, and before the pain of the new silence between us, we were closer than ever before.
I
t was a great relief to be on the road and independent of the Mango King’s uncertain hours. It was from him that I gained an idea of Sind’s composite society, complete with Hindus and Muslims. That completeness ended with the 1947 transfers of population. I looked now for what had taken its place. My father had spoken of the ‘Pakistani ethos’ in his letter, and with this in mind, I set out for the desert city of Hyderabad. My travelling was to be different from anything I had done so far. I wanted to avoid focusing on any one group but to see an array of life, a panorama, in a typical Sindi town. And for this I was meeting Laxman, one of the publisher’s most trusted managers, on the outskirts of Hyderabad. My brother had arranged a driver, a dark, moustached man with mascaraed eyes.
The road to Hyderabad through the bleached, shrub-covered country was full of unexpected bursts of colour and activity. There were black flags with gold borders, their masts covered with coloured bulbs, commemorating the Shia mourning; tiny pink and orange figures of women working in sugar-cane fields; and green pools of water with children bathing in them. The shade of mango trees attracted old people in white and animals escaping the heat, including a hennaed donkey, with an impossible burden. The road was crowded with camels pulling carts, cattle crossing from one side to the other, and small, painted mosques, with grey loudspeakers, huddled close to the road.
We covered the distance at an irregular pace, stopping or slowing for varied traffic. At one point, we hit a little goat that the driver calculated would make way for him. I thought we’d killed it, but it picked itself up and, indignantly, with hardly any change in its pace, made its way across the road to join the herd. We passed a gold-domed and yellow-tiled Shia mosque, whose opulence among the surrounding thatched houses suggested Iranian contributions.
Laxman was waiting for us near a canal on the outskirts of Hyderabad. He was a stocky man, with thick, greasy hair and shiny black skin. He had a bristly moustache over a set of pearly, capped teeth. He greeted me in a furtive, hurried manner, and within minutes was organising me, making phone calls and giving the driver orders. He suggested we go first to a shrine just outside Hyderabad, where Sind’s Muslims and few remaining Hindus prayed together. Sind’s countryside was covered with the Sufi shrines of saints who were often honoured by Muslims and Hindus alike. They were part of a local form of Islam that served a once diverse society. It was this kind of worship that gave me the protective string on my wrist that the men in Mecca had minded so much.
An armed guard, who provided security to the newspaper’s people when they travelled in the countryside, accompanied us. Laxman said the road was often struck at night by dacoits. Their ploy was to throw a stone or a bale of straw into the middle of the road, and to surround the car as soon as it slowed down. He said a man from the newspaper had been robbed recently. The dacoits had thrown a briefcase in front of the car. I didn’t think that this was a particularly obstructive object so I asked him about it.
‘He got greedy.’ Laxman chuckled. ‘He thought there was money inside it so he stopped.’
In the open land outside Hyderabad, a still, hot afternoon came to an end, solitude and isolation giving way to a more social hour. Children came out to play, truckers stopped for tea, and a wrestling match began in a clearing at the side of the road. Dozens of people gathered round a sandy ring, children watched from the branches of trees, and loudspeakers energised the crowd. The wrestlers, bare-chested and in tied-up
salwar
s, prowled around the edges of the ring, awaiting their fights. They were of varied ages and physiques, some young with slim, hard bodies, and others with heavy shoulders and barrel stomachs. It was clear from the dark brown welts on some of the younger men’s backs that they were Shia and had flagellated themselves during the period of mourning.
The wrestlers had thick ropes tied round their waists. When their match was called, they approached each other as if about to give one another a low embrace. Then they grabbed their opponent’s rope and began to pull. Sometimes one wrestler would do a kind of dance round the other, hoping to tire him out before leaping on him with all his weight and pushing him to the ground. At others, the heavier wrestler would engage the lighter one as soon as possible, entwining his more powerful legs round his opponent, causing him to lose his balance.
We drove past men on rope beds drinking tea, and boys playing in the hollow of a haystack, until the white shrine appeared among flat fields, dotted with large trees.
‘It’s proof of the Sufi time in Sind when Muslims and Hindus prayed together,’ the driver said, as we approached. ‘I think there’s even a mention of it in the Indian movies.’
The story of the white shrine, with its turrets and little crenellations, was typical of what made the religious commingling of Sufi India possible. An oppressive, fanatical king ill-treated his people, Hindu and Muslim alike, until the saint Oderolal, a white-bearded miracle man, arrived out of the water, preaching love and oneness, and used his powers to end the cruel king’s abuse. He came to be loved by both Muslims and Hindus and, honouring his memory and message of unity, they prayed next to each other, though not actually together. ‘Here the
azan
is about to be called,’ a white-bearded man, in sunglasses and a red cap, explained, ‘and there you can see Hindus are praying. That is the miracle.’
‘Is it still like that today?’
‘Like brothers. There is a lot of love.’ He pointed me in the direction of a tree, which the saint had put down in the dry earth. ‘That’s the miracle,’ the man said gaily. ‘It needs no water.
Look!’ The leaves at the top are green.’ The tree was in bad shape and I wasn’t too surprised that it grew from a little patch of dry earth. Most of Sind was dry and only a few days before I’d seen a much bigger tree growing out of a building and a drain. The bearded fakir yanked down my head and said, ‘Aatish, may you become cool,’ then demanded money.
Laxman let out an evangelical cry and said, ‘Ask! This is the time. Ask, if you ever meant to ask! Open your heart and ask!’ The call to prayer sounded and a few Muslims on the other side of the white courtyard congregated. ‘This was once the world!’ Laxman said dramatically.
It was easy to see how the true relevance of a shrine like this would have grown from the society’s former diversity. Unlike the idea on which the state was founded, here, the commonality of culture, language and local faith trumped doctrinal differences. One could imagine how it would have made the heart leap to put aside religious differences, Hindu caste notions or the Muslim horror of idols and images, in favour of a larger cultural unity.
In the white courtyard, under the shade of a
neem
tree, a group of farmers and their families discussed something in low, serious tones. Laxman and I went up to them and sat down to listen. They spoke in Sindi and Laxman translated. They seemed upset. One man was saying, ‘Conditions are so bad, these days, we don’t know how we can continue.’ Having just been with a landlord, I was keen to hear what else they would say, but Laxman was in a hurry: it was evening and he was worried about dacoits. After some persuasion, I managed to get the farmer’s problem out of him. Three young men from the community, sitting solemnly together on one side, had struck a deal with the landlord in the hope of improving their lot. They had his land from him at a fixed price, with an eye to cultivating it and keeping whatever profit they made from the crop. But that year everyone’s crops had failed. The three enterprising farmers found that not only had they made no profit, they hadn’t even made enough to pay the landlord his rent. They approached him and begged him to excuse part of their debt. The landlord agreed and said he would excuse them 40,000 rupees (some £490), leaving them still to pay 50,000 (£600). They managed to collect this amount, pooling together all that they had and borrowing the rest. But when they appeared at the landlord’s with the money, he denied any recollection of their first meeting and demanded the entire sum.
Sitting in the shrine’s courtyard, as they might always have done, the community elders, with leathery faces and white stubble, considered the dilemma. Children climbed over colourfully dressed mothers and the three young farmers listened in gloomy silence. They had just reached some kind of solution when Laxman insisted we leave immediately, promising to explain the meeting’s conclusion to me later.
In the car, he murmured something in his alarmist fashion about dacoits. It was hard to sense the danger in the sociable, rural scene, but Laxman was convinced that just after we had left the shrine a group of men had taken a picture of the car on a camera phone, with the intention of marking us for robbery.
I hadn’t seen them, but the driver said he had and accelerated down the country road. We passed police posts on the way, which I pointed out to Laxman, but he said it made no difference: the police were in collaboration with the dacoits. The driver agreed and said we were running just as much from the police as from the dacoits. Then, looking at our bodyguard, he added tenderly, ‘Don’t worry, we don’t think you’re police.’
‘It’s always an inside job,’ Laxman explained. ‘First, the dacoits gave the police ten per cent, then the police started demanding more, twenty, thirty, forty. Finally it was
phipty-phipty
. Then the police said, “Why let them do it when we can do it ourselves?” So now the off-duty policemen are the dacoits.’
When we were safely on the main road to Hyderabad, Laxman relaxed and I was able to extract from him the meeting’s conclusion. I understood now why I had missed it the first few times: its innocence was like a failing of logic. The elders had decided, since the landlord could not remember excusing the debt, to approach two of the landlord’s friends who were present at the time the debt was excused. Surely they would remind the man of his promise. If not, the community would pay off the young men’s debt. In any event, it was clear that they were ruined.
