Stranger to History (38 page)

The sign for the Inward Parcel Office, a mountain of packages, men sleeping on plastic sacks, and a policeman lying on a bench, drifted by as the Tezgam left Karachi. We passed heaps of burning garbage, smoke rising against cement walls, with black writing on them. I thought of the bureau chief ’s words, ‘In Hyderabad, garbage is disposed of by burning.’ The train climbed past the top of the city, and a final film reel played out through tinted windows: the coloured roofs of buses, the upper storeys of small apartment buildings, corrugated-iron roofs held down by bricks, mango-tree canopies, bougainvillaea from terraces, barbers’ shops, the green and white domes of mosques modelled on Medina’s, the span of a flyover, water tanks and green satiny flags, with gold trimmings, fluttering in the black smoke from burning garbage. A village of cloth and sticks appeared near the tracks amid the devastation of blue plastic bags. Thorny bushes reached out to touch the train. The cement city, with men sitting on rooftops, families of buffaloes in manure and the watermarked walls of warehouses, passed just before sunset.

At dusk, the eternal Sind scene: flat, dry land throwing up magnificent, double-storey cacti, with fleshy depressions and sparse giant thorns.

The next morning we were in Punjab. At Multan station, the carriage attendant looked into my cabin and smiled. I asked for some tea.

‘Yes, yes,’ he said. ‘Everything is available. I’ll send the boy.’

A few minutes later an old man in a green uniform arrived to take my order. ‘Just tea?’ he said, with surprise.

‘What else is there?’

‘Eggs, double
roti
and butter.’

‘OK. Bring them all.’

He came back with bread, marmalade, teabags, real milk and sugar, and an omelette on a white napkin and a steel plate. One station later, a young man with long, greased-back hair and a silver wire in his ear came into my cabin with a red brush to sweep the place while I sat on my haunches. The station, though smaller than Karachi’s, had the same colonial elements: sloping metal roofs with a carved skirting; a whitewashed platform, blackboards and blue and white signs that said ‘Battery Room’; ‘Unity – Discipline – Faith’, the motto that Pakistan’s founder gave the country hung on a wall. There was a pink marble mosque and people washing for prayer outside.

Soon afterwards, a boy with a pointed face and crooked teeth knocked on my door. He was looking for a plug point to charge his phone. I said I hadn’t seen one, but that he was free to look. He went away, then came back and sat down. His name was Rizwan and he was an electrical-engineering student in Karachi. ‘Where are you from?’ he asked.

‘Karachi.’

‘But in reality where are you from?’

‘London.’

‘I could tell from your accent.’

‘Is it apparent?’

‘Slightly. Are you Muslim?’

‘Yes,’ I replied, not wishing to enter into a long explanation.

‘Nationality is British?’

‘Yes.’

‘I can tell.’ He smiled. ‘If you have any need in Pindi, I’m there. For a hotel, car, whatever.’

‘Thank you.’

He said he had two more years left before he got his BSc in electrical engineering.

‘Then?’

‘Middle East. There’s a lot of demand there. Maybe UK too.’

‘Aren’t visas tough, these days?’

‘Yes, very. Don’t even ask how tough, but Allah will help and when it happens I won’t even know how it happened.’

‘Where in the Middle East?’

‘Dubai and Saudi. Both have a lot of demand, but Dubai is like ours.’

Just then, the carriage attendant and a man in a white uniform, with shiny silver buttons, knocked on the door, came in and asked to see my ticket.

‘Who’s he?’ he asked, seeing that my ticket was for one person.

‘We were just talking.’

The man turned to Rizwan and said sternly, ‘Please go back to your seat.’

‘No, no, we were just—’

‘Please go back to your seat! You’re lucky it was just me. Another conductor would have fined you.’

Rizwan rose, I made one last plea on his behalf, but the conductor reminded me that I was lucky it was just him.

Outside, a few boys in
salwar kameez
played in a canal. Another defecated near the tracks while a friend kept him company, running to get him water when he needed it. Under a cloth roof held up by four poles, a few women lazed next to a buffalo in a patch of mud. In Punjab, the houses were firmer and the majority in red brick. White domes and rust red minarets rose out of the low townscapes. There were big-leafed papaya trees in the fields and a golden layer of ripening corn. There was also much more water: in the fields, in the tube wells and in the wide network of canals. At the stations, men used old-fashioned hand pumps outside signs that said ‘Lamp Room’.

Being in Punjab made me think ahead to my arrival at my father’s house. My doubts had faded; the travelling made me optimistic. I felt that it would appeal to my father’s sense of adventure that I was showing up on his doorstep after eight months of journeying from Europe to Pakistan. I also thought that if we were to move forward from our recent problems, we might set a new tone in our relationship. Fighting with someone, whatever its other effects, was at least a sign of emotion and openness. I thought that it might help make our relationship more instinctive.

At sunset, not far from Lahore, Adil, a Kashmiri boy, knocked on my door. The train had stopped and he felt like a chat. He had pale skin, light brown hair, amber eyes and prominent, very pink gums. He was a marine-biology student in Karachi and there was something intense and restless about him, even about the way in which he’d barged into my cabin for a friendly chat. He was off to Kashmir for a memorial service to his uncle who died in the October earthquake, which happened a few weeks before my trip began.

Adil had a brother in Abu Dhabi, but he was reluctant to go abroad. ‘You can say you’re a Muslim abroad,’ he said, ‘but you can’t say you’re a Pakistani because immediately people will say, “He’s a terrorist.” You tell me, how can you go to a foreign country and not even be able to say what your nationality is?’

‘Do you think Pakistan’s reputation has become that bad?’

‘It didn’t become bad. It was broken.’

‘Who broke it?’

‘Indians. They really maligned us abroad.’

I started to become nervous as the conversation grew more sub-continental.

‘Are you Muslim?’ he asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Then why do you wear that string?’

‘It’s from a shrine in Sind,’ I lied.

‘OK, then why do you wear this bangle?’

‘My grandmother gave it to me. She’s a Sikh.’

‘But you?’

‘Muslim. My father’s Muslim.’

‘And your mother?’

‘She was Sikh,’ I lied further, ‘but she became a Muslim.’

‘What does your father do?’

‘Business.’

‘What kind?’

At last I got him off the topic by asking how Karachi was. He said it was great, and that it was fun to tease the girls there.

‘How do you tease them?’

‘We go up to them, a few friends and I, and we sing songs to them.’

‘Like what?’

He laughed and began to sing: ‘Come, come, my little queen, tonight I have the emperor’s right on you. Who will free you from my grip? Tonight, you’ve been caught, caught, caught . . .’

He laughed again and stayed talking until the silver-buttoned conductor appeared to eject him and announce the train’s destination.

And so, with the ease and inevitability of a train pulling into a station, I found myself, one hot evening in Lahore, almost at the point where I had begun a journey to find my father four years before. But for the short flights in and out of Iran, I had travelled by land and it amazed me now that the journey which had begun in Europe, by train from Venice to Istanbul to Damascus, and by road through Arabia, had yielded the sub-continent, Lahore and, even more miraculously, my father. I had travelled eight months for this meeting, but the confluence of time, distance and expectation made it feel even longer.

I arrived to a house full of people. My younger sister was graduating from Lahore’s American School and brothers, sisters, their spouses, uncles and grandparents had all flown down for the ceremony. My stepmother was involved in organising the graduation. There was to be a party at the house, and a few days later, it was my father’s birthday. The level of activity was close to that of a wedding. Tents went up in the lawn as I drove in and a steady stream of tailors, caterers and hairdressers passed in and out of the house.

The mistake I made with my father was to be ready for anything other than indifference. That evening, standing on his doorstep after a year of silence, I thought we’d do something we’d never done before: have a meal together, a drink, a conversation about what had happened since we’d last met.

The trip had not left me unchanged. My relationship with Islam was no longer a negative space. I had learnt about the faith in the early part of my journey. Then, from my conversations with men like Abdullah, I discovered it wasn’t faith in an obvious way that I needed to understand, but the political and historical demands it made and how it reshaped countries like Iran and Pakistan. This aspect of the religion, which could make my half-brother feel ‘civilisational defeat’ without being a believer, and which my father could possess without the faith, was not open to me. The way into that kind of faith was closed. It would once have been part of a whole system of belief, complete with ideas of politics, law and behaviour. In Pakistan and Iran, I had been shocked by the violence of reviving the faith in the form of Islamic republics and religious homelands. But all this seemed very far away now that I was at my father’s doorstep. At that moment I thought only of our relationship. I couldn’t see how these amorphous things, politics and history, could bring up real differences between two people. I had never lost a relationship over such differences and I couldn’t believe that they might encumber my relationship with the father I had found after so many years.

And though I was more confident in some ways, arriving into the commotion at that low, red-brick house, I felt my courage fail me at an emotional level. Somehow I was a weaker man than I had been four years before when I walked boldly into his life. It was easier then for me to be the person I wished to be with him, to be able to say frankly that I’d like to talk to him alone. Now, even before I walked into my father’s house, I felt myself fall into line with the rules of the place.

I found my father, as I had always known him, lying on his bed surrounded by family. He didn’t get up, but from the nod and smile in my direction, I could tell that there was no bad feeling. He was in high spirits. At one minute he was answering his phone or laughing as he read aloud a funny text message, at the next he was serious, discussing the price of his shares with his brother-in-law. My stepmother sat on the bed, speaking to friends, organisers, dealing with my sister’s sartorial panics. My two younger brothers came in from a football match on the lawn. An older sister was arriving later that night with her husband, who worked at one of the American banks. It was a scene I had witnessed many times before and occasionally felt part of. It was a scene in which you could be present yet sink into your own thoughts without anyone noticing.

My stepmother, always very welcoming, managed between many chores to ask me about myself and if I needed anything while I was in Lahore. Over the next few days my father and I came to rely on her to defuse the awkwardness of speaking directly to one another. Our conversation became neutered. In the past, we spoke openly about history and politics, but this time, those topics were off limits. Though I could tell from my father’s manner that he meant to make amends, it was as if an unspoken distance, a sense of my having joined another camp, had arisen between us. I found it strange that, over the next few days, he didn’t ask me once about my trip through the Muslim world or my travels in Pakistan. It was as if he didn’t want to know.

At last I felt I had to raise the subject and I walked into his room, three or four days after I arrived, with that purpose. He seemed pleased to see me, but after a while, when some of the family had dispersed and I told him what I wanted to talk to him about, his face darkened. ‘It depends on what you’re writing. If it’s another filthy anti-Pakistan diatribe, I want no part in it. I’ve read some of what you’ve written and I don’t think much of it.’

He said that what angered him about the article I wrote after the London bombings was that I had posed as a Pakistani. He said that he and his father were known as defenders of Pakistan and had been patriots all their lives, that he could play no part in an attack on Pakistan and Islam.

He lay on his bed as he spoke, occasionally turning to me, but mostly text-messaging. He seemed bored yet irritated. He described the faith as a brotherhood, something he’d grown up in. He said that the other day he’d been in Udaipur where some numbers, ‘786’, were written on a wall. He asked his guide what they meant and the man replied that they were a lucky charm. ‘No,’ my father had said, ‘it’s bismillah rahman e rahim [in the name of God, the compassionate and the merciful].’