The Age of Kali (51 page)

The institution that perhaps most directly links the modern Frontier with the area’s primeval past is the blood feud. These small but incessant inter-family battles cause literally thousands of deaths every year, the ancient penalties of the system magnified a hundred times by the killing power of modern weaponry.

What most surprised me was the level of culture of some of the families caught up in the cycle of violence. Blood feuds sound the preserve of mafiosi, but in the North-West Frontier the most gentle and civilised families are involved in tit-for-tat killings of appalling brutality.

Hajji Feroz din-Khel is a charming old man who lives in a tumbledown stronghouse near the tribal village of Barra. He has twice visited Mecca, has eighteen grandsons and is held in great respect by
everyone in Barra, where he is the main landlord and the honorary muezzin in the mosque. He has a long white beard and on a dark night could easily be mistaken for Father Christmas. Yet with his own hands he has murdered three men and a number of children. This is what he told me:

‘Feuds usually start over a dispute about land or money. In this family we have feuds with two other families, both of which started simultaneously about forty years ago. Those two families have formed an alliance against us although they are not related. I have lost a father, two sons and one nephew aged about seven. The other two families have lost nine people altogether, so at the moment we are winning.

‘The feuds started over a completely petty matter. There was a stream which flowed between our lands. It was divided by a line of stones, and on our side of the stream the water was diverted to a water mill. One day I was removing some of these stones to build a wall. My neighbour saw me and said, “Stop, these are my stones.” We had a quarrel and I insulted him. The next day he killed my father, Faizal Akbar.

‘After thirty years of killing we arranged a truce. But that truce was broken last year. My youngest brother Said Lal was walking along the road towards Barra when a car stopped and five men jumped out. They tried to kidnap his son who was walking with him. Said Lal shot at them and chased them away, but as they went one of them sprayed his machine-gun behind him. They killed my nephew. He was only seven.

‘Despite this killing I want to make a settlement. But the other side have had more people killed, so they have to get their own back.’

I visited the Hajji several times during the autumn I was staying in Peshawar, and on my last trip I saw the effects of the blood feud for myself. Up to then, all the talk of guns and violence had been just that – talk. Now I saw what it actually entailed, the stark reality.

It was late afternoon and I was chatting to the Hajji in the shade of his verandah. We drank tea and the Hajji told me about his most recent visit to Mecca. Suddenly four men came rushing in, screaming in Pushtu. The Hajji rose to his feet, apologised to me and made straight for his jeep. ‘There has been some trouble in the bazaar. My brother tried to kidnap a man who owed him money. The man resisted. Now Said Lal’s been shot.’

I sat in the Hajji’s house for an hour before the messenger came. Said Lal was dead. His body had been brought back to a house further down the road.

By the time I got there about a hundred people had gathered in and around the compound. The Hajji greeted me, his face distorted with sadness, but his eyes dry. He whispered a prayer and went back in to the house. I could hear muffled wailing from the women within the harem, but the men outside were completely silent. They sat on
charpoys
(string beds), heads lowered, hands cupped around their faces. Others pulled their beards. The dry, silent male mourning seemed much worse than the noisy grief of the women. Despite the frequency of violence in the tribal territories, the shock of loss was no less tangible here than it would have been anywhere else.

I was still holding my notebook, and my cameras were slung over my shoulders; I was a journalist intruding on a moment of private tragedy. It would have been quite wrong to stay. At the gate, I passed a friend of the din-Khels whom I had met with the Hajji earlier in the month.

‘What will happen now?’ I asked.

‘There will be a truce for the funeral,’ said the man, ‘and then the Hajji will be required to recover his honour.’

‘What does that mean?’ I asked.

‘It means,’ said the man, ‘that he must seek revenge.’

LAHORE
,
1997

It is barely dawn, and the sky is as pink as Turkish delight. Yet already, at 5.45 a.m., Lahore Central Station is buzzing like a kicked hive.

Bleary-eyed, you look around in bewilderment. At home the milkmen are abroad at this time, but no one else. Here the shops are already open, the fruit and vegetables on display, and the shopkeepers on the prowl for attention.

‘Hello my dear,’ says a man holding up a cauliflower.

‘Sahib – what is your good name?’

‘Subzi! Subzi! Subzi!’

‘Your mother country?’

A Punjabi runs up behind the rickshaw, waving something horrible: a wig perhaps, or some monstrous vegetable. ‘Sahib, come looking! Special OK shop! Buying no problem!’

Lahore station rears out of the surrounding anarchy like a liner out of the ocean. It is a strange, hybrid building: the Victorian red-brick is imitation St Pancras, the loopholes, battlements and machicolations are stolen from some Renaissance
palazzo –
Milan perhaps, or Pavia – while the towers are vaguely German, and resemble a particularly extravagant Wagnerian stage set. Only the chaos is authentically Pakistani.

As a tape of the Carpenters’ greatest hits plays incessantly on a Tannoy, you fight your way through the surge of jammed rickshaws and tottering red-jacketed coolies, through the sleeping villagers splayed out on the concrete, past the tap with the men doing their ablutions, over the bridge, down the stairs and on to the platform.
In the early-morning glimmer, Platform 7 seethes with life like a hundred Piccadilly Circuses at rush hour. Porters stagger towards the first-class carriages under a mountain of smart packing cases and trunks. Further down the platform, near third class, solitary peasant women sit stranded amid seas of more ungainly luggage: cages and boxes, ambiguous parcels done up with rope, sacks with lumpy projections – bits of porcelain, the arm of a chair, the leg of a chicken. Vendors trawl the platform selling trays of brightly coloured sweetmeats, hot tea in red clay cups, or the latest film magazine. Soldiers wander past, handlebar moustaches wobbling in the slipstream.

The railways are now so much part of the everyday life of the subcontinent that it is difficult today to take in the revolution they brought about, or the degree to which they both created and destroyed the India of the Raj. Before the arrival of the railways in 1850, travel in India meant months of struggle over primitive dirt roads. Just fifty years later, tracks had been laid from the beaches south of Madras to the Afghan border, more than twenty-three thousand miles of railway in all. It was the biggest, and most costly, construction project undertaken by any colonial power in any colony anywhere in the world. It was also the largest single investment of British capital in the whole of the nineteenth century.

By 1863 some three million tons of rails, sleepers and locomotives had been shipped to India from Britain, in around three and a half thousand ships. Engineers had looped tracks over the steepest mountains in the world, sunk foundations hundreds of feet in to the billowing deserts, bridged rivers as wide and as turbulent as the Ganges and the Indus. It was an epic undertaking, even by the standards of an age inured to industrial heroics.

The railways also brought about a social revolution. There could be no caste barriers in a railway carriage: you bought your ticket and you took your place. For the first time in Indian history a Maulvi who spent his days contemplating the glorious Koran might find himself sitting next to an Untouchable who skinned dead cows.
Moreover, as journey times shrank, India became aware of itself for the first time as a single unified nation. As the bullock cart gave way to the locomotive, a subcontinent disjointed by vast distances and primeval communications suddenly, for the first time, became aware of itself as a single geographical unit. It was the railways that made India a nation.

Ironically, a century later, the same railways also made possible the irreparable division of the subcontinent. The partition of India and Pakistan on 15 August 1947 led to what was probably the greatest migration in human history. More than twelve million people packed up and left their homes and their countries. Muslims in India headed
en masse
for Pakistan, while Hindus and Sikhs made their way in the opposite direction. In the course of the mass migration, suppressed religious hatreds were viciously unleashed: over a million people lost their lives in the riots and massacres that ensued. Yet Partition would have been impossible without the railways; and it was on the railways that much of the worst violence took place. Lahore station was the eye of that whirlwind.

The fate of Lahore remained uncertain until the final maps of the boundaries between the two nations were released on 14 August. In the event the city went to Pakistan, just fifteen miles from the Indian border, and Lahore and its people were torn apart. Thousands of Hindus and Sikhs fought their way to the station to flee to India. At the same time train after train began arriving from south of the border carrying hundreds of thousands of Muslims to their new homeland. The station became a battleground.

On the night of Independence the last British officials in Lahore arrived at the station. They had picked their way through gutted streets, many of which were littered with dead. On the platforms they found the railway staff grimly hosing down pools of blood and carrying away piles of corpses on luggage trolleys for mass burial. Minutes earlier a last group of desperate Hindus had been massacred by a Muslim mob while they sat waiting quietly for the Bombay Express. As the train finally pulled out of Lahore, the officials could see that the entire Punjab was ablaze, with flames
rising from every village. Their lives’ work was being destroyed in front of their eyes.

The massacres of Partition brought the Raj to a cataclysmic close. Now, only half a century later, that period can seem as distant as that of the Romans. But the buildings – like Lahore station – still survive. They are the keys which can unlock the history of a period, a history which, though it may seem impossibly foreign, is as much part of the British heritage as that of the Indian subcontinent.

With its great round bastions and tall machicolated towers, Lahore station may look like the product of some short-lived collaboration between the Raj and the Disney Corporation, but it was in fact built in deadly earnest. According to its architect, William Brunton, the whole station had a ‘defensive character’, so that ‘a small garrison could secure it against enemy attack’. The twin towers may look as innocent as Swiss cuckoo clocks, but they were designed to be bomb-proof, while the loopholes across the façade are not the mock arrow-slits they appear to be, but placements for Maxim guns, drawn down carefully designed lines of fire. Even the cavernous train sheds could, in an emergency, be sealed with huge sliding metal doors, turning the whole complex in to a colossal fortified bunker.

Straddling the Grand Trunk Road leading south to Delhi and Calcutta, Lahore is marching-distance from the North-West Frontier. At the time of the Great Game the Victorians saw it as an important defensive post against a potential Russian invasion through the Khyber Pass. Moreover, the station was built in the immediate aftermath of the Indian Mutiny of 1857, and for that reason it was designed to function both as a station and as a fort. Brunton was particularly pleased with the masonry, which he called
‘the best in the world’ and which he felt confident could survive even full-scale howitzer fire.

In the event, however, Brunton’s extraordinary architecture was never put to the test. Instead, in the course of the late nineteenth century the station became a symbol of the surprisingly profitable partnership Britain developed with its greatest colony. For India took to the railways in a way that could not have been imagined by the British engineers who first drew lines across the plains of the subcontinent. Just as India has always seduced and transformed its conquerors, so in the same way it slowly took over and indigenised the railways. Soon the stations were inhabited by whole villages of people washing, sleeping and cooking in the ticket halls, arriving days early for a train and building encampments on the platforms. Within a few years something quintessentially English had been forever transformed in to something quintessentially Indian.