The Age of Kali (52 page)

Then there was the bureaucracy. Somehow the idea of multiple forms, triplicate permissions and strict codes of practice – ideas that originated in Crewe perhaps, or maybe Swindon – took on a new lease of Indian life in the plains of the Punjab, in the hands of Hindu bureaucrats brought up from birth with gods who had multiple incarnations, three faces and the strictest of codes of practice regarding their representation and worship. The hierarchy of the railways seemed directly to echo the Hindu caste system, with a pyramid that rose, rank after rank, from the lowly armies of sweepers through the parcel clerks, goods clerks, booking clerks and special ticket examiners to the twice-born apex of Stationmaster and general manager. For the Muslims too, there may have been something appealing in submission to a railway timetable at once as merciful, omnipotent and loftily inflexible as the great Koran itself.

The railways were the ultimate symbol of all the Raj prided itself on being: pioneering and up-to-date, intrepid and impartial; on the cutting edge of the Industrial Revolution. Even today harrumphing Home Counties colonels will point first and foremost to the railways as a symbol of everything they like to think the British ‘gave’ to India. Yet the railways were not works of charity. They were sound
commercial enterprises, and the private investors who put up the initial capital saw their money returned many times over. Nonetheless, the railways did inspire a real feeling of
esprit de corps
among those who worked for them, a spirit which survived until very recently.

Walking around the station one day this summer, I met Abdul Majeed. He was an old man with hennaed hair and heavy plastic spectacles. He wore a sparkling clean
salwar kameez
, and sat on a magnificent throne raised on a mahogany dais above Platform 1, underneath a plaque with the message: ‘Our objective – Speed Cum Safety.’

Abdul Majeed told me that he had retired from the Pakistani railways ten years earlier, but he still chose to come to the station and sit in the information booth: ‘I spent forty years in the railway department,’ he said, lowering his face shyly. ‘I come back to this station because I am loving these railways of Pakistan – to them I have dedicated my life – and because my colleagues are my best friends.’

I remarked to Mr Majeed how many of the older men in the Pakistani railways seemed to regard its running almost as a sacred duty.

‘I think we should,’ replied Mr Majeed. ‘I always took my duty as a sacred duty, just like my religious function. I never came to the station without washing myself, just as I prepare for my prayers in the mosque.’

I asked him how the railways had changed in the forty years he had been part of them.

‘Sahib,’ said Mr Majeed, ‘it’s not only the railways. The change is in the general sphere of life.’

‘In what way?’

‘In the shape of corruption, in the shape of requirements, in the shape of evils, in the shape of thinkings, in the shape of harassment, in the shape of sabotages. Now the young men are not so dutiful, I think. There has been big change.’

‘You think corruption has eaten in to the railway system?’

‘Sahib, you can imagine. When I was working as a Stationmaster, people used to adjust their watches by the passage of trains. Now we adjust our watches from the public. Today there is no punctuality. Yesterday’s train arrives today and today’s train arrives tomorrow. No one thinks to mention it when a train comes in ten or twelve hours late. Things are very bad.’

Abdul Majeed, it emerged, was born in the half of the Punjab which is now part of India. Expelled from his ancestral village at Partition, he and his family were made to walk to a refugee camp in the monsoon rains. There was no drinking water or facilities for even the most basic sanitation. Soon cholera broke out.

‘In the camp my mother died at about two a.m. due to cholera,’ said Abdul Majeed, eyes still lowered. ‘The same day my father died at fourteen hours.’

‘You lost both your parents on the same day?’

‘Yes. We buried our mother that evening, then buried our father on the morning of 9 October.’

‘You had to bury them yourselves?’

‘Yes; we buried them ourselves near a mosque, offering our religious prayers. I was just fifteen years old. The following day we were made to walk to the new place from where we had to catch a train. In the crowd, my younger brother was separated from the rest of us. I never saw him again. In the morning, when the train passed the Beas river I looked down and saw hundreds of corpses scattered in the riverbed from point to point, being eaten by crows, dogs and kites, giving bad smell. After many hours we eventually crossed the Pakistan border from Atari at about fifteen hours. We were stunned when people said “
Pakistan zindabad!”
[Long live Pakistan!]. They welcomed us and gave us food and water. We had not eaten for four or five days. Then we thought, we are still alive.’

Pakistan’s birth-pangs had also been India’s Holocaust. Everyone you met had their story, but the most horrific were told to me by Mr Majeed’s elderly friend Khawajah Bilal, who had had the unenviable job of being the Stationmaster of Lahore in 1947.

‘I have been coming to Lahore station since I was a student,’ Khawajah Bilal told me as we sat on a bench outside what had once been his stationmaster’s office. ‘Before Partition took place the station was a landmark of beauty. The platforms were clean and the carriages were spotless. The people were calm and quiet. The staff were well dressed. The uniforms they wore were immaculate. The buttons were polished, the braid was golden and shone under the lights. All that ended with Partition.’

‘What happened?’ I asked.

‘On 14 August I was on duty. We heard an announcement that Partition had taken place. Soon after that the killing started, the slaughter began. Everywhere we looked we saw carnage and destruction of human life. There was no law and order, even when the soldiers came and made a barricade with barbed wire outside the station. Despite their presence, many were being killed – on the platforms, on the bridges, in the ticket halls. There were stabbings, rapes, attempts at arson. I had my
charpoy
in the stationmaster’s office: I didn’t dare go back to my house. But at night I could not sleep because of the screams and moans of the dying coming from the platform. In the morning, when the light came, bodies would be lying everywhere.

‘One morning, I think it was 30 August, the Bombay Express came in from Delhi via Bhatinda. We found dead bodies in the lavatories, on the seats, under the seats. There had been around two thousand people on this train. We checked the whole train, but nobody was alive except one person. There had been a massacre when the train stopped at Bhatinda. The sole survivor told us he had approached the train driver, an Englishman, who gave him refuge. He hid the man in the watertank by the engine. When the Sikhs arrived they could not see him so they went away and he survived. Only one man out of two thousand. After that every train
that came from India was attacked. We used to receive one hundred trains a day. Every one was full of corpses.’

Listening to these horror stories, it was clear that for the people of India and Pakistan the horrors of Partition were not just the stuff of history, consigned to the memories of a few old men: for most people they were still livid scars, unhealed wounds which were still poisoning relations between Hindu and Muslim, India and Pakistan, half a century later.

Today the old main line from Lahore to Delhi, once the busiest in India, is hardly used. These days only one train a week passes from Lahore station down the line to India – and that is largely empty.

KARACHI
,
1994

Islamabad – Pakistan’s regimented concrete capital, home to Benazir Bhutto and ten thousand of her bureaucrats – is to Pakistan what EuroDisney is to France: it is in the country but not of it.

As you drive in the early morning through its long, deserted avenues, Islamabad still looks strangely like a building site in to which no one has yet moved. The bureaucrats’ blocks and the Saudi-financed mosques – many still shrouded in scaffolding – rise up on every side. There is little evidence of Pakistan’s burgeoning population. Indeed, as you circle the grey, megalomaniac mass of the President’s Palace and rise up towards the fortified compound of the Prime Minister’s Residence, you realise that since you left your hotel you have seen nobody on the streets at all – except, that is, for the policemen, each clutching his assault rifle as nonchalantly as a banker might hold his brolly.

The summons to interview Benazir Bhutto had come through from the Pakistan High Commission in London two days earlier. After five months of waiting, I had been given forty-eight hours to get tickets and a visa, jump aboard a flight, and present myself in
Islamabad. On arrival I had been met by a burly Ministry minder who escorted me to my hotel, then reappeared the following morning to conduct me to the Prime Minister’s Residence. On the way he had broken his silence to lecture me on protocol: ‘You address the Prime Minister as Ms Bhutto,
not
Mrs Bhutto,’ he said. ‘And I must warn you that in our society men
never
shake hands with women.’ As the car drew up to the double gates of the compound he held out his identity card to the troop of commandos; the gates swung open.

After the grey architectural brutalism that had gone before, the Prime Minister’s Residence crowning the hill was something of a surprise: a giddy pseudo-Mexican ranch-house with white walls and a red-tile roof. There was nothing remotely Pakistani or Islamic or Asian about the building, which, my minder said, wobbling his head approvingly, was ‘PM’s own design.’ Inside it was the same story. Crystal chandeliers dangled sometimes two or three to a room; oils of sunflowers and tumbling kittens that would have looked quite at home on the railings around Hyde Park hung below garishly gilded cornices; potted ferns sprouted from kitsch neo-Egyptian bowls. The place felt as though it might be the weekend retreat of a particularly flamboyant Latin American industrialist; but in fact it could have been
anywhere
. Had you seen it on one of those TV game-shows where you are shown a particular house and then have to guess who lives in it, you might have awarded this
hacienda
to virtually anyone; except, perhaps, to the Prime Minister of an impoverished Islamic republic situated next door to Iran.

Which is, of course, exactly why the West has always had a soft spot for Benazir Bhutto. Her neighbouring heads of state may be figures as foreign and frightening as, on the one hand, President Rafsanjani and his cabinet of Teheran mullahs, and on the other a clutch of bearded, fundamentalist Afghan warlords – but Benazir has always seemed reassuringly familiar, has always seemed as if she is
one of us
.

She speaks English fluently because it is her first language. She had an English governess, and her childhood social life revolved
around a succession of English colonial clubs with names like the Karachi Gymkhana and the Sindh Club. She went to a convent school run by Irish nuns, and during holidays on the family’s country estate she played cricket and badminton with her brothers and friends. She rounded off her education with degrees from Harvard and Oxford. The English media have always loved her, not least because a number of newspaper editors knew her (and in one case even attempted to court her) at Oxford. On top of all these assets she’s good-looking, she’s photogenic, she’s brave, she’s a democrat and she’s a woman.

For the Americans, what Benazir Bhutto
isn’t
is possibly more attractive than what she is: her name isn’t unpronounceable, she isn’t a religious fundamentalist, she doesn’t organise mass rallies where everyone shouts ‘Death to America’ and burns the stars and stripes, and she doesn’t issue
fatwas
against best-selling authors – even though Salman Rushdie went out of his way to ridicule her as the Virgin Ironpants in
Shame
.

But the very reasons that make the West love Benazir Bhutto are the ones that leave many of her fellow Pakistanis with second thoughts. Her English may be fluent, but you can’t say the same about her Urdu, which she speaks like a conscientious foreigner: fluently but ungrammatically, muddling her plurals and singulars, her genders and tenses. Her Sindhi, which for generations has been the mother tongue of her family, is even worse: apart from a few imperatives and a handful of greetings and platitudes, she is completely at sea. Her opponents complain, not unfairly, that she is more British than Pakistani, more Western than Eastern.