The Way of Wanderlust (19 page)

The rulers eventually relinquished their independence, but in essence they remained semiautonomous well after Partition and the creation of Pakistan in 1947. The wali of Swat gave up rule in 1969; the mirs of Hunza and Nagar surrendered their sovereignty only in 1974. (In fact, the current mir of Hunza, who was in power at that time, is the last of the former rulers allowed to use his royal title.)

Today in many ways these areas are still hardly part of Pakistan, Asad said. They don't belong to any of the country's four full-fledged provinces, but rather to an anomalous entity called the Northern Areas. The inhabitants prefer local dialects to Urdu, the national language. And the dominant branch of religious belief is not Sunni or Shia Islam—which prevail in other parts of Pakistan—but Ismaili, a somewhat mystic and less fundamentalist, more eclectic strain.

We reached Karimabad, the “capital” of the Hunza Valley, just before sunset. Of all the exotic stops on our itinerary, it was Hunza, famed for its apricot orchards, the longevity of its inhabitants, and its fairy tale setting of a verdant valley encircled by snowcapped peaks, that had most attracted me to this tour. In the far-off United States, I had felt that something was waiting for me in Hunza, that something would be revealed to me there.

No burst of epiphanic light or even partial parting of the clouds greeted my arrival, but my first impressions were still favorable: The people were healthy-looking, with rosy cheeks and bright eyes and sturdy, colorful clothes; the cold, clear mountain air rang with the cries of children at play; and the setting was indeed spectacular, a lush bowl surrounded by peaks, some jagged and distinct against the sky, others obscured by clouds.

We spent the following day touring the highlights of Hunza, starting with Baltit Fort. Built 550 years ago and inhabited by the mirs of Hunza until the present residence was built in the 1920s, this white, high-perched palace is a stirring sight, especially when viewed from a distance against a backdrop of cloud-piercing peaks. Close up, however, it seemed a dusty, neglected, mud-plastered place. Still, looking closely and imaginatively at its massive wooden beams and intricately carved doorways and columns, we could get some sense of its former magnificence.

We were told that UNESCO has been negotiating with the mir to take over the management and restoration of the fort. If an agreement is reached, the palace will probably be sealed off, or at least partly restricted to visitors, until the restoration is completed—but it was heartening to think that this precious, poignant symbol of Hunza's history and culture might be preserved.

Altit Fort, Baltit's predecessor, was in a similar state of disrepair, but presented from its tower an enchanting tapestry of rooftop life in the surrounding hamlet: Here was a woman doing the breakfast dishes; there another doing laundry. Three women chatted and crafted masterful crochetwork almost directly below us; another group sat sorting twigs. A mother appeared with a basin under one arm and a squirming naked child under the other, and proceeded to scrub him clean, much to his displeasure. Another adjusted a wooden carrier on her back before setting out for the fields.

In all, our wanderings revealed an underlying sense of prosperity and serenity in Hunza. Solid rock houses sat beside fertile green plots irrigated by an ingenious, extensive network of canals; and everywhere thin spring willows spired into the sky, and pear, apple, and apricot trees burst into brilliant pink and white bloom. Dusty, litter-free paths interlaced the hamlets of the valley, and I noticed an aural interlacing as well: Because of the area's acoustics, a child's cry or the clanging of a cowbell at one end could be heard clearly at the other. It was as if everyone was everyone else's neighbor.

Contentment seemed to spring naturally from Hunza's idyllic and isolated setting: The valley bowl imbued the place with a stabilizing sense of community, and the peaks, even when invisible, conferred a kind of high mountain peace. How could one not be happy here? I thought.

Such romantic speculations obscured the harsh realities of the situation, however—the inhabitants' situation and, indeed, our own. We were staying at the guest house of the mir, on the grounds of the present palace, about as prestigious an address as one could hope for. But despite the name, there was intermittent electricity, little hot water, even less heat—and no mir, alas. (He was still at his winter residence in Islamabad.) Even more important, the clouds that had first appeared in Swat had steadfastly followed us up the KKH, clouding the mountains and our minds. It was cold, many in our group were sniffling and coughing, the food was mediocre and the pretty pictures the tour brochure had innocently painted began to seem malevolent mockery.

At an uneasy dinner, various discomforts were brought up, and the consensus was to cut short our stay in Hunza by a day and continue up the KKH a few hours to Gulmit. Some travelers who had just come from there had spoken glowingly of a lodge with abundant hot water, blankets, heat, and good food. So we revised the itinerary once more: The following day, we would tour the Nagar Valley, across the Hunza Gorge, and then leave for Gulmit the morning after.

I decided I would forgo the excursion to Nagar and wander Hunza's dusty lanes, hoping they would reveal whatever it was I had come to see.

The next day dawned auspiciously clear, and at 5:30 Karimabad was surrounded by a spectacular panorama of peaks, each one glistening golden snow against the sky: Rakaposhi, Pari, The Throne, Ultar.

At 6:30 I walked alone down the main street, exulting at the invigorating air, the head-clearing silence, and the aloof but somehow encouraging solitude, serenity, and strength of the mountains. The entire valley seemed a soul-lightening composition of bold, basic colors: green fields, pink blossoms, white peaks, blue sky.

The day passed in a kind of counterpoint of reflective solitude and entwining encounter. Wherever I wandered, I was met with smiles and waves, but I was also left free to simply roam and reflect.

At one point a man strode up to me and said, “How do you do? I am very happy to welcome you to Hunza. Would you like to see my house?”

He gently took my arm and led me to a plot of land that had been leveled, where a cinderblock dwelling was sitting in stately half-completion. “This,” he said proudly, “is my house.”

He took me through it room by room, pointing out the electrical outlets, the living room's airy view, and the kitchen with its fancy new fireplace.

At another point I saw two old men sitting by the side of the road, in toothless tranquility. A young boy was standing near them, and I asked him how old they were. He asked them, and they replied, “Eh?” He asked more loudly. Same response. He walked closer and asked in an even bigger voice. Same response. Finally, he walked up so close that he was shouting almost directly into one old man's nose. “Ah,” they responded, and then sang out some sentences.

“They are not sure,” the boy translated. “Maybe eighty, maybe ninety.” They smiled great toothless grins, and I asked if I could take their picture. I don't know what their answer was, but it sounded like, “Yes, of course, what took you so long? We have been waiting for you to ask us!”

Much later, after the others on our tour had returned from Nagar, three musicians bearing a horn and two drums arrived at the mir's palace and began to play on the lawn. Asad had arranged a dance for us, and as the primitive, pulsing music floated through the village's natural amphitheater, children began to gather from all corners; then grizzled men with canes and younger men carrying their work tools appeared as well.

First three elders in elaborate costumes presented a tale of some long-ago pilgrimage. Then two younger men with shields and swords enacted an epic battle. In the lull between performances, the children pushed and cajoled each other onto the grassy stage and danced.

Just as I was exclaiming at the wonder of witnessing this storytelling tradition that went back perhaps 2,000 years, a young man raced into the dancing area, his eyes bulging, and violently pushed away an old man who had been dancing. The children screamed and scattered.

This youth tore wildly around the grass a half-dozen times, then suddenly stopped and bent over the central drum, sweat streaming off his face, and began to call out words in a husky, disembodied voice.

“This one is a shaman,” Asad said. “He has been possessed by the spirit of the fairies, and is predicting the future.”

But the encounter that moved me most of all occurred earlier in the afternoon. I was returning to the mir's palace when I saw a man in his backyard crafting a beautiful wooden door. He was working slowly and carefully, and seemed so entirely absorbed that there was no separation between him and the wood he was shaping.

Suddenly he noticed me admiring his work and beckoned me to join him. I slid down a small hill to his home. He grinned. I grinned. I gestured that the door was very beautiful. He called out something, and presently a gorgeous young girl shyly walked up to me bearing a plate of apricots.

The apricots were sweet and delicious and I tried to say so. Then I pulled out some postcards of San Francisco and tried to communicate that it was where I came from. Finally I pulled out some pictures of my family and asked if I could take a picture of his family to bring home to show to my family.

His eyes lit up, and he called out something, and presently his family appeared—wife, teenage daughter, one baby, second baby, mother-in-law—peering out from inside the house. I asked if I could take their picture—not being able to take pictures of women had been one of the great frustrations of the trip—and he enthusiastically motioned me into the house.

It was too dark and I didn't have a flash, but I did have a chance to see the inside of a traditional Hunza house: We entered into the living room, which had a carpet and window at one end, a door leading into what I took to be a bedroom in another wall, a fireplace in the wall opposite the carpet and a hole in the ceiling above the fireplace, the perimeter of which had been blackened by smoke. Curtains of some rough cloth framed the window, but otherwise there was almost no ornamentation, nothing on the walls and no furniture save for one low chair.

After I had taken a photo inside, I asked if I might take their picture outside as well. They posed patiently and sweetly—the babies taking turns crying, drooling, and cooing—and when we had finished, the carpenter said something, and after a few minutes his elder daughter brought a plastic bag bulging with dried apricots and kernels.

These are for your family, he said, pointing to my pictures. I thanked him as profusely as I could, and handed him two of the San Francisco postcards I had brought. Please hang these on your wall, I said. He said thank you, then asked to have one of the pictures of my family as well. I hesitated—I didn't know what situation might arise where I would need those precious pictures—but he was so kind and friendly and I was so moved, I relented and gave him his choice.

He chose a Christmas picture of us standing in front of a brightly decorated tree and told me that he would hang it proudly on his wall between the two postcards of San Francisco. He then clasped my hand warmly and said two words that I later found out meant “family” and “brothers.”

Now, half a world away, I think of that singular encounter and a whole gallery of images comes to life within me: the sword-wielding shopkeeper in Swat, the immortal mountains, the shaman's frenzied dance.

I wonder if someday my daughter will journey to Hunza and find that same carpenter's house, and our photograph still on that rough wall. And I think that time flows backward and forward, and that once in a rare while—if you are lucky and it is cloudy enough to make you see beyond your preconceptions—you stumble onto a connection that transcends it all.

Part Three: The Epic of the KKH

The adventures intensified after our Contac-quaffing, Maalox-munching, cloud-weary group left Hunza for Gulmit and the hot showers and hearty food other travelers said we would find at the Silk Route Lodge. The journey north was uneventful—skitterish rocks and precipitous drops had become commonplace by now—until we reached an avalanche about ten minutes from Gulmit.

The avalanche had buried the road long enough ago that a plow had already cut a corridor through its twenty-foot-deep drifts, but our steel-nerved driver, Ali Muhammad, feared the van would lose traction on the icy path and sit there, sandwiched in the snow, a fat target for a second avalanche.

So Asad Esker, our Pakistani guide, set out on foot for Gulmit to get a tractor that could pull the van through, and Ali backed the van up to a point on the road that looked reasonably secure. And we sat and waited.

Waiting for an avalanche or rockslide to sweep us into oblivion quickly lost its appeal, so after a while I decided to set out on foot for Gulmit, too. There wasn't much chance of making a wrong turn—the nearest intersection was about four hours away.

Scrunch, scrunch, scrunch
went my feet, quickly along the snow-plowed path, then slowly when I reached the other side. There, beyond sight of the van, the notion of solitude took on a whole new, almost otherworldly dimension. It was just me and the mountains, and I tried to imagine what the traders and missionaries and adventurers who had wandered this way before me had felt.

Scrunch, scrunch, scrunch.

If I walk long enough, I thought, I'll reach the Chinese border. And if I keep walking after that, eventually this same road will take me to Kashgar, where right now wild-eyed mountain men are sizing up camels and crockery, bartering for boots and broadcloth.

Scrunch, scrunch, scrunch.

This is one of the most remote and desolate places I've ever been, I thought. If I were traveling alone, I would probably think I had come to the end of the Earth.

Then I took out my tape recorder and said: “It's not just that it's an inhospitable environment—which it certainly is—but also that you sense the forces of nature and time grinding on all around you, and you feel like a grain of sand on the slopes of one of the mountains.”