Where the Indus is Young (3 page)

However, many Pakistanis deny the ‘benevolence’ of Ayub’s régime and will accuse me – no doubt correctly – of being biased. I cannot deny feeling a natural sympathy for the Pathans, a deep admiration for what Ayub Khan tried to do and a great personal affection for his widow and family. He certainly made mistakes, but often these were based on military forthrightness and an impatience with the sort of humbuggery that distinguishes too many of the subcontinent’s more successful politicians. A good example of this sort of ‘mistake’ was his uncompromising commitment to Family Planning. He even appeared on television in an attempt to counteract a widespread campaign of anti-contraceptive rumours which was being cleverly organised by unidentified groups. Probably these groups were led by Muslim equivalents of Ireland’s more unsavoury bishops, whose fanaticism had been harnessed by Ayub’s political opponents. The President’s determination to lower Pakistan’s birthrate was a most valuable stick with which to beat him, in a country mainly populated by illiterate, gullible, hidebound peasants. Indeed, many observers believe that it contributed even more to his downfall than the charges of corruption – much publicised but never proved – that were
brought against his immediate family. At any rate, it is perhaps worth recording that one of India’s most distinguished public figures – a man full of years and wisdom – said to me in March 1974, shortly before the Field-Marshal’s death: ‘If only India had had one leader like Ayub Khan!’

To everybody’s relief, it rained heavily throughout our first night in Swat and until noon next day. After lunch Rachel and I explored under a grey sky patched with blue. As the cloud was not low we could enjoy the craggy mountain walls that enclose Saidu on three sides, but the snow-peaks to the north remained invisible. Near the Waliahad hundreds of flat-roofed stone and mud hovels cover the steep hillsides and between them run narrow alleyways or flights of steps. Purdah is strictly observed in Swat and because I looked male to local eyes our progress was marked by the scurrying indoors of numerous veiled figures, some of whom abandoned heavy
water-jars
in their flight. Even little giggling girls of eight or nine completely covered their faces while peeping at us around corners.

A deep, dry, stony nullah-bed wound between the slopes and was in a disgusting state; being a general dump and public latrine, it stank most abominably after the night’s rain. Having spent the previous winter in India, I caught myself constantly making odious
comparisons
– for instance, between the filth of many Muslim villagers and the scrupulous personal cleanliness of even the poorest-caste Hindu.

I spent that evening with the lively-minded Burkis, and as I was leaving Mrs Burki invited Rachel to play with her three children next day.

Back at the Waliahad the chowkidar in what used to be the
sentry-box
was still rapidly knitting, as he had been when I left five hours earlier. The men of Swat are keen knitters and at first one is slightly taken aback on seeing six-foot sentries standing with rifles over their shoulders and incessantly clicking needles in their huge hands. They turn out an endless number of sweaters, scarves, socks, caps and gloves for themselves and their families – an aspect of Pakistani life that Women’s Lib would surely applaud.

We woke next morning to a cloudless sky; thick frost sparkled on the burnt yellow lawn outside our window and a glorious glisten of new snow lay on the long, jagged line of the Himalayas, now clearly visible to the north. At nine o’clock I deposited Rachel on the Burkis, where I suspect she found the forceful Pathan young rather disconcerting after her malleable south Indian playmates of the previous winter. Then I spent a happy day climbing a mini-mountain, revisiting some of Swat’s Gandhara sites and gossiping around Mingora bazaar. Thirteen out of the fourteen English-speaking men with whom I discussed local politics were decisively pro-Wali and said so openly. I thought it an important point in favour of Mr Bhutto’s government that they felt free to criticise it thus to a total stranger.

An innovation called the Tourist Wagon Service has recently appeared on Pakistan’s roads. These fast minibuses, each seating eleven plus the driver, operate non-stop between cities and are used by the less poor Pakistanis rather than by tourists. Our tickets for the 112 mile journey to Peshawar cost Rs.16 (eighty pence), whereas the ordinary bus fare would have been Rs.4.50. As females we were entitled to the two roomy front seats beside the driver; in all Tourist Wagons these, and the back seat if necessary, form the Ladies’ Compartments.

When we left Mingora the valley looked superb in sparkling
sunshine
, with autumn colours still glowing on poplars, elms, birches and planes. Under a cloudless sky the Swat river was a gay ribbon of blue, tossed across the landscape, and hundreds of multi-coloured goats were grazing on the tawny mountainsides. We met three buses coming up the Malakand Pass on the wrong side, their roofs piled with a singing, waving overflow of passengers and their wheels inches from lethal drops as they swung around hairpin bends. Our driver seemed to keep his right hand permanently out of the window, in order to squeeze his bulbous rubber horn; no doubt he reckoned that negotiating such bends without a horn would be even more dangerous than steering with one hand.

In my first book,
Full Tilt,
I described Peshawar as being ‘like an English city with a few water-buffaloes and vultures and lizards
thrown in’. Those words were written the day I came over the Khyber Pass, after months of cycling through the remoter regions of Persia and Afghanistan. But in 1974, having come straight from the fleshpots of Karachi, Islamabad, Pindi and Saidu, I found this ‘Paris of the Pathans’ – Lowell Thomas’s phrase – a very special place. It seemed less a city in the modern sense than an agglomeration of medieval bazaars inhabited by attractive rough diamonds of many races. It is one of the three Pathan cities – the others are Kandahar and
Jellala-bad
, in Afghanistan – and since my first visit it has become one of the hippies’ main junctions.

In 1963 the great eastward Hippy Migration had not yet started and
Full Tilt
has frequently been accused of increasing its
momentum
, which suggestion troubles my conscience more than it flatters my vanity when I see groups of drugged wrecks dragging themselves around Asia. However, Peshawar’s attitude to strangers has been only slightly modified by the hippy influence. Pesh Awar means ‘Frontier Town’ and for at least 4,000 years this city has been dealing with invaders of many types. The hippies are merely a source of local amusement – and of course profit, for the many drug-peddlers in the bazaars.

We stayed on the outskirts of Peshawar with the Khanzadas, who in 1963 had entertained me at their Abbottabad home and nursed me through a devastating attack of dysentery. But having been unable, from Saidu, to warn Begum Khanzada of our arrival, we spent our first night in a doss-house.

By five-fifteen it was dark and beneath a gold-flecked sky we set off through crisp frosty air to explore some of the ancient bazaars. Rachel was enthralled as we wandered from one narrow, dimly-lit alleyway to another. Above us loomed tall stone and wood houses, centuries old, and we passed butchers and bakers and candlestickmakers (literally: one coppersmith was at work on a candlestick). Often we paused to watch men weighing huge chunks of marble, or carving wood or mending transistors or cobbling shoes or beating brass or tailoring shirts – all by the light of lanterns hanging from the roofs of their little stalls. A flour-covered baker gave us a length of hot
nan
from his underground mud oven, and we were invited into one
eating-house for juicy kebabs, and into another for small bowls of delicious tangy curds, and into two primitive tea-houses for little red and blue china pots of green tea –
gahura
, the Pathans’ national drink – which filled me with an almost unbearable longing for Afghanistan. As we sat cross-legged on filthy matting in one
teahouse
a small boy came strolling up the alleyway, noticed us, hesitated a moment, and then stood on tiptoe to hand up to Rachel a glorious pink rose bud, about to unfold. Before we could thank him he had disappeared into the surrounding shadows, his impulsive gesture having completed the perfection of our evening.

A few days later we returned to Pindi to see how flights to the Northern Areas were faring. ‘No hope for you until the sixteenth,’ I was told. ‘Weather’s been terrible this past week.’

As I turned away from the counter a young Punjabi army officer, stationed in Skardu, suggested that if I were to exert a little pressure the waiting-list might be cooked. I was uncertain what sort of pressure he meant – whether moral or financial – but I did not doubt that my debonair PIA friend would be genuinely insulted if offered a bribe. In any case, looking around at all the wretched men who had been stuck down-country for weeks, and were longing to get back to their families, I felt it would be unforgivable to jump this queue.

We spent the next three days in Islamabad, as guests of Begum Ayub Khan. This was only seven months after the Field-Marshal’s death and his family were still mourning a beloved husband and father. Begum Ayub vividly reminded me of my own mother after my father’s death. My mother, too, was a woman of exceptional fortitude; and though such people tend not to give way outwardly to grief, its effects are all the more lasting for that.

The Ayubs’ spacious new house is on the extreme north-eastern edge of Islamabad. Just behind it lie green, rounded hills, on which patches of light-brown earth or grey rock make an irregular pattern, and behind them rises the high blue ridge of the Murree Hills. We found the house and garden full of sons, daughters,
in-laws
, grandchildren, nephews, nieces and various unidentified relatives from the village. Yet Begum Ayub’s motherly hospitality
is so boundless that within those walls we felt not merely accepted but cherished.

Aurangzeb and Naseem live about a mile away, down a long straight road bordered on one side by the homes of diplomats or rich Pakistanis and on the other by miles of open scrubland. Over this wide expanse at the foot of the mountains are scattered the National Assembly buildings, the Prime Minister’s residence-
cum-government
-offices, the Bank of Pakistan’s Headquarters, a colossal United Nations building, a colony of suburban villas for the British Embassy staff – looking as though it had strayed from Bexhill-on-Sea – and several of the larger embassies, including the Russian, Canadian, British and Chinese.

I remember cycling past Islamabad while it was being built and thinking how frightful it would soon look – another Chandigarh. But in fact Pakistan’s new capital is an agreeable place of wide, bright boulevards, many trees, brilliant gardens, no high-risery and much attractive domestic architecture that is original without being ‘
way-out
’. Despite its official status it feels like an elegant, cosmopolitan suburb of Pindi – some fifteen miles away, but very close in spirit – and one hopes it will remain so. When Ayub Khan planned it he specified ‘no industrial development nearby’ but his successors may have cruder ideas.

A more immediate threat than industry is basic Asian squalor; it does not take the Orient very long to impress itself on the latest in Occidental architecture and town planning. Islamabad is disfigured by too many areas from which builders’ rubble was never cleared and where men squat around relieving themselves in the shadow of imposing banks, embassies and shopping arcades. Even amidst the diplomatic residences some corners are piled with rubbish and occasional houses already show symptoms of jerry-building, while throughout the less affluent quarters squalor is gaining fast. In ancient Asian cities this sort of thing seems tolerable – even picturesque – but there is something peculiarly unprepossessing about disintegrating new buildings. And inevitably Islamabad has its beggars, though far fewer than any Indian city I know. These piteous bundles lie on the ground, hidden by a thin sheet of filthy
cotton or a ragged burkah, and one would never suspect their humanity but for a stick-like arm and motionless begging palm outstretched on the pavement beside the fine new buildings of a new country with very old problems.

Tourist Wagons constantly ply between Islamabad and Pindi; passengers get on and off anywhere they like at either end, or in between, and pay a fixed rate of one rupee per ride. One rarely has to wait more than a few minutes before being picked up, but if a bus is almost empty its driver may cruise around the streets for half an hour, filling enough seats to justify a journey. Even when one starts out from the most swinging quarter of Islamabad, most women come aboard wearing burkahs. To discover what sort of person is sitting beside you it is necessary to study the hand that will soon appear to grip the dashboard bar as the driver swings recklessly around corners. From that hand and its adornments quite a lot may be deduced about the age, physique, social status and approximate ethnic origins of the shapeless figure lurking silently within those folds of (usually black) cotton or nylon.

Despite their looking so spick and span, these buses, like most Asian vehicles, will accommodate on the roof virtually anything that is capable of somehow being hauled up there. Enormous bales of hay and bundles of firewood, pyramids of stainless steel
cooking-pots
, trussed-up, frantically bleating goats, a plastic kitchen table, a day-old buffalo calf, a sack of wheat, two geese in a wooden crate – up they all go, and are deftly secured to the roof-rack by the driver’s mate, who is usually a good-natured adolescent anxious to help everybody. Rachel’s favourite Islamabad anecdote concerns a goat belonging to one woman passenger who got at a bale of hay belonging to another woman passenger. When the goat’s perfidy was revealed, on our arrival at Pindi, the two women exposed their faces, the better to tear each other’s eyes out, and order was not restored until a passing mullah, outraged by this display of nudity, belaboured both with his walking-stick.