For my last four years in Pakistan we lived at the
quaintly named House 10, Street 1, E7. Two months ago a bomb exploded 100 yards
from the house, killing four people; about 1,500 have been killed this year in
terrorist attacks. It’s hardly a tourist destination these days so I’m surprised
to find that the flights are all full. I am an aerophobe; my real fear is
getting there. The only direct flight is on PIA, otherwise known as Please
Inform Allah. British Airways stopped flying there after the Marriott bomb
attack in Islamabad last September. As I’m packing, my London neighbour, the
comedian Patrick Kielty, drops off a parcel containing The Complete Worst-Case
Scenario Survival Handbook with a note pointing out the pages on how to escape
when tied up, how to take a bullet and how to survive if you wake up next to
someone whose name you don’t remember.
I arrive in Islamabad at
3am on a Sunday. With everything that’s going on in Pakistan these days —
violent civil war in the northwest, 2.5m internally displaced people, a
separatist uprising in Baluchistan, a hostile neighbour, corruption, recession,
inflation, unemployment —I’m surprised anyone has the energy for swine flu
paranoia, particularly as Pakistan is strictly a pork-free zone. Yet before
disembarking we are obliged to fill out two forms. Recent proximity to pigs
and/or Mexicans will result in an obligatory spell in quarantine. It must be the
name of the virus that’s causing alarm.
Pakistanis dislike pigs.
Until quite recently my children thought the word for pig was “gunda-pig” (dirty
pig). The wild boar in Lahore zoo is squished into a cage so minute it can’t
scratch its own back and people throw stones at it. I’m staying with Imran, my
ex-husband, and our children in the house I helped to design but which we never
lived in together. It’s on top of a hill outside Islamabad. The courtyard
fountain is a reminder of the insanity of political life in Pakistan, even on
the periphery. It’s covered in the exquisite blue and white Multani tiles that
almost landed me in jail in 1999. I bought them as a present for my mother but,
before they reached the port to be shipped to England, they were impounded and I
was charged with smuggling antiques (they weren’t, according to Bonhams and
other experts here), a non-bailable offence. I was pregnant and scarpered to
England until there was a military coup six months later by the then friendly
dictator, General Musharraf.
The case was dropped, the tiles were
released and I returned to Pakistan with an extra child in tow. Had I been an
aspiring politician, I’d have stayed put in Pakistan. A spell in jail is a
prerequisite for anyone wanting to be taken seriously in politics. My
ex-husband, who heads a political party, was jailed two years ago for treason
and his popularity soared, according to Gallup polls. I should have considered
this when campaigning vigorously for his release.
Islamabad was
once considered an ideal family posting for foreign diplomats, green and clean
and offering an easy life, if a little dull. Now, to get to my friend Asma’s
house in an affluent area of the city, I have to go through four security
checkpoints manned by armed police. We drink chai, feast on samosas and gupchup
(gossip); but we mostly discuss the political situation and how dire it all is.
The next day I set off for the refugee camps close to the Swat valley, where the
army is fighting the Taliban. Before I leave, Imran’s chowkidar (watchman) tells
me that the newspapers in Pakistan are all funded by Yehudis (Jews). His
Kalashnikov-toting commando — it’s the first time Imran has felt the need to
have security — nods, adding that there are no Taliban. They are a fabrication
by Jews and Hindus to destabilise Pakistan. He adjusts his belt of bullets.
Pakistan pulsates with conspiracy theories. One, which has made it into the
local newspapers, is that the Taliban when caught and stripped were revealed to
have been “intact, not Muslims”, a euphemism for uncircumcised. (Pakistanis are
big on euphemisms.) Their beards were stuck on with glue. “Foreign elements”
(India) are suspected.
Jalala camp between Mardan and Mingora is
the first point of refuge for those escaping the military operation in Swat.
It’s full to capacity: 80% of internally displaced persons are children.
Thousands have been separated from their parents when fleeing their homes. Two
children are fighting over coloured crayons when I arrive. A girl with blistered
burns on her face from the sun shouts at a small boy who turns out to be her
brother: “If you don’t give them back to me I’ll tell the Taliban and they’ll
cut your throat.”
According to the teacher in the camp, every
child has witnessed public beheadings. Eight-year-old Amina explains quietly
from behind her teacher how she saw her uncle’s stomach gouged out by the
Taliban. Another girl’s mother was shot for not being in purdah. And another was
shot at with her family when she was walking outside during the curfew.
Seven-year-old Bisma, I’m told, has seen all the male members of her family
hanged in what has become known as Bloody Square. She doesn’t speak. The
children are equally afraid of the army. There’s a joke going around: “What’s
worse than being ruled by the Taliban? Being saved by the Pakistani army.” When
the chief minister landed in a helicopter next to the camp a few days ago, I’m
told, the children fled screaming in terror to their tents. A group of small
children are drawing pictures, part of an art therapy programme run by Unicef in
its child-friendly spaces within the camps. Here traumatised children can play
volleyball, sing songs and be read stories in shaded safety. A boy called Salman
hands me a precisely drawn and signed picture of a Kalashnikov. A shy
eight-year-old girl sitting cross-legged next to him, with her grubby green
dupatta half obscuring her smile, offers me hers of a helicopter shelling a
village. “That’s my house,” she says, pointing to some scribbled rubble. Their
schools and homes have been destroyed. All have had relatives killed. An
orphanage in Mingora was caught in the crossfire when soldiers based themselves
on the roof of the building with 200children trapped inside. After an hour and a
half in the camp we are asked to leave for security reasons. Apparently the
Taliban have been infiltrating, trying to recruit supporters.
There’s certainly support for the Taliban in the camps. They
represent, for many, an opposing force to an army that “drones” (it’s now a verb
here) its own people. America’s war on terror, supported by the Pakistani army,
is unanimously viewed here as a war on Islam. Newborn twins have been named Sufi
Mohammad and Fazlullah after the two militant leaders in Swat.
The
following day I drive to Lahore. We take the M2 motorway. (There is no M1.) It’s
expensive to take this route and lorries are banned. As a result it must be the
most underused motorway in the world. As I approach Lahore I get a text from
Imran: “Don’t panic. There’s been a big bomb blast just now.” The Pakistani
Taliban claim responsibility for the deaths of 30 people. The next call is from
my mother who has converted worry into crossness.
Compared with
the tranquility and solitude of Imran’s mountain-top idyll, Lahore is mayhem.
The sky is a tangled mess of electrical wires, the buildings are half built or
half falling down. There is no respite from the 42C heat or the incessant
traffic noise, which worsens at night. My mobile phone stops working and I
complain that it has melted, but everyone laughs at me. Lahoris are the most
telephonically dependent people I’ve met. It’s the first time I’ve been to
Lahore since I left Pakistan six years ago; and it’s where I shared a house for
the first five years of my marriage with Imran’s father, his two sisters, their
husbands and their children, 16 of us in total.
Imran’s father
died last year and I’m here to offer condolences, a cultural imperative. It
involves visiting the bereaved, in this case my former sisters-in-law, and
offering a formal prayer in Arabic, arms extended, palms open, for the deceased.
I’m nervous as I haven’t had any contact with them — bar my Facebook friendship
with the children — since getting divorced, but everyone is exceptionally warm
and welcoming.
I cry when I hug Imran’s niece, who was 13 when I
first arrived in Lahore but is now married with a baby.
I’m
staying at the haveli (mansion) of Imran’s old schoolfriend, Yousaf Salahuddin,
in Lahore’s old city. He is known mostly by reputation, although that’s not
necessarily an exclusive club in this conservative city. You need only to read
Salman Rushdie’s Shame to understand how important honour (izzat) and reputation
are — although I shouldn’t really write that. The last time I admitted to having
read Rushdie (for my university dissertation on post-colonial literature), I had
a thousand placard-waving beards outside my door and adverts in the papers,
calling me an apostate and demanding that my citizenship be revoked. Yousaf is
Lahore’s best host, tirelessly generous and entertaining. His house is a dusty
jewel hidden in a tiny alleyway in what was once Lahore’s red-light district,
known as the Heera Mandi. It is now inhabited mostly by cobblers and paan
sellers. The haveli is one of the few existing traditional houses built in red
brick around a central courtyard. Cherie Blair, Mick Jagger and Elizabeth Hurley
have all been guests here. Once a politician in Benazir Bhutto’s government,
Yousaf is now a music producer and fashion aficionado. He has girlfriends —
plenty and young — he smokes, he serves alcohol in his home, he loves music and
models and he parties with Lollywood’s glitterati. He also has a deep knowledge
of Sufism and is a passionate supporter of restoration work in the old city.
Like everyone here he likes to opine: where Pakistan has gone wrong,
where politicians have gone wrong, where the interpreters of Islam have gone
wrong, where Imran has gone wrong and, by the end of our stay, where I’ve gone
wrong. He also loves to eat, usually after midnight. JP, a film-maker friend, is
here to research a film about Pakistan. We head for tea with Iqbal Hussein, who
paints dancing girls from the red-light district for a living. His mother was a
prostitute. As we arrive he is packing up his paints. His models, two gypsy
sisters, one clutching a baby, are sitting quietly motionless on a mattress in a
dark, windowless back room in his studio. Every half an hour in Pakistan there’s
“load shedding”, when the electricity cuts out. We sit in candlelight in the
thick, still heat and the girls sing classical songs, using upturned metal cups
as instruments. Chewing betel nut, they giggle and reveal red-stained teeth. We
cheer and clap and chuck rupees in appreciation. I’m starting to feel sick and
dizzy from the heat. Everyone’s face is coated in sweat, strands of hair stick
to the girls’ faces as they sing, but nobody else seems bothered. Finally they
take pity on me and we retreat prematurely to the dark, fabric-swathed,
air-conditioned inner sanctum of Yousaf’s haveli and stay there until nightfall
when the old city begins to wake up.
Yousaf has invited a qawwali
singer, Ustad Rahat Fateh Ali Khan, a huge star, to perform privately for us in
his smoky underground music chamber. Rahat’s family have been qawwali singers
for 600 years, the skill passed down from generation to generation. He shows me
a video on his mobile phone of his five-year-old son performing qawwali. He has
been training the child since he was two. The little boy sits cross-legged on a
chintzy sofa, raises his tiny palms to heaven imploringly, closes his eyes and
starts to sing, smashing his hands back down on make-believe tublas and throwing
his head back in mock ecstasy with all the passion and panache of his ancestors.
We’re joined by Iman Ali — or “monster” as Yousaf calls her — one of Pakistan’s
most famous models/actresses. She’s dressed in tight jeans, a sleeveless top and
kitten heels. I’m in what I’d always thought was the obligatory billowing white
cotton. She’s extremely opinionated even for this ready-steady-rant society,
prefacing each pronouncement with, “Well what would I know? I’m just a dumb
model but . . .” She’s very bold and at times perspicacious, especially about
religion. She tells us that Indians are all “cry babies” and Muslims would do
better to be cry babies, too, and that way gain equal levels of sympathy abroad.
I like her forthrightness. She says things others wouldn’t dare to say here,
albeit euphemistically. She questions how it is that she is the most successful
celebrity in Pakistan and yet the poorest. Then she answers herself: “They must
have other sources of income.” JP looks perplexed. “Illegit,” she enlightens.
Pakistani actresses and models have traditionally emerged from the red-light
area. They must have “friends”, she adds for good measure. Dosti (friendship) is
a euphemism for cliX-Spam-Subject: YES ent, while shadi (marriage) means sex
with a client.
I return to the calm of the capital, scoop up my
cricket-fatigued boys at 2.30am and head to Islamabad airport — now renamed
Benazir Bhutto International by her widower, the president. We join the end of a
20-coil queue that snakes from the car park towards the distant terminal. The
airport was the first glimpse I had of Pakistan all those years ago. It’s the
country I feel I grew up in and was a part of, arriving at 20 and emerging a
decade later a more questioning and conflicted person. I am still maddened by
its faults but I bristle and become defensive if others criticise.
As we’re jostled along towards the check-in area, I think about
Pakistani society. It is an endless contradiction — hostile and hospitable,
euphemistic and unambiguous, spiritual and prescriptive, aggressor and victim.
Nothing sums up its topsy-turvy nature quite like the Heera Mandi in Lahore, one
of the most conservative cities, where the prostitutes wear burqas and girls
with honour dress like Wags
Saddened to hear of Col Shukla's demise. Remember him and our association with his family in Banglore (PMO Plan Aren) very fondly. An upright officer who was an exemplary soldier. Reena stayed with for a while to appear for her exams and endeared herself with all of us and became part of the family. We pray for his soul and the family..Rani ji, Reena and Ankur. Ajay Nad Kalpana Madan
ReplyDeleteExtremely saddened to hear about the passing away of Brig V P Kushwaha. He was a Technical Graduate who passed out from IMA with us. Always jovial and cooperative, remember him as a competent person and a delight to interact with.
ReplyDeleteश्रन्धांजलि
Very sad to learn about the demise of Col MS Chauhan. We had a long association and particularly I still cherish his welcoming us in Gangtok in 1985 when I took over as Officiating Co 27 Mtn Div Sig Regt.
ReplyDeleteMay the Almighty grant peace to the departed soul and give strength to the family to bear the loss.
Col D P Gupta