Among the Believers (34 page)

So now, seeing them as the poor and the unrepresented, and not as people wearing a certain kind of costume or having a certain cast of features, I considered the labourers, the herdsmen, and the idle people watching the log-loading, above the green-and-white river. And something of Masood’s gloom and the jeep driver’s hysteria touched me.

I said, “What will happen to these people?”

Masood said, “God alone knows.”

Later he said, “
Nothing
will happen.
What
will happen?” And later still, after a flock of dyed sheep picked its way past us, grinding the fine dust finer, causing it to rise, colouring his white skullcap and greying his walrus moustache, Masood said, looking down into the river, “They have empty hands. They don’t have guns.
Millions
will have to die.” And that was not rebellion speaking; that was despair. “Do you know how many political parties there are in this country? There are ninety-four political parties in this country.
What
can happen?”

I said, “When did you start getting worried about the future?”

“Nineteen seventy-one.” That was the year of Bangladesh. “No, I think it was before. I think I started worrying about the future in matriculation.”

Masood had misunderstood my question. I had asked about Pakistan. But he was so choked by his own anxieties that he had taken the question to refer to himself. He had taken the question to be a continuation of our talk the previous evening.

The jeep driver was sitting on the hillside, knees up, white-trousered legs apart, watching the loaders.

Masood said, “I used to do tuitions. I used to get four hundred rupees a month for that. But I had to stop. The parents of the children treated me like a servant. They never treated me like a teacher. If I had to get to the house at four and got there at five, they made trouble. If their children failed they blamed me.”

Money, his career, his family: after the previous evening, these were the topics to which Masood returned.

He said, “My father now asks himself why he came. ‘Why did I come? Where is the dignity I thought I was coming to?’ ” But that, as I had felt before, was only half true. Masood’s father, the Muslim army sergeant, migrating to Pakistan in 1947, had found the dignity he had wanted in 1947.

The truck was loaded at last. The heavy logs were beaten into place with staves, and ropes were twisted tight around the logs. The truck moved off. The red Suzuki minibus moved off. We followed, after a tussle with the opposing traffic that had also built up.

We stopped at the town of Jared. It was famous for its woodcarving. But the examples I saw were poor—wooden daggers, trays, ashtrays: poor design, poor carving. Masood bought a walnut ashtray for
fifteen rupees. Clearly there was once a tradition; now the absence of skill, eye, judgement, was like part of the human desolation.

We passed the truck with the logs again, and then again we were behind the little red Suzuki. We ate their dust.

All at once there appeared to be some kind of commotion at the back of the Suzuki. Someone was hurled out onto the road. And then someone else was thrown out.

I said, “They are throwing people out of the bus.”

Masood said, “A fight.”

The Suzuki was moving on. But then it stopped. We avoided the first man; he was uninjured, and on his feet again. Then we passed a young boy or man—his slack, string-tied trousers opened, his genitals exposed—lying on the road. People from the bus were already running up to him. We passed the Suzuki—there was no one in the driver’s seat—and stopped about a hundred yards ahead, where the road widened.

I didn’t want to see blood. I was glad our driver had stopped where he had. What had happened wasn’t clear. But the Suzuki’s windscreen was smashed, and on the steep hillside above was the explanation: a herd of goats, part of the migration, wandering off the road. They had dislodged a stone; the stone had smashed the windscreen and wounded the driver. For some seconds the Suzuki would have been out of control on the mountain road. That was no doubt when one of the passengers at the back had thrown himself out. Then the wounded driver had fallen out; and someone, perhaps the man beside the driver, had brought the Suzuki to a halt.

The driver was now being lifted, to be brought to our jeep. And our jeep driver was climbing, sure-footedly (he was a man of the region), up the rocky slope to where the goats and their herdsman were, high above the road. What was our driver doing? Why the haste? The answer was simple: it was to knock the herdsman about, to beat and drive him down to the road.

The quaint tribesman, the man driving his flocks down to their winter pasture, was now only someone very small and vulnerable. He was hit about the face and abused by our driver. His black turban—his dignity—fell loose from his bald head, became a dingy length of cotton; and he was pushed and punched all the way down, leaving his precious goats behind. There, on the road, various people from the Suzuki took runs at him and punched him and then ran back to where they had been
standing. Then anger came to them again, and they ran up again to the old herdsman—crying and, without his turban, looking as small as a child—and beat him about the head and chest.

I said to Masood, “They’re going to kill that man.”

Masood said, “No. They’re going to stop beating him now. You see, they’ve put him in the bus. Now they’re going to take him to the police station.”

But it had been an accident. And what about the man’s goats? But it was the custom of the place; Masood saw nothing to object to. Yet our jeep driver had spoken so feelingly about the poor. The poor were his fellows, people of the valley; outsiders were not among his poor.

They brought the Suzuki driver to our jeep. He was unconscious. One man held him in his arms in the front seat. Masood and I sat on the back seat; the jeep driver’s boy held on to the back of the jeep. The wounded man wasn’t bleeding.

Masood said, “His wounds are internal. They say it was a very big stone that fell down and hit him as he was driving.”

I had thought, seeing him half exposed on the road, that he was a boy or a very young man. I saw now that he was older; that he was very thin, with a face and body shrunken from undernourishment. He remained unconscious. The man cradling him spoke to him softly, as to a child. But the wounded man never replied, never opened his eyes.

We drove as fast as we could down the Kaghan Valley to Balakot, beside the Kunhar gorge, the lines of the hills, the tall pines, the terracings of maize, the flat-roofed houses. From time to time Masood or the jeep driver felt the unconscious man’s cheek with the back of a hand. They said he was alive; but he never stirred or made a noise.

For an hour or so we drove. And when we got to Balakot, to the little grey hospital, there were only children in the yard, and no one came out to take the wounded man. The doctor had gone to Peshawar; the compounder was in Mansehra. It was to Mansehra that the wounded man had to be taken. But that was no longer our responsibility; we had to surrender our jeep.

And the responsibility of the jeep driver was also at an end. There was nothing more he could do. He had worked himself up into a political passion; he had expressed this passion in his persecution of the Afghan herdsman, his tenderness towards the wounded man. But his solicitude—and his sense of drama—could not survive the long, exacting
mountain drive to Balakot. When we left him there—handsome, idle—he was like a man enervated and empty.

We drove away—in our borrowed car and with our borrowed driver—through the late afternoon and early evening. After the mountains, the land was softer, drier, with more varied vegetation.

Neither Masood nor I spoke much. There was little to say. Masood’s troubles made him heavy, made neutral conversation difficult.

The bicycles on the road carried no lights. The buses and trucks often had no lights at the back, because there was no point in lighting up where you had been. The horse carriages had no lights at all.

I said, with sudden irritation, “They have no lights.”

Masood said, flatly, “They have no lights.”

I set him down on the Peshawar road—Peshawar, the military town to the west, in the flat, wide valley leading to the Khyber Pass and another part of Afghanistan.

  9
Agha Babur

I
n Rawalpindi the newspapers carried news of government cuts. Six ministries were to be wound up. There were to be economies in Baluchistan: no new jobs were to be created, and there were to be no salary rises for people in jobs. Twenty-nine officials of the Weights and Measures Department were to be dismissed. The
Pakistan Times
said that the officials concerned had “urged the government to provide them alternative jobs to save them and their families from mental agony and starvation in these days of high prices.” According to
The Muslim
, however, the officials had asked only to be relieved of “mental agony and frustration.”

The minibuses that plied between Rawalpindi and Islamabad had gone on a one-day strike to protest against police harassment. The bus
drivers told the newspapers that the police wanted higher bribes. The police said the drivers had been “misbehaving” with passengers.

Thirty-four teachers told
The Muslim
that they hadn’t been able to leave for their jobs in Oman in southeast Arabia because the emigration authorities in Pakistan had raised questions about the teachers’ “no-objection” certificates. In the same issue of
The Muslim
there was an investigative report about the high costs of an extension to a government-run tourist inn in the far north: a job that should have taken seven months had taken five years.

In the
Pakistan Times
a retired army man wrote an article about indiscipline. “It is now openly acknowledged that ours is a corrupt society, practising every conceivable social evil imaginable. Children growing up in a domestic atmosphere where smuggling, black-marketing, hoarding, bribery and corruption … are indulged in quite blatantly, should not be expected to accept discipline in any form. When these children go to the educational institutions, they naturally try to project the home atmosphere there.…” The solution was a greater firmness, “an iron hand,” in the schools (no politics to be allowed there) and in the courts. “Imprisonment, flogging and even capital punishment will do the needful.”

On the wider subject of the Pakistan crisis there was an urgent leader-page article in
The Muslim
by A. H. Kardar, the former cricket captain of Pakistan, and an Oxford man. “We look back in shame and anger at the utter lack of homework and preparedness of political leaders and administrators vis-à-vis economic issues … shame and anger at the ever-increasing shipload of imports of foodgrains.…” What—after this passion—was his solution? Nothing concrete. Only, less politics; and a little more of what had gone before. “Clearly, the choice is between materialism and its inseparable nationally divisive political manifestoes, and the Word of God.”

With all this there was a review in the
Pakistan Times
of an Arts Council art exhibition. The artist was Hameed Sagher. It was his first show; and the reviewer was at once frank and tender.

“As one enters the aged hall of the Council’s premises, and treads the wooden floor, the eye is caught by a number of bright panels and the mind is gripped by conflicting reaction to these panels. There is a bewildering variety of techniques and styles.… To understand all that
variety of styles, some of them clash with each other, one has to know a few things about the artist. Hameed Sagher was poet for some time. Then he started the vocation of art in the commercial field with a professional experience as his guide. He has no formal training as an artist.… As a poet he is fascinated by ideas. As an artist he has to capture those ideas in colours and he feels inspired by the provocative ideas of his friends. He therefore has developed a tension with which he illustrates his ideas rather vehemently and sometimes rather obviously.…

“His ‘Intellect’ looks a head on fire. The panel captioned as ‘Struggle’ in pastels is hands with fire emanating from them. ‘The Movement’ is another rendering a political struggle in flames and smoke. Somewhere in patches the cool green tends to disturb the fiery impact of figures on fire. ‘The Pray’ is hands in supplication, with big eyes looking in between and minaret with birds around it.… The bright colours, the movement and the tension hold out a promise. With more experience, and less of economic pressures, Hameed Sagher is bound to emerge as a significant artist.”

The exhibition was in the Freemasons’ hall. The Freemasons had been banned a few years before as a Zionist organization (and also, I was told, because they exalted Solomon above all other prophets); and their hall had been taken over by the Arts Council.

It was in the street at the back of Flashman’s Hotel, a street of shawl-sellers and carpet-sellers and cloth-sellers. It was a solid brick building of the British period—Public Works Department style—with a lawn, a semicircular drive, arched windows, and a portico. On the pediment of the portico was still the Freemason emblem of the two dividers, like an unfinished star. (Rawalpindi was full of these usurpations, these reminders of expulsions and the cleansed land. The president’s house had belonged to a Sikh; Poonch House, one of the palaces of the Hindu maharaja of Kashmir, was due for demolition.)