Full Tilt (27 page)

This morning Naseem telephoned and invited me to the President’s House – where she and Aurang Zeb stay on their visits to Pindi – for dinner this evening. In honour of the occasion I then took myself off to the city’s leading hairdresser and spent 5
s
. instead of the usual 1
s
. 6
d
. on a devastating hair-cut which has so transformed me that I get a shock every time I pass a mirror. Next my hostess and her three daughters passed what was for them a most enjoyable afternoon, equipping me with clothes appropriate to the Presidential Presence. Admittedly my wardrobe is unequal to that demand; at the time of writing it comprises Aurang Zeb’s cast-off army slacks, my new shorts and two khaki shirts. Drastic measures were undoubtedly
called for, but as Begum Ghawas and her daughters came up with garment after garment I began to wonder if they need be
quite
so drastic … Yet the end product was worth it all – you wouldn’t have recognised me! In fact the President’s household is the essence of simplicity as I knew from a previous visit, but the family’s pleasure on seeing me in their national costume made the afternoon’s sartorial marathon seem well worth while.

President Ayub doesn’t live on the grand scale of the wealthiest Pakistanis; his domestic surroundings are more like those of the average army officer, with a comfortable but plainly furnished home where good, but not exotic, food is served. The man himself impressed me as being shrewd, honest, kind, and above all, utterly sincere.
However
, like many strong characters who are fighting a non-stop battle against widespread evils, he possesses a steely quality which doesn’t make for easy approachability and since I’m unaccustomed to
consorting
with Heads of States I was myself rather more tongue-tied than usual this evening.

After breakfast Aurang Zeb called and took me to a most interesting debate of the National Assembly where I was promoted from the Distinguished Strangers’ Gallery to solitary glory in the President’s Box! Again I was impressed by the complete freedom of speech in the Assembly. Members may criticise as bluntly as they wish the régime in general and President Ayub in particular, and many members today were doing just that. I should think that a student of politics would be fascinated by the political scene here, which shows democracy at the crawling stage, before it has found its feet and begun to toddle.

Looking around the Assembly (which included four women members) I was struck by the complexities of trying to run a country like Pakistan as a united nation. The members ranged from
near-communists
through liberal Muslims to fanatically orthodox Mullahs; from white-skinned Pathans through brown-skinned Punjabis to almost black-skinned Bengalis; from wealthy hereditary princes like
Aurang Zeb through moderately well-off professional men to destitute representatives of the city slums; from men who spoke flawless Oxford English through men whose grammar and pronunciation were questionable to men who could only speak pidgin-English. And in the restaurant at the 11 a.m. interval the air was chaotic with Pushto, Urdu, Bengali, Punjabi and English, while the members (clad as variously as they spoke) sat arguing over their tea or coffee. Theoretically the unifying element here should be Islam but Pakistan’s years of exposure to Western influence have brought her religion to a crisis of
reinterpretation
, so that it tends to disrupt at least as much as it unites, while individual citizens battle to adapt it to what they believe is best for the country, or to defend it from any change.

After so many hours in the blissful coolness of the new
air-conditioned
Assembly building it was quite nightmarish to step out into 108° in the shade at 1.30 p.m. Aurang Zeb took me back to the President’s House where Naseem, he and I lunched together and where I had my two-hour siesta before being driven off in an
air-conditioned
state Chevrolet to meet an Indian journalist with whom I had an appointment. Poor Roz! I have to admit that air-conditioned Chevrolets are more suitable in present temperatures.

This Kashmir deadlock is a heart-breaking muddle and somehow all such muddles are made more muddled nowadays by the politicians’ new weapon of mass-communication, which doesn’t give international sores a chance to heal up but keeps re-infecting them. The Indian journalist to whom I talked this afternoon was a perfect example of just how terrifyingly irresponsible journalists can be when they want to give their public only what it wishes to read – or what its rulers wish it to read – and when objective truth is therefore utterly disregarded. Of course a certain section of the Pakistani press and radio uses exactly the same tactics of distortion and deception against India.

I had dinner with the Shahid Hamids, where the Aurang Zebs were fellow-guests. It was an enjoyable evening, but all the time I felt sad underneath, because tomorrow I leave Pindi and in a few days I leave Pakistan. At midnight the Aurang Zebs drove me home and I said
au
revoir
(I hope) to the best friends I have made en route.

What a name for a city! I’m staying in Farhat’s rooms in the Lady Willingdon Hospital, which is beside the busy red-light district so I now know it only needs an ‘s’ to make it true.

The Pakistani Railways must be a charitable organisation: they took Roz and me the 170 miles from Pindi in five hours for 3
s
. 6
d
. The third-class carriage was quite comfortable, with fans and very nice fellow-travellers who, as usual, insisted on buying me so many Pepsis that I almost blew up. They also wanted to feed me the atrocious little tid-bits which are fried and sold on every platform; a fortnight ago in Gilgit I’d have given all I possessed for one of them but today my stomach somersaulted at the very sight of those greasy balls. So then they pressed me to have some of the fly-blown sweetmeats which are also hawked at each stop, and when I persisted in refusing they looked quite hurt, and one of them went off and bought me a roast chicken, to my great embarrassment. I tried to explain that I wasn’t being upstage and ‘memsahibish’ about their sort of food, which I normally consume
ad lib
., and that it was merely a question of my insides not being as democratic as my principles. But no one spoke English very well so the intricacies of the situation escaped them and they simply nodded and smiled and told me that the chicken was very good and sat happily watching me unhappily eating what they wouldn’t dream of affording for themselves.

With every mile we travelled south the temperature rose, the flies multiplied, the dust thickened in the air and the flat landscape became more arid. We arrived here at 3 p.m., the most intolerable hour of the day, and my first impression was of a depressing dump of a city, all stinks and stenches and not to be compared with either Peshawar or Pindi. In fact Lahore is by far the most interesting of the three from architectural and historical points of view, but at the moment I’m a bit past being interested in the Higher Things of Life: I simply registered that it was even hotter than Pindi. The only thing that cheered me up, en route from the station to the hospital, was the phraseology of a young man who told me I’d find the hospital ‘on the backside of the
mosque’! When I did find it Farhat gave me a real Pathan welcome, but it was of necessity brief, since the staffs of these hospitals are grossly overworked. I then went to sleep until 8 p.m. – sleep being the only effective escape from this degree of heat.

A deliciously fat mail, collected this morning, has put me in such good humour that Farhat thinks I must be getting used to the heat. On my way through the centre of the city I passed an RAC signpost saying, ‘
LONDON, 6,372 MILES
’; it’s nice to know the exact position! I’d resolved last night to be a good little tourist today and see some of the things one ought to see here, but after a ten-mile cycle to collect the mail I only wanted to lie on my charpoy under a fan, drinking
lassee
and reading and rereading my letters. It was too hot for me even to start replies; sweat ran profusely into my eyes when I sat up and dripped merrily on to the writing pad.

Then, at about 9 p.m., Farhat roused me from my not unpleasant lethargy by offering to take me to the operating theatre, where she was about to do a Caesarean. It was a most interesting spectacle and I was tremendously impressed by the cool efficiency of her team of assistants, all recently-emancipated young women in their early twenties. (Male gynaecologists are obviously not popular in the Muslim world.) Usually only spinal anaesthetics are given here as Pakistan can’t afford anything else in her public hospitals; but the skill of people like Farhat more than makes up for the shortage of drugs and modern equipment. Watching the performance I even forgot the heat – though it was intensified by my mask and gown – and when at last a little black head appeared and the baby was hauled out I felt like cheering. He was a fine healthy son who roared like a lion after one look at this world – a reaction which in the present temperature I find quite understandable.

I suppose that when one has left Ireland to cycle to India the day on which one eventually cycles across that final frontier qualifies for Red Letters. Yet this evening I’m aware of no sense of triumph, elation, excitement or anything other than loneliness for Pakistan – though you may remember that on crossing the Khyber Pass I was too stricken by the parting with Afghanistan to feel any enthusiasm for Pakistan! Now it remains to be seen if a few months in India will have a similar effect; somehow I already doubt that.

Last night Farhat pronounced me fit to cycle again, providing I never cycle between 9 a.m. and 6 p.m., never cycle too far in one day, eat masses of salt and eschew too curried curries. So this morning we set off at 4.10 a.m. to reach Amritsar before the ‘medical curfew’. Already it was bright and the sweepers were busy on the streets and lots of cyclists were buzzing around, although many lazy-bones still lay fast asleep on charpoys lining the pavements; it’s odd to see half the population of a city sleeping in public. By 4.45 a.m. I was passing through the cantonment area where athletes were vigorously practising cricket, tennis and volleyball. Lahore is such a huge city that it took me an hour’s fast cycling to get clear of it and we didn’t reach the border until 6.15 a.m. Here there were virtually no formalities to be gone through, yet it was 7.30 before I’d finished drinking the inevitable tea and talking to three delightful Customs officers about my happy days in their country. Then I plucked up courage to go, and said my last
Salaam Alaikum
(God go with you); it will be too bad if I forget myself and use that greeting on this side! I’m trying hard not to be biased, but
it’s the objective truth that my reception at the Indian Customs post, though very polite, was markedly cold and formal. After the warmth and apparent joy with which strangers are welcomed at every Muslim Customs post I’ve passed, this one left me feeling slightly forlorn.

The Punjab is the most boring terrain I’ve ever cycled through. My only diversion today was the bird-life; a fascinating selection of beautiful unknowns were to be seen in every direction. On crossing the frontier, the two most obvious changes are the number of women in evidence and the comparative nudity of the men. Your average Muslim wouldn’t dream of showing a knee, so it was quite startling to find myself suddenly surrounded by hundreds of loin-clothed bodies.

Some ten miles from the border I stopped for a cigarette and began to learn the ABC of travelling in India. I was sitting under a tree full of tailor-birds’ nests, watching waterfowl fishing in a stagnant pond, when a Hindu peasant came walking along the road carrying two brass jars of milk balanced on his shoulders. I smiled and said ‘
Nemuste
’, but instead of returning my greeting and passing on his way à la Muslim, he put down his gallons, came and sat beside me and tried to squeeze my arm while making what were obviously (even in Punjabi) improper suggestions. Knowing he couldn’t understand English, I said what I felt – ‘Go to hell’. So he went; not to hell, but off down the road. The motto seems to be that one curbs one’s natural mateyness and refrains from greeting stray Hindus – which does not make life any more pleasant. Happily, this is the Sikh State, so I have them as buffers while I readjust; many Europeans and almost all Muslims distrust the Sikhs intensely on various counts and have warned me to beware of them but so far I find them very helpful, courteous and friendly.

Amritsar, twenty-three miles from the border, is the chief city of ‘Sikhdom’, but because of the heat I didn’t stop to explore it; on my return in the cooler weather I hope to do my duty by the Golden Temple. About three miles beyond Amritsar I was settling down to have my siesta under a wayside tree when suddenly a dust-storm began. This sounds dire but it was in fact an enormous relief, because the gale-force wind was northerly and almost cool. Taking advantage
of it I pedalled on through stinging whirls of dust that reduced visibility to about twenty yards, but even this seemed a cheap price to pay for the sudden drop in the temperature. Because of the wind we covered eighty-nine miles today, reaching this little village where I’m staying with the family of the local Sikh Superintendent of the Punjab Armed Police.

Sikh boy-children and adolescents are a trifle disconcerting; a religious rule against cutting hair means that their long locks, often tied in top-knots with coloured ribbons, give the impression that the country is populated almost exclusively by girls. The good looks of the race are quite astonishing, yet somehow not altogether pleasing. Unlike the proudly handsome Afghans, whose features are made additionally impressive by the spirit within, Sikh good looks are of a conventional, rather film-star type; they are reported to have the most regrettable effects on some Western women but I can’t see the remains of my virtue being undermined here! Yet they are a fine race of people, tall and well-built, in complete contrast to their weedy, vegetarian Hindu neighbours. Also, of course, they are very astute businessmen and very unscrupulous money-lenders. One of their racial characteristics is a streak of mechanical genius; I’m told that most Indian bus and truck drivers in every state are Sikhs.

So far I haven’t noticed any of the dire poverty one expects in India; but then the Punjab is the country’s most prosperous state – partly because of its natural resources and partly because Sikhs are in general more on the ball than Hindus. An FAO official I met today told me that their work in the Punjab is much more productive than elsewhere in India because of greater and more intelligent co-operation from the locals.

However, if the poverty of India has not yet hit me the smells of India certainly have; one of these days I’ll lose my grip on the situation and be forced off Roz to vomit by the wayside. Maybe that’s one reason why I’ve lost my appetite so completely; even after today’s cycle I couldn’t look at food this evening though I haven’t had a bite since 4 a.m. I just drink, drink, drink –
lassee
and salt and lemon and salt and tea and salt and mango-juice and sugar – glass after glass after glass.

We only covered fifty-eight miles today but even that nearly killed me. At 11 a.m. I took refuge in a dak bungalow for tea and a siesta and while the tea was being made I lay on the sitting-room floor under the fan and went to sleep. A few minutes later a piercing scream wakened me: the
chowkidar
’s wife had come in and, not being used to the spectacle of Europeans slumbering on floors, had decided that I was a corpse! Actually she wasn’t very far wrong; this sun acts like a sleeping-drug on me and today I felt as if I’d had an overdose. You don’t realise how exhausting it is while cycling on a level road but when you stop the yawning begins and you just want to lie down where you are and go into a coma.

Really, this Punjab is the most dire thing that ever happened. The landscape is flatter than Belgium, even more overpopulated and enlivened only by thousands of cattle, the majority at a most gruesome stage of emaciation. I feel as I did during the myxomatosis epidemic at home, when I carried a hammer around in my saddlebag and killed rabbits by the score every week; but it would hardly be politic to go along on Indian roads shooting cattle. I’m all for coming to terms with other people’s religious angles yet it’s exceedingly difficult to have patience with this cow worship; one has to see it in action to appreciate its full brutality and stupidity. But I suppose what we describe as the Hindus’ cruelty should more properly be called ‘insensitivity to physical suffering’, and should not be regarded as an absolute yardstick by which to measure their national character. Hindu philosophy makes no discernible attempt to achieve that natural balance between the spiritual and the material which we consciously or unconsciously inherit as part of our traditional ethic, and to a people nurtured on such a philosophy the physical sufferings of both men and animals are of far less importance than they are to us. What interests me – although such a speculation may seem naïve to the learned – is whether the Hindu chicken or the apathetic egg comes first. In other words, did Hinduism encourage a resigned acceptance of material privations of every kind because some opiate had to be given to the relevant masses, or did these
masses cease to strive for a reasonable degree of material well-being because Hinduism represented it as unworthy of Man’s endeavour – or, in the case of the Untouchables, as a categorical impossibility? This brings us to the caste system, of which I’ve obviously had no experience yet, beyond a few brief discussions. These give me the impression that the sheer impracticability of upholding it in a modern city is destroying it throughout urban societies but that it still flourishes in rural communities, though possibly in a less virulent form than previously.

Then – to continue my jaundiced list of Punjabi abominations – there’s the food … Curries are one thing but the local messes, that taste entirely of chillies, are quite another. And they even put the dratted stuff in your lemon-drink if you don’t watch it – for alleged medicinal reasons. (Of course this also applies in the Pakistani Punjab, where unfortunate Pathan immigrants, like Farhat, simply can’t touch the regional dishes and have to prepare their own food.) I find it quite impossible to swallow the average meal here – though today I was ravenous and tried hard – because of the acute burning pain in my mouth and throat, however much cold water I drink between swallows. Looking at it the other way round I pity the unfortunate Indian immigrants in Europe or America, who find our food not only tasteless but positively nauseating.

The little towns and villages along my route today were just smelly conglomerations of mongrel buildings – neither Eastern nor Western – inhabited by people who were on the whole unfriendly, unhelpful and of an unintelligence surpassing even that of the Persians. However, their unfriendliness has nothing to do with me being mistaken for a British traveller; already I’ve observed the almost total lack of anti-British feeling, which I surmise is not unconnected with their religious teaching. Several times already I’ve been assured that the average Indian harbours no resentment towards Britain for two reasons, which together strike a faintly comic note. The first reason is that Britain has done so much good for India and the second reason is that their religion inculcates the suppression of resentment. (I’ll leave you to sort that one out for yourselves.) As an Irishwoman, I find myself having a curiously mixed reaction to this magnanimity. On the one hand I admire it and admit we could do with a bit more of it in Ireland, but on the other
hand, being of good rebel stock and
not
a Hindu, I tend to despise it, having the strong conviction that no amount of good done to a country by a conqueror can quite compensate for the loss of national freedom and the dignity that goes with it. Yet in India’s case it is a very moot point whether either freedom or dignity existed throughout the subcontinent in the centuries immediately preceding the British epoch. Incidentally, on almost every occasion yesterday and today when an Indian asked my nationality and I replied ‘Irish’, the response was, ‘Ah! de Valera’s country. He is a great man!’ Whereupon I grinned all over my face and said, ‘Yes indeed – a very great man.’ It’s nice to know that on at least one point I’m going to be in harmony with the majority of Indians! It’s also nice to be in a country where the word Ireland conveys something; in most places en route it was impossible to convince the average citizen that Ireland was not my mispronunciation of either Iceland or Holland. And the occasional erudite individual who had heard of it usually remarked brightly, ‘Ah, yes, part of Britain’, which was infinitely worse than being a mispronunciation of Holland! I’ve had great fun at various points along the line speaking sentences in Irish for the delectation of the locals, and my passport has been scrutinised more often as a sample of Irish script than as an official document. Which reminds me of a philologically fascinating item I acquired a few hours ago: counting up to ten in Hindi is so like counting up to ten in Irish that even I mastered it in less than three minutes!

Ever since crossing the border our way has been lined by ruined mosques, burned and bombarded in many cases and providing a terrible monument to the berserk savagery which prevailed in this area at the time of Partition. Many of their walls are now derisively plastered with crudely sexy film advertisements that no Muslim country would allow inside its frontiers. Others of these once beautiful buildings have been converted into stables or cafés or, if small, into private dwellings; it reminds one of the fate of some Russian churches. All over this region I’ve been conscious again of the helpless anger evoked while cycling through the First World War battlefields of Northern France, where the aura of the futile wastage of human life has not yet been dissipated by time.

Having slept today from 12 p.m. to 5 p.m. I now feel inconveniently alert at 12 a.m.! Obviously the thing to do from now on is to cycle by night.

It was only when I crossed the frontier yesterday and saw the number of tractors in use here that I registered having seen none (apart from that Persian village) since leaving Bulgaria. Splendid progress is being made in re-afforestation throughout this area and thousands of young trees are thriving by the roadside. Incidentally, this grand trunk road from Peshawar to Calcutta via Delhi is the oldest highway in India, having been built by Akbar four hundred years ago. Its metalled surface is very well kept, considering the volume of heavy traffic, but the standard of driving is appalling and I cycle in constant expectation of a premature demise. The number of cycles, both in Pakistan and here, is astronomical: even the rickshaws are tricycles, with a little covered wagon for two behind. A thing that humbles me, speaking as a moderately proficient cyclist, is the skill with which Indians contrive to pedal a cycle through a densely-thronged street with an absolutely staggering load attached to both the rider and his machine. What in Ireland would be considered a fair load for a donkey is here a fair load for a cyclist, which makes one wonder if the Indians are as weedy as they look. But then a horrifying percentage of them do die in their forties of heart diseases. It still seems odd to see women cycling all over the place – and even odder to see husbands and wives walking along the streets together or sitting chatting in eating-houses. Of course these would be less common sights in the Hindu states as Hinduism adopted the purdah system when the Muslims were the ruling power; at first it was merely a status symbol in emulation of the ladies of the Royal Court, but I’m told it’s now a feature of everyday life in many village communities.