In Xanadu (38 page)

'You wouldn't find of these boys nancying around reading books or learning English,' she said as we got out the bus, and was soon proved right when I failed to get anyone to understand my request to be directed to a hotel.

We did find a hotel, eventually. It lay hidden behind the bus station and you entered through a narrow wicket gate which led into an open courtyard. The hotel was built of wood, and the upper storey of the building was ringed by a wooden balustrade. It looked a fine spot, and we decided to take a room. Then we met the owner. He was a Pathan, one of the biggest we had
yet seen. I filled in the register, then timidly asked if he would send a pot of tea up to our room.

'No, sahib,' he replied. 'This hotel is self-service.'

'Self-service?'

'Yes, sahib.'

'So we can't have a pot of tea?' 'No, sahib.'

He gave the key to Louisa and
I
followed her up the stairs. She unlocked the double doors and looked in.

'Willy, I know I'm awfully stupid, but don't Pakistani hotels normally have beds in them?'

'Yes, of course they do,' I replied, rather enjoying the role of Experienced Traveller that I had assumed since Laura left.

Then I looked in the room. It was, as Louisa had indicated, quite bedless. I trotted down the stairs, back to reception.

'Excuse me,' I said. 'I don't think there is a bed in our room.'

'No, sahib.'

There isn't... meant to be a bed in our room?' 'No, sahib.' 'I see,'

The Pathan stroked his beard.

'Uh... I'm sorry to... be a nuisance or anything, but what do your guests ... normally .. . do?' The Pathan considered for a moment. They hire mattresses, sahib.'

Terrific. That's terrific. Um . . . where do they hire mattresses?'

From me, sahib. Ten rupees extra.' 'Good. Well could we have two?' 'Yes, sahib.'

'Any time you've got a moment just bring them up. No rush or anything.' The Pathan knitted his outsized brows. No, sahib,' he said in a voice that indicated lost patience. 'What do you mean?'

'Sahib, this hotel is self-service. I have told you this thing before. Mattresses are over there.'

He indicated a dank comer of the courtyard near the open drain. I paid twenty rupees. The Pathan watched while I selected two damp mattresses and dragged them upstairs.

At supper that night we shared a table with a reassuringly small Punjabi. He had just finished a term teaching English in the hills above Swat and was heading back to Lahore as fast he could.

'Oh gentleman-sahib, these Pathans, they are barely human,' he said. 'They have no civilization. They are not using right thinkings.'

'What do you mean?'

'Gentleman-sahib. They are Junglies.'

Nothing wrong with that,' said Louisa. They're just natural. Unspoilt. Noble.'

Oh missy-sahib. You do not know what you are saying. The things I have heard. The things I have seen.' He wobbled his head from side to side. There are wicked mens in the hills. Always they are singing and dancing and making sexual intercourse. Missy-sahib, they are not Muslims.'

What are they then?'

'Oh missy-sahib.
I
am telling you. They are worshipping goats.' He leaned across the table, eyes wide with horror. 'I'm am not making joke. Really. I have seen them. Among them there are many witches.'

'Witches?'

"he Pathan womens. They are more wicked even than the mens. If a Pathan witch-lady is wanting to go to see a friend she climbs up a tree and she flies this tree wherever she wants.'

'But you don't believe that nonsense, do you?'

'Mo, sahib. But many wicked things are happening and sometimes I am thinking: what are these things?'

Tell me some more of the wicked things.' said Louisa.

'Oh missy-sahib. What can I say? Last term a policeman died and he was buried. Two days later his grave was found dug up and his body gone. Now this man - he was having many enemies. Always he was telling these Pathan-fellows: you must not do such and such. Maybe his enemies thought, let us dig up this man and then we will revenge ourselves. Maybe this is what happened. But there were other stories in the bazaars.'

'What son of stories?'

The Pathan women are of... a very lusty nature. Excuse me, missy-sahib. Now it is said that if a witch-woman is feeling of lusty inclination towards a man, and she wants to make sexual intercourse with this fellow, then she will go to a burial place and dig up a newly buried body.'

'How does that help?' asked Louisa.

'Missy-sahib, I am telling you. It is said that a witch will hang up the dead body on a tree and pour water over its head. She then collects the water dripping off the feet and takes a bath in it. The witch becomes very beautiful and no man can resist her.'

And this son of thing still goes on in Swat?' I asked. 'Sahib. By my word.'

But Swat was where all the British officers used to go duck-shooting,' I said lamely. The Wali of Swat was famous for his house parties.'

'Sahib. No longer.'

'What do you mean?'

'Sahib. The Wali of Swat was hacked to pieces by some Pathans last year. Now he is no longer alive.'

We walked back to our hotel that night, our ears still ringing with the dangers awaiting us up the road in Gilgit and Hunza (where, according to our friend, the Pathans were notable for infanticide and cannibalism). More immediate horrors awaited us in our hotel room, however. Darkness had brought with it the local cockroach population and we found a number nesting contentedly on our mattresses. We spent half an hour in slaughter, but were still woken intermittently by their long cat-like feelers brushing our faces. The one consolation was that the cockroaches seemed to discourage the fleas, and, at eight thousand feet, we were now too high for mosquitoes.

We were woken by a volley of throat-clearing sounds from the balcony. Other splashing and gargling noises wafted up from the courtyard. Ablutions are an important and apparently enjoyable occasion for a Pathan, as for many peoples of the subcontinent, and they are entered into with great gusto. Phlegm is cleared from the throat, noses are blown, wind is broken. Then it is time to approach the tap. Every part of the body that can be cleaned, modestly, without removing a
charwal
chemise,
is cleaned, particularly, for some reason, the back of the ears. Teeth are scrubbed with a twig, then picked with a toothpick. Finally the moment has come forthe Pathan to comb his beard. This takes a very long time: a Pathan's beard is a manifestation of his virility, and is treated with the respect due to such. Great pride is taken in its trimming, curling and dyeing (orange seemed to be
de rigueur
while we were there). As anyone who observes a tribesman at his toilet will learn, there is a surprisingly dandyish element in the Pathan character. Some even use eye shadow.

We checked out of the hotel and, having found that no bus was expected until evening, we decided to hitch on up into the hiils. But before we left, I wanted to see the rock edicts carved on two great boulders outside the town. They were put there in
the
second century BC by the Maurya emperor Ashoka. In the century following Alexander, Ashoka created a vast empire which included all of Pakistan and most of India. Sickened by
the
bloodshed he had caused conquering his dominions, he w£s converted to Buddhism and established the faith as the cornerstone of his empire. All over the subcontinent edicts were carved promulgating the new laws based on the principle of non-violence. It is all strangely familiar: Ashoka has a ring of Gandhi about him, over two thousand years before Gandhi was born.

The edict starts with a declaration of vegetarianism:

Formerly in the Royal Kitchen every day many thousands of living creatures were slain to make curries. At present only three living creatures, one peacock and two deer, are killed daily ... even these three creatures shall be spared in future.

Then follows a more ambiguous passage:

Moral policemen, censors of the laws of piety, have been appointed to inculcate obedience, liberality, and avoidance of excesses among all classes of the Empire.
I
For a long time past business has not been disposed of, nor have reports been received properly or at once. This laxity will cease in future. All work shall be for the public benefit. There shall be no other end than this.

On
the
smaller boulder, Ashoka declares that
he
will tour the Empire 'proclaiming the law of virtue' and banning 'corrupt and worthless ceremonies'. Sitting peering at the almost invisible hieroglyphics, I wondered what Ashoka's regime would have been like to live under. H. G. Wells in his
History of the World
wrote that it would have been paradise, and that Ashoka was the wisest emperor in all world history. But then H. G. Wells approved of totalitarian government. In the 1930s
he
was one of the first Western intellectuals to follow Andre Gide and proclaim the virtues of Stalinism. For all their touching vegetarianism, Ashoka's edicts do have a worryingly puritanical, authoritarian ring to them.

To my mind a more sympathetic character than Ashoka is the original translator of his edicts, James Prinsep. Prinsep was the secretary of the Royal Asiatic Society in Calcutta where he fought a rearguard action against the growing tide of Raj bigotry which in the early 1800s was threatening the whole study of Indian culture. The British at that time were just beginning to encourage the westernization of Indians rather than the orientalization of Englishmen which had been the keynote of British policy in the eighteenth century. Prinsep was the last of the great tradition of 'Brahminized' Englishmen who treated Indian civilization as the equal of that of Europe. Henceforth the coming of the memsahibs and building of the clubs and the civil lines would draw the two races apart and lead to the neglect of Indian history until Mortimer Wheeler in the twentieth century. Prinsep was an engineer who worked in the Calcutta Mint and became interested in oriental culture through his study of ancient Indian coins. He is remembered today largely for his work in translating two forgotten Indian scripts: Gupta Brahmi and Ashoka Brahmi, the script of the rock edicts. At the time, however, he was at least equally famous for his rust-proof treatment for steam boats and his design for the Calcutta Ice House, a project in which he cooperated with an alcoholic named James Pattle, my great-great-great grandfather. The Ice House was Calcutta's first experiment in refrigeration, and the day the first cargo of ice arived from America a public holiday was declared. 'All business was suspended until noon.... Everybody invited everybody to dinner to taste claret and beer cooled by the American in Donation.' Pattle served 'tip-top champagne'.