Stranger to History (34 page)

Did they really not know that the landlord lied when he said he didn’t remember excusing their debt? Had it not occurred to them that the landlord’s friends would lie too? Or that they would be beaten for trying to get round the landlord in this way? I tried to put the scenes of disappointment or, worse, open flailing out of mind. It was an affecting final image of feudal life before the city.

Hyderabad was older than Karachi. Stray images from lithographs of a great fort and the Indus ran through my mind as we entered it. The Indus still unseen! Almost a lost river for Indians as only a shred of it remained in India. There was something especially evocative for me in thinking of my longer journey as ending near the Indus.

The traffic into Hyderabad showed signs of a city whose organisation had broken. Hundreds of small industries gathered close to the road. Trucks, carrying anything from cattle to black electrical meters, clogged the main road.

‘Why electrical meters?’ I asked Laxman.

‘They’ve been confiscated because they’ve been tampered with,’ Laxman replied. Lost in his own thoughts, he suddenly said, ‘Because of the problem in Karachi, I don’t know if it’ll be all right for me to take you into a Sunni shrine or
madrassa
. Even though they say,’ he added nervously, ‘that the MQM did it.’

The ‘problem in Karachi’ was the bombing that had occurred a few weeks before my arrival. Hyderabad was once a Muslim town, with a highly successful Hindu merchant community. It was a perfect example of the society, complete with its Hindu middle class, whose loss the Mango King had mourned. After 1947, much of that middle class left and made good in places as far away as West Africa.
Muhajjirs
took their place, and a great urban tension existed between Sindi and
muhajjir
. The MQM Laxman spoke of was the
muhajjir
party.

I tried to unpack the varied currents in Laxman’s comment. ‘Why would it be a problem for me to go to Sunni
madrassa
?’ I asked.

Laxman, with an evasiveness that I was beginning to recognise in him, said, ‘Well, don’t tell them you come from Iran.’

‘I don’t. I was just travelling through Iran.’

‘Oh, that’s fine,’ he said quickly, seeming to adjust his judgement of me.

The communal landscape was hard to make sense of. Difference of denomination, region and political affiliation were on everyone’s mind.

Laxman had booked a room for me at the Indus Hotel. It was a modern place, on a bleak stretch of road, full of fake flowers and scenic pictures of places cooler than Hyderabad. He told me he would give me some time to ‘get fresh’, but almost as soon as we arrived, he was keen to get going. He wanted me to meet his bureau chief at the newspaper’s offices. He even followed me upstairs, extolling the man’s merits and usefulness to me. My room was reached by a transparent lift that was out of order, and overlooked the driveway and main road. The hotel’s designers must not have envisaged it breaking down because the only staircase provided was a grubby service entrance.

The room had a large white plywood bed, with a satiny bedcover and thin, dirt-encrusted carpeting. As we entered, Laxman asked, unprompted, if I’d like some beer.

‘No, thanks,’ I said, finding the question strange, given the hour and that alcohol was illegal in Pakistan.

But he seemed to be trying to tell me something else. A moment later, he came out with it. ‘There’s no problem for me,’ he said. ‘I am a minority. I am allowed a permit.’

‘What minority?’ I asked, then felt like an idiot. Of course I knew that Laxman was Hindu, but outwardly the similarity between India and Pakistan was so great that my awareness of being in Pakistan had faded momentarily. I had stopped thinking of him as a Hindu in a state for Indian Muslims; I had forgotten about the transfers of population. But he, a member of a tiny minority, a remainder of the city’s once great diversity, never forgot he was that rarest of rare things: a Pakistani Hindu. It made him want to know where everyone else stood and I saw now that the offer of beer, had, perhaps been a way to find out whether I was Muslim and, if so, how Muslim.

‘What’s happening underground will definitely burst,’ he said mysteriously, as he loitered in the doorway.

‘What’s underground?’ I asked, unpacking my bags, and truly confused by all this intrigue.

‘Hatred,’ he replied.

‘Between whom?’

He looked at me, a suspicious eye-darting look, at once worried about who was listening and whether I was playing with him. ‘Sindi and
muhajjir
.’

The road on which the Indus Hotel stood was called Cool Street. It formed, I discovered from Laxman as he bundled me out of my room, an enemy line between the Urdu-speaking
muhajjir
section of town and the Sindi-speaking Sindi section. On the way to the newspaper’s offices, it was possible to see from the systematic organisation of the streets, and the occasional fine row of whitewashed buildings, with Hindu names and motifs, that Hyderabad was once an attractive town. And the black wires, starved animals, paper and polythene that grew over the scene only made its past harmony more apparent.

The newspaper’s offices were in an old building, up a darkened flight of stone steps. Its wood and glass partitions, old furniture, typewriters and yellowing files seemed to have been unchanged for decades. The bureau chief was at his desk, a tall, elderly man, with thick glasses, deep lines on his face and neatly combed grey hair.

He was full of gloom. Minutes after we met, he launched into talk of religious and regional divisions, corruption, water shortages, feudalism and crime. ‘The MQM is trying to start a problem between Sunni and Shia to have in-fighting while they keep their vote bank.’ The religious parties, which came up under General Zia, have come of age, and are instilling in the minds of youth that death is imminent, and that they must fight the enemies of Islam. Crime is rampant: you can’t go ten kilometres outside Hyderabad without someone throwing a stone in front of your car and taking your money at gunpoint.

The Indus, which used to roar like a lion through Sind, is running dry.

‘The Indus dry?’ I said, hoping to stop the torrent.

‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘There’s dust flowing in it now.’

He was in a panic because some nights ago he had had to hold back the paper’s printing to include the speech of the MQM leader. ‘The district news must be finished up by ten,’ he cried, ‘because the page is laid out. But the story of the leader’s speech was filed at a quarter to one in the morning and a paper like ours had to wait for it. We don’t even wait for the president, but we had to wait for this story because they have Kalashnikovs in their hands so we are helpless. Just imagine one thing. Their leader had only a 50cc Honda and a small house, but he’s living in London now. You know how costly that is, and with secretaries? Where is the money coming from? That is the question nobody in Pakistan dares to ask.’

I didn’t know the answer. ‘This is the worst time I’ve seen!’ he cried. ‘We’ve lived through difficult times, but this is the worst.’

‘Why?’ I asked, thinking of the Zia years.

‘Because there’s no faith in anyone. Someone becomes your friend and the next minute they stab you in the back. There are suicides because people are so short of money. The frustration is terrible.’

I spoke to him for nearly an hour, told him something of my travels so far, and he offered to help me meet some people over the next few days. I didn’t have a fixed plan. I was happy to be in other hands; happy to be shown what people thought I should see. We arranged to meet the following morning at the newspaper offices.

When Laxman and I walked down the dark flight of stairs, a sandstorm had begun on the once beautiful street. It cleared the crowds and traffic of a few hours before, and brown swirls of smoke and dust now pounced on little scraps of paper, and raced down the empty street. A purplish-brown haze made it seem later than it was. We drove over a truss bridge. Below there was a vast bed of white sand, reeds and a ribbon of green water. Laxman, looking down at it, shook his head. ‘There were times when they would warn the residents on the shore to leave their houses because a flood was coming,’ he said. ‘And now, look, in the same river children are playing.’

His words didn’t sink in immediately. Then, with the special horror reserved for something close to death, I turned again to look through the lattice of iron beams at the remains of one of the world’s great rivers. ‘That’s the Indus?’

Laxman nodded. I told the driver to pull over. The car took a left and stopped near a large
peepal
tree, under which a man sold balloons and green-bottled soft drinks lay about on plastic tables. Steep black steps led down to the Indus. From just the height and gradient of the bank I could imagine what the river had once been. Halfway down the stairs, the strip of greenish water was lost in the white dunes and reeds. I walked for some minutes across the riverbed, over sinking sand, before I came upon it again. It was possible at this dusk hour to see the clear outline of the moon and this, along with the darkened sky and the wind blowing the green water in the opposite direction from the one in which it flowed so frailly, gave the scene a final, twilight aspect. A line of roaring traffic went by on the bridge many metres above. A small blue boat bobbed in the narrow strip of water, spanning half its breadth, and the river seemed, at once and ever, like a scene of beginnings and of endings.

Laxman crept up behind me. ‘It’s an amazing thing. We are standing in the Indus, not in a boat or anything, but in the Indus. People pray to this river. The Sindhu river! But where is the water? It’s just sand.’

Laxman, the Hindu, thought of the river with the special, religious regard much of the sub-continent gave its rivers. In Sind, the story was that Punjab was stealing the water. Some wanted Punjab to be divided again, not because that would make a large state easier to govern, but so that it would not dominate the other states. There was an irony to these regional differences coming up on account of the Indus because it was the closest thing Pakistan had to a national river. It was almost like a symbol of national unity, a coronary artery flowing through the middle of the country, for which the scattered rivers of Punjab came together to feed its once great expanse. Sindi nationalist parties had taken up the issue and the splintering, faction within faction, difference within difference, that I had seen since I arrived in Pakistan, and was hardly able to follow, was spreading through the political arena.

And here there was a deeper irony. It was thought that the faith, as the basis of Pakistan, would trump all other identities. It didn’t matter what kind of Muslim you were, what language you spoke or even if you lived at the other end of India. As long as you were Muslim, Islam would bridge the differences. It reminded me of the faith Abdullah, in Istanbul, placed in all the Muslims of the world he hadn’t met. ‘You mentioned the conflict between Islamic countries,’ he had said, ‘but I’m trying to say that to be a Muslim is a very different experience from any other, no matter where you are. To be Muslim is to be above history.’ But history did matter, not just the faith’s encased and symbolic history, but history as realised in language and culture. It was a distortion of faith that all this didn’t matter, and in Pakistan people seemed to fall back on regional, linguistic and denominational differences.

Laxman, now determined to exercise his minority privileges, insisted I join him for a beer. On the way to his house, we drove through a gated urban colony, with run-down buildings, open drains and walls covered with slogans. ‘“Sunnis, when will you awake?”’ Laxman read, in a fearful whisper, as if the words leapt off the walls at him. It was a reference to the bombing in Karachi and, Laxman thought, a call to arms. As we left the quiet, concrete colony, domestic scenes overhead and hatred on the walls, Laxman hissed, ‘See? See? It’s boiling. If something doesn’t happen, it’ll rip.’

That night at Laxman’s house, the bureau chief called, wanting to know my father’s name. That made me nervous. My father was well-known in Pakistan and I would have preferred to travel with a degree of anonymity; I had done well so far. Laxman gave it to him, then put down the phone and gave me his hunted-minority look. His room was filled with fake flowers, dusty stuffed toys, calendars and pink curtains. His bed was of a black and gold laminate, and a fake vine of maple leaves in autumnal colours drooped over one corner. A drinks trolley, still in its plastic covering of years, came in.