WE HAD TO LEAVE MULTAN earlier than expected to make it to the dervish festival on time.
Typically for such a rural event it was going to be held two days earlier than widely believed – because like the agricultural seasons and many other saints’ festivals, it took place according to the old Sanskrit calendar. Again typically, we only found out the real date by chance: a man whom we met at a samosa stall, an advocate of buffalo dung as a source of biogas, told us.
*
With Allah Ditta trailing behind us in my car, we drove westward on a dazzlingly bright morning towards the Indus in a Landcruiser loaned to us by a feudal, Sardar Jaffar Khan Leghari, a chief of the Leghari tribe who’d invited us to stay with him in his desert fort.
Accompanied by one of Leghari’s armed guards in the car, who invariably had the barrel of his Kalashnikov carelessly pointing at our crotches, Abbas, his driver, an old acquaintance of ours, twirled his moustache, grinned beneath his Aviator sunglasses, turned up the volume of a Punjabi bhangra number and put his foot down. Carts and bullocks hastened into ditches, drivers swerved at the last second to avoid our cattle-bar and cyclists wobbled out of control in a struggle to leave the road.
We were on the edge of Punjab, where irrigated fields are bordered with acacia and eucalyptus and the province tapers into deserts and fragments into a jigsaw of castes and tribes and peoples. Poetic Seraiki-speakers and cotton-picking Hindus cluster round palm-groved shrines; and nomads materialise from the haze with brass pots, nose-rings, arm-bangles and secret verses. Then they disappear along invisible paths traversing deserts from Afghanistan to India.
We crossed the broad slate-grey waters of the Indus on a low bridge. Soon rolling desert took over and ran away across a torrent-riven plain to the spine of the Suleiman Mountains and Baluchistan. We drove on into Leghari country, peopled mainly by Baluch tribes that centuries ago had settled on this side of the provincial border.
On arrival at the village of Choti, Leghari’s manager, a short white-bearded man dressed in a white shalwar that covered a significant pot belly, greeted us with formality as several servants scurried to pull back the palace’s heavy wooden gates. The manager, whose disproportionately large white turban proclaimed his high status, marched us into the house, making up for his short height by walking gravely with his chin tucked in, his back as straight as a bookend.
The front of the house was a swirling, curving wave of concrete, a style that seems to have rippled through the Pakistani elite in the 1960s. But it was a façade for what was essentially a small 16th-century desert palace. As soon as we stepped through heavily studded carved wooden inner doors, we were again in that world: walls emblazoned with exquisite floral murals, marble mesh windows, painted wooden ceiling beams, recessed arched windows and passageways all revolving around a central hall.
Leghari was surrounded by a noisy crowd of his kinsmen. He was simultaneously operating six or seven telephones and a batch of mobile phones, arguing, berating, pleading and occasionally roaring. Now in his seventies, he was still black-bearded and youthful with pale skin and striking blue eyes inherited from his English mother. His audience consisted of Baluch tribesmen with narrow faces under huge black turbans, civil servants in crimplene blazers and old women huddling together, their backs to the assembly, clutching veils about their faces.
Vociferous supplicants waved papers in his face: one wanted electricity, another’s daughter had been abducted, and someone had stolen someone else’s land. Occasionally his anger boiled over and the crowd recoiled and fell silent, before slowly encroaching and again breaking out into a din.
Leghari had experienced the perks and infamy of Pakistani politics: a bachelor playboy until late in life, he had ridden high while his cousin was president but did a short stint in jail after his clan’s inevitable fall. He was now in the middle ground, a parliamentarian again, married, and like other feudals, working to keep his lands, mills and electorate afloat.
Noticing us, his face lit up and he beckoned us.
‘Boys! There you are. Sweethearts. Darlings, come and tell me how you are!’
But his attention quickly shot off in other directions, a telephone pressed to his mouth, a servant on either side holding yet more telephones to his ears. ‘Sir how kind of you to see me, yes the inspector general … ah my dear old friend how was the match, aitcha listen I have a case here where the judge … listen here you bastard I told you six months ago to transport that fertiliser…’ Then suddenly he broke off, ‘… yes, you see I’m still the best-looking man in Pakistan, I do not have one white hair in my beard…’ and with his briefly free hand he began to sign petitions asking officials to ‘Please help the undermentioned etc etc’.
We sat down on the edge of this durbar. It was only at this level you saw what oiled Pakistan’s wheels: safarish, networking and nepotism, used to expedite the merry-go-round of bureaucrats, police officers and local officials, whom local feudals attempted to move about to suit their tastes, and who did one’s ‘work’.
A man came up and told us proudly how he had murdered the son of a neighbouring chieftain as part of an on-going feud. He had a particularly large turban on which I complimented him.
‘The Baluch turban is so big,’ he said, ‘that we carry our coffin on our heads.’ Noticing my confusion, he explained that they use the turban as a funeral shroud.
That evening we managed to have dinner with Leghari at a table crowded with local businessmen and politicians. He was the master of the Pakistani florid introduction: if your father was an army colonel, you would be introduced as the son of a field marshal; if you had exported some clothes from Peru to England you would be called one of London’s greatest couturiers. I swiftly became a newspaper editor.
When he’d finished eating, he stood up to leave for some midnight appointment – here people work at all hours except the morning. Everybody instantly dropped their bowls, plates and forks or whatever they were doing and followed with the swiftness of a shoal of fish changing direction to avoid the jaws of a predator. A scene that could have played out at Louis XIV’s court, it revolved around the Punjabi worship of power – nobody wanted to appear less than the most loyal of fawning disciples, nor to miss out on a morsel of favour that might fall from their lord’s hand. People around him asked each other, ‘Is he going to go or isn’t he?’ and then there was a mad scramble aboard vehicles as their patron, still talking on a mobile phone, moved off.
Leghari had had to hasten back to Lahore on some errand, leaving us the run of his palace. And we were in luck. The Sufi festival would, according to the latest reports, indeed be held the day after next.
*
Our bedroom was on the other side of the shish mahal (‘mirrored palace’, of which the most famous Mughal example is in Lahore’s fort), a room whose ceiling had been covered with inlaid mirrors and whose walls had some of the house’s finest and most intricate murals. Since our last visit a fire had ravaged large parts of the house: the shish mahal was now being restored, and the great hall was no longer great. Its upper storey, the zenana, from which the women used to look down from carved mesh windows, had been cut off by a new floor built to support the building’s weakened structure.
But other important things hadn’t changed. That first morning our bedroom door clicked open to reveal a file of servants bearing trays that rattled with plates of chilli omelette and toast wrapped in napkins, tea-cosied pots of chai and bowls of porridge.
After breakfast, we took our tea up on to the roof where there was a King David–Bathsheba view of daily village existence. With the elephant-hide grey spine of the Suleiman Mountains suffused in a sparkling haze in the background, we gazed (cautiously, because years ago we had been told off for ogling young maidens) at intimate scenes of family life in tiny brick courtyards. Doting mothers combed their daughters’ thick black locks and old men reclined on charpoys smoking hookahs. Women covered head to foot in burqahs – which in the area have a pointed tip unlike the usual shuttlecock variety – darted along narrow alleys below the palace’s walls.
We spent the day idling about the village. It was the usual Punjabi contrast of immaculate interiors and exterior squalor: dogs gnawing on buffalo carcases, dozing goats and sewage channels. Above it all wheeled flocks of pigeons. They banked and rolled, breasts aflame with sunshine, coming to rest at the orders of pigeon fanciers whooping and waving staves at them from rooftops.
During our walkabout, people took us on unsolicited tours. They showed us black flags flying over Shia households, proudly defiant markers of Islam’s oldest schism; and the tombs of the Talpurs, a Leghari clan who went on to become the rulers of Sindh. Hindu women with bejewelled noses were pointed out as if apparitions from another world, and giggling mothers pulled us into their courtyards to sip tea and meet their children. Chev was taken to a side street and told in a low whisper that it was the domain of low-caste villagers. Here a barber must marry a barber, a dhobi a dhobi: pure Hindu traditions existing in the land of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, layers of a palimpsest. We remembered an earlier visit when we’d been invited for lunch with a family, after which the men had danced to ‘I am a Disco Dancer’, a 1980s Bollywood filmi song.
Sparrow-brain nuggets and chips were served for supper at the fort. We thought it was chicken but when we asked the lovely old cook, Khardhim, he mimed first a small bird and then pointed to his head. These birds are often picked off with shotguns while they warble on electricity lines. They are good with ketchup.
*
The next morning we set off westwards to the dervish festival on the very edge of Punjab. We passed fields where lines of colourfully robed women plucked wisps of cotton, tossing them into linen sacks, and men slashed at fields of sugar cane with hand-axes. Children chased trailer-loads of cane, pilfering as much of it as they could.
Wherever we went when the sugar-cane crop was tall, we heard tales of men and women wandering off into the cover of these fields for illicit trysts. The pages of the local newspapers were full of karo-kari (the feminine and masculine of ‘black’) tales where a couple was killed after being accused of adultery. Often these cases were no more than a ploy by covetous relations who wanted to wrest land from their adversaries by levelling allegations and then accepting land as part of the settlement enforced by the village council.
The Suleiman Mountains rose abruptly in front of us. Wiry acacia trees and nomads’ low-lying pitch-black tents darkened the clean graphite line of the pan-flat land. A few camels crossed the road and padded onwards to an unseen destination. We overtook small groups of ragged barefoot pilgrims. They were walking to our destination, the shrine of Sakhi Sarwar, a 12th-century mystic. Some of them, we found out later, were fakirs, wandering holy men who, having undertaken to spend a life paying their respects at the shrines of the saints, had been walking for years.
We arrived at the makeshift town that had sprung up about the shrine and discovered it was a camel-market-cum-saint’s-festival. A tawny mass of foul-tempered, four-legged odour invested the shrine, with every dusty street crowded with groaning, masticating beasts and mounds of their green fodder.
We entered the crowded bazaar, a maze of dirty, fly-infested alleys covered with a canopy of old cloth, its stalls stocked with plastic trinkets and toys. Allah Ditta, so chivalrous in clearing a path for us through the crush and guarding our flanks from pickpockets, was himself pickpocketed within seconds.
We became enmeshed in a human stream that swept us towards the shrine. Resisting, momentarily, the heaving pressure from the mass of people behind us, we managed to take off our shoes and leave them on a pile at the entrance before being swept into the courtyard.
We’d become part of an orgy of lights, green arches and floral murals, blaring loudspeakers, drumbeats, bunting and dancers spiralling with arms raised. Above us, portraits of the pir’s living descendants, a roguish-looking lot, hung from a side of the shrine’s cupola, seedy eyes leering over the jubilation.
Women danced in a section of the courtyard, one of them falling into a trance, flailing her arms and legs before dropping, head lolling, on to the floor. Her companions gathered about her as plump mothers, babies clamped to their hips, watched from the edges. This was it – the ecstatic dance, dhammal, of which we’d read years before, and here were women, usually sequestered and subdued, breaking out, flouting norms, throwing off their chains in the only public way they were permitted.
A group of prostitutes – one pockmarked, another with a lazy eye – took a rest from dancing, leaning sweating against a wall, covering their heads with dupattas to deter men’s out-of-hours interest.
The perfume from scarlet petals, which were thrown in handfuls, bursting in the air like fireworks, competed with the spicy odour of mutton stew that simmered in brass pots over fires. Eunuchs with bright red gloss lipstick and twelve o’clock shadow taunted pilgrims, demanding alms. The scene enveloped us in its noxiously heady magic, the soles of our feet sticky with sweets that had been thrown over the crowd.
White plaster pillars, supporting a high wooden ceiling from which drop-down punkahs whirred, divided the interior of the shrine. The whole chamber was crisscrossed with festive lights like Harrods at Christmas. A mad press of people circled the head of the tomb, pulling and touching its green-and-yellow quilt now layered with petals.
All was confusion in my mind as I tried to decipher the meanings of chants, symbols, ex votos of oil candles, bracelets and coins placed here and there. Then Allah Ditta tugged at my sleeve, pulling me into a small darkened side chamber, whispering ‘Shia, Shia’. In the middle of the gloom was a concrete bench on which lay a vicious-looking cat-o’-nine-tails spattered with blood. We left for the courtyard, me struggling to make sense of what we were seeing.
Chev and I soon became another facet of the fair, a subsidiary freak show. A kindly old man got up unsteadily on his rheumatic limbs, approached, shooed away a crowd gathered about us and warned that militants had threatened to blow up the shrine because it was, in their view, un-Islamic.
‘It is no longer safe for foreigners here,’ he said.
I looked about. The popularity of the festival showed that despite such threats folkloric Sufism was in robust health; but the old man’s words chilled me and, combining with the memory of that bomb attack on the Sufi-minded clerics, deepened my doubts about the future.
Someone tapped me on the shoulder. ‘Pakistan is a good country,’ shouted the man, as if to contradict the warning about a militant attack. He stepped back to rejoin a posse of people, wanting us to watch them, throwing dance moves with wide eyes and a grin, to the racing drums.
I still didn’t know much about the saint, apart from that he was a proficient healer of eye ailments and his good deeds had resulted in his death: he was murdered in AD1181 by men jealous of his reputation. In 1834, John Wood, a British naval officer, visited on his pioneer journey up the Indus to the source of the Oxus. He thought the camel fair could be transformed into an excellent showcase for British goods.
Local newspaper reports suggested that Sakhi Sarwar was indeed a market, not for imperial goods, but for ‘ghost brides’, women who spend a few months with a ‘groom’. Some of these women appeared to be willing to be ‘married’ for a short time in return for remuneration; others were unwillingly sold as brides, or temporary sex slaves. Recently two sisters who had gone to say prayers at Data Sahib’s shrine in Lahore had been kidnapped and brought to this shrine for sale or rent.
In the evening the festivities moved to the flat land below the shrine and Pathans, Baluch, Seraiki-speakers and Punjabis danced, recited poetry and gambolled about. Framed by an old padlocked wooden doorway, two Baluch shepherds sat crosslegged, their long faces half covered by the shadow of large black turbans, each holding the other’s beard in their fists and each other’s steady gaze, the old way of striking a deal.
All of life was here, a place where people from every province, Muslims of every hue – apart from the orthodox – and Hindus, Sikhs and Christians prayed shoulder-to-shoulder. Stepping among clusters of holidaying pilgrims it seemed to me the shrine was a rabbit hole through which to drop into a wonderland of curiosities, where nomad and city-dweller came together, singing, bartering, playing and stealing, transcending the usual proprieties and borders, and a fixation with these places began to take hold of me. Shrines were prisms, looking glasses through which to view the country, to step into the mysterious world that I was so eager to capture before it disappeared.
As we watched the last scenes of the day unfold, a police officer of some rank bore down on us. He asked us the purpose of our visit and explained politely that foreigners were no longer allowed into the region without permission. We discovered later that uranium had been found in the hills and the military were building a secretive base nearby. He said we must cross back over the Indus, but did not insist on enforcing the order when we told him we were Leghari’s guests.
The sky had turned into an advancing battleship, full of dust and rain. A man was staring, as if he could not believe his eyes, into his inside pocket. He had been robbed.
*
At a loose end on the morning of our last day at Choti, we decided to drive westward to a colonial hill station on the Punjab/Baluchistan border.
With each mile the government’s control became weaker as the voluminous turbans, black beards and Kalashnikovs of the Baluch became more prevalent. A marine sky enhanced the shining reds of the passing trucks. Women day-labourers, perhaps Hindu, dressed in flimsy caftans and saris, carried wicker baskets of rocks on their heads to a building site. Above us rose tall vertical cliffs of sandstone bristling with wild olive trees and jagged ridges.
We pulled over on the roadside so that Chev could photograph a man who had climbed into the branches of an acacia tree to lop off branches for his goats below. Jingle trucks stuffed with Baluchistan’s apples and citrus fruit thundered past. There was a steady stream of traffic; it was a notorious smuggling route for stolen cars, vodka and drugs. For millennia it had been one of the principal thoroughfares connecting the plains of India with Persia and Central Asia.
The landscape around us was a treasure map of mounds, forgotten forts and still inhabited caves where relics of the past occasionally came to the surface. Leghari had a small museum room in his palace that housed a hoard of such artefacts, including statuettes of women dancing – one sprawled on her belly leaning on her arms, her legs folded up behind her, ankles in the air – remnants of a bygone Hindu age. Also among his collection were coins bearing images of Alexander’s head.
Soon we reached the hill station. At 6000 feet, Fort Munro, an outpost built by the British to control the tribes, was a juniper- and pine-shaded refuge from the scorching plain in summer.
We walked over to the Christian Cemetery. Since our last visit, it had been vandalised and the graves smashed up. Shattered crosses and tombstones lay about. We looked in vain for the tomb of a Reverend Smith who ‘Sank While Bathing’ which we had seen before on our previous visit. A great crack gaped across a grave in the shade of a large three-trunked tree. It was inscribed: ‘In Loving Memory of Maud Evelyn, wife of Captain ML Ferrar, Indian Army Punjab Commission, only daughter of WB Oldham esq, ICSCIE who died at Khar on 13th October 1906 aged 26 years’.
Looking at that broken grave, I thought how recently the tide of British conquest had surged into these mountains; how on my first visit, with its puttees, ruined officers’ bungalows and macaroni served for tea, Pakistan had felt a little like a room recently vacated by people of my grandmother’s type. But how quickly the Raj had ebbed, leaving its debris high and dry.
We walked over a hill to the nearby lake where Reverend Smith must have sunk. Shepherds scrambled down to its edge with their sheep and filled water tins. On the other side a group of women pounded clothes with rocks and drank from water skins. They greeted each other with an intricate kissing of hands and then placed their hands on each other’s faces.
As we watched this scene, a local bureaucrat, whom we’d met near the cemetery, rumbled up to us in a 4X4. ‘You have been invite to a wedding ceremony. Please join me.’
We sat in the place of honour in a circle on reed mats in a stubbly field with about one hundred and fifty tribesmen, their guns laid out in front of them. A goat’s shoulder bone was produced and a sage divined the future from scratches on it. A man with a shaven head, who showed signs of mental illness, pranced into the middle, stopped, pointed at us, and cried something at which everybody fell about laughing.
‘What did he say?’ we asked.
The bureaucrat replied: ‘He said you have such big heads that you cannot be human.’
A dish of the most putrid brain rolled in stomach intestine was placed with great ceremony before me, and then a dagger with which to eat it. The entire party looked on, licking their lips in anticipation of digging into lesser fare.
‘I’m sorry,’ I explained to our host, ‘I am a vegetarian. But my brother … he is very hungry.’
In keeping with his staunch character, Chev sighed and picked up the knife, saying, ‘No man who has eaten British school food can be appalled by the fodder of another nation.’
Occasionally pausing to prevent himself from gagging or to mutter ‘fucker’ at me under his breath, he ate the delicacy with as much outward sign of appreciation as he could muster.
When Chev had recovered from his ordeal and was on speaking terms with me again, we drove down from the mountains in a mellow mood, happy to have visited an old and familiar spring.
*
We decided that we couldn’t face Allah Ditta falling asleep at the wheel all the way back to Lahore, so we took the even more precarious twin-prop Fokker flight from Multan.
We joined the fray in front of the ticket office and the clerk took our money ahead of the others. A couple of mustachioed thugs, minor feudals dressed in Western clothes, came up to us and, apparently angry we had jumped the queue, started shouting at us:
‘You are foreigner, how dare you behave like this. I will cut your balls off and shave your head, motherfucker.’
‘We will take our weapons from the car and kill you,’ rejoined his friend. We were shocked; their faces registered both anger and fear, but they did not seem to know what to do while we remained silent.
A humble old man intervened bodily, risking a blow from them.
‘This is no way to treat our guests, bas bas enough enough,’ he said gently. The thugs stood down, cursing, and the old man led us away. He apologised. The angry incident was forgotten. Even now Pakistan was one of those places: the sour taste of frustration and disappointment quickly erased by acts of kindness.
We returned to the capital, from where Chev left for home and I faced Pakistan’s increasingly turbulent present. For, nationally, a sea change came suddenly.