My Sweet Islamabad My Sweet Islamabad From Dubai, that spring, I flew alone to Islamabad. After the smooth ease of the Emirati city airports, their marble and technology, their generous space, the airport in the restless and dangerous city of Rawalpindi, Islamabad’s sister town, felt atrophied and sad, surrounded at three in the morning by idlers and touts and men with heavy weapons. The road outside empty and half-lit, the taxi driver eager to get out of there as soon as his gas pedal would permit. A guesthouse in F-6, the safest and wealthiest quarter of the capital, a bare room with British fixtures, a smell of council house bathrooms, a terrace outside surrounded by the patios and windows of neighboring houses. A single house guard with an M15.
The days were sunny. Marmite fingers for breakfast and PG Tips with Carnation condensed milk. I could walk to the Great Mosque, that monument of 1960s taste that seems too big even for a mosque, and sit in the courtyards of white marble and be alone, untouchable almost.
I took a motorbike and rode out to Taxila, the Gandharan ruin in the hills north of the city, a Buddhist monastery patronized by Alexander the Great and destroyed by the White Huns in the sixth century. The guide took me around, astonished to see a white man on a bike, and pointed to the signs of fifteen-hundred-year-old fire.
“White Huns, sah. Here, White Huns.” He shook his head with extreme but melancholic distaste. “Again White Huns, sah. Here”—pointing to hideous scaffolding—“British, sah.”
The White Huns, the British, Alexander the Great. The Greek kings of the Gandharan era who minted their silver drachmas with images of both Buddha and Athena: Islam is only the most recent import into the ancient hills of Sind, subdued in the eighth century by the armies of nineteen-year-old Umayyad general Muhammad bin Qasim.
I went back to the city after these long trips to Taxila, and the city at night seemed secretive and withheld. Even at Hotspot, the ice cream place for the beautiful youth, there were men outside with weapons, and in the deserted restaurants there was a tension, an anticipation of unknown catastrophes. It was a place to savor life’s inevitable solitude and uncertainty.
One night, nevertheless, tired of solitude, orange juice, and ice cream, I went to the Serena Hotel to meet a Pakistani businessman who had once been a friend of a friend in New York. The Dawat is by far the grandest restaurant in Islamabad, just as the Serena is the Pakistani capital’s only true luxury hotel. My guest, who insisted on anonymity, leaned over the table and whispered that the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, was staying in one of the suites upstairs. “We might see him at dinner,” he said. “We might be—alone with him.” I looked around at a desolately empty room of considerable plushness. It didn’t seem likely that Karzai would appear or that we would soon be enjoying a nice bottle of Bordeaux, though I was hopeful. I had heard that you could get a drink in the city’s hotels, and not the fruit kind.
We were both in crumpled suits, awkwardly off-key. My guest, with the violently hennaed hair so disconcertingly popular among aging Pakistani men, talked in an unnecessary whisper. He wanted to know what I was doing in Islamabad. The country was hardly for the tourist trade, and he was pretty sure that I was not “an American operative.” Certainly not CIA.
“I came,” I said, also whispering, “to see if I could get drunk here.”
He looked panicked. “Are you serious? Get drunk in Islamabad?”
I had heard that alcohol was so repressed now in Pakistan that getting drunk might be a cultural adventure all by itself. In one of the most dangerous and alcohol-hostile countries in the world, I wondered what it would be like to intoxicate oneself.
“You put that on your visa application?” he burst out.
I admitted that getting my visa in New York had certainly been an ordeal. Weeks of questions, delays, and paranoia inside the Pakistan embassy in D.C. Once when I called to inquire as to the status of my never-appearing visa, an employee had, after a polite altercation and a few expressions of frustration, screamed at me: “We don’t have your passport! Go away now!”
My guest laughed.
“Yes, I see. They thought you were a visiting alcoholic.”
“I am a visiting alcoholic,” I said.
From a palatial marble lobby came the sound of a lonely pianist struggling with the simple tunes of Love Story, which echoed over and over through the Serena’s glass-bright arcades and salons, which are lit with chandeliers but which never seem to fill. Seedy Americans sit in corners glued to their cell phones, also frantically whispering, also in crumpled suits, and a man in a red turban stands by the outer doors ready for trouble. They say the CIA are in fact fond of the place. Surprisingly, it hasn’t been bombed yet, but terrorists are patient people.
With the rise of Islamic militancy, bars are obvious targets across the Muslim world, and for years, with grim fascination, I have been following the mass murder of humble tipplers in suicide attacks from Bali to Islamabad itself. When the Marriott Hotel in Pakistan’s capital was destroyed by a suicide truck bomber on September 20, 2008, fifty-four people were killed and 266 were seriously injured. No one doubted that the Marriott’s famous bar and its long-standing association with alcohol were one reason it was hit so viciously. In 2007 another suicide bomber had killed himself in a botched attack on the same hotel.
There is therefore an undeniable thrill about getting liquored up in Islamabad. The possibility is very real that as you sit discreetly sipping your Bulgarian merlot from a plastic bag, you will be instantly decapitated by a nail bomb. You might even be shot in the head for the simple crime of drinking. Your chances of dying in this way are not astronomically high. But nor are they astronomically low.
The girls in saris brought us our haandi curries with exquisitely tense expressions, and I asked Mr. A if I could suggest—it was just an idea, I’d heard it could be arranged—a glass of wine.
His eyes opened wide. “Glass of wine, na?”
I also whispered: “They can do it sometimes, no?”
“They can?”
He beckoned over a waitress and spoke with her in Urdu.
“Wine?” she said to me in English.
“Just a glass.”
The businessman began to squirm a little.
The waitress, too, leaned in to whisper: “We cannot. Not even in a plastic bag. How about a fresh strawberry juice?”
“Watermelon, too, na,” the businessman suggested hopefully. “They call it natural Viagra.”
“All right.” I sighed. “I’ll take a fresh strawberry juice. On the rocks.”
The waitress whispered even lower: “Sir, there is a bar downstairs. You can go after dinner.”
“Bar?” the businessman hissed.
“Yes, sir. There is a bar. In the basement.”
When she had gone, my friend frowned.
“It may be true. But it may not be true. I cannot come with you either way. They will never allow a Muslim in. I would be arrested.”
I asked him what the punishment would be if he were caught sipping a Guinness with me in the Serena bar.
“It depends, na,” he said glumly. “It could be prison.”
“Prison?”
“Prison, sah, or a good thrashing.”
Islamabad is the capital of a nation of 160 million people and is itself a city of about a million. And yet, my companion assured me, the number of places where you could get a drink could be numbered on the fingers of one hand. There were three open bars in the entire city, and only about sixty outlets for alcohol in the entire country. In the capital, aside from the secret basement bar of the Serena, there was a bar called Rumors in the Marriott Hotel. And there was reputedly a bar in the Best Western, though he had never been there. Outside the city, there was a luxury hotel in the hill station town of Murree called the Pearl Continental, where—again, according to rumor—there was a bar that enjoyed views of the snow-capped mountains of Kashmir. He had heard of a friend of his enjoying a gin and tonic there, once upon a time. There had also been a bar, he added, in Islamabad’s alter-ego twin city, Rawalpindi, in a hotel gloriously named the Flashman. But the minister of tourism had vindictively closed it down.
The noose was tightening around the city’s bar culture. There were bars of sorts inside some of the foreign embassies, but they were accessible only to the diplomatic corps. There was a UN Club, with access similarly restricted, and there was an Italian restaurant called Luna Caprese, popular with Westerners, where, as dark gossip had it, they would bring you a glass of wine from a bottle hidden inside a plastic bag. They wouldn’t show you the label, but they would pour you a glass, and you would pay for it separately so that it didn’t show up on the restaurant’s books.
“Is it popular?” I asked.
He looked infinitely sad. “It was—until it was bombed.”
After dinner my friend made a rather desperate gesture with his hand and walked off, wishing me a “pleasant drink.”
I doubled back through the echoing arcades to a grand staircase near the Dawat that plunged down into an altogether different part of the hotel. There was not a soul there. I went down, slipping on the polished marble, and as I came into the immense underground gallery, a rather magnificent figure suddenly appeared, a bellboy of sorts done up in a beautiful white uniform with gloves and a turban.
“Where,” I whispered, “is the bar?”
“Bar, sir? Bar is here.”
And he executed a magnificent and regal flourish, indicating a pair of doors around the corner. I thanked him, and he bowed, moving with glacial elegance up the staircase. I looked around to make sure I was alone, a pervert approaching his darkest desire, and moved quickly up to the unmarked doors. I pushed the doors, and they merely rattled: the handles were tied together with a padlock. I shook them, but they didn’t yield. It was not even nine p.m., and I realized that it was going to be a long night of strawberry juices.
• • •
A few nights later I went to the Marriott because I had a hankering for a gin and tonic, and it appeared that at nine p.m. it was the only bar in town that was dependably open. The hotel has now been completely rebuilt and is surrounded by soldiers and by those sad concrete barriers that you see all over Islamabad covered with stickers for Zic motor oil and a thing called Tasty. Inside, the Marriott lobby—garnished with fish tanks, Punjabi art, and box-shaped fountains—was nervously half alive; its opulent coffee shop was filled with Saudis planted stiffly in front of slabs of nonalcoholic cake. I went through to Jason’s Steak House.
There was no one there. I ordered a steak and then asked, with my usual delicacy, if I could get a bottle of wine.
“I’ll ask,” the waiter said.
He came back with a black plastic bag with the top of a wine bottle sticking out of it. It was the red.
“And the white?”
“Not recommended, sir.”
I asked what this one was.
He leaned down to whisper in my ear: “Greek Shiraz, sir.”
The Marriott chain is a symbol of American imperialism across the Muslim world, but it was, as I have suggested, Rumors that had made this one so offensive to militants. This was the bar I repaired to after my steak and my rancid glass of Greek Shiraz. I was taken there by a bellboy. Down an immense lonely corridor, down a flight of stairs, turning left at a desolate landing with a lone chandelier, and down another flight of steps. At the bottom, like an S&M club buried under the sidewalk, was the neon for Rumors and the doors of the bar, shielded by security cameras designed to pick up errant Pakistanis. “This is bar,” the boy whispered firmly, pointing up to the door. This time it opened.
I went in, expecting a riotous speakeasy filled with drunken CIA men and off-duty Marines perhaps abetted, I was hoping, by a smattering of loose Pakistani Hindu women. But no such luck. There was, as always, no one there. I took in the fabric walls, the fringed seats, the two pool tables, and the foosball, as well as the dartboard next to a plasma TV playing an episode of the British sitcom EastEnders. It was a very British and homey pub. A barman in a waistcoat stood at his post cleaning beer glasses and watching me with great interest. He was Muslim, and it took him little time to joyfully admit that he had never tasted the nectar of Satan even once.
He made a mean gin and tonic, however, and I asked him about the security cameras by the doors. He was happy to discuss them.
“We are catching those blighters every week,” he muttered, shaking his head. “Muslims coming in for a drink. We see them on the screen, sir, so they cannot succeed.”
Blighters?
“And what happens to them?”
“Ejecting, sir. We are ejecting. Sometimes police are called.”
“Are the blighters thrashed?”
“Very much so, sir.”
Alcohol has been banned for Muslims in Pakistan since 1977. A Muslim patron trying even to open the door of a hotel bar, as the barman intimated, will be asked for his ID, refused entry, and possibly prosecuted for the attempt to enter. Non-Muslim foreigners can enter, and so can the “unbeliever” 5 percent of the Pakistani population (Hindus, Parsis, Christians), who are asked to present both ID and a “permit book,” in which their monthly permitted alcohol quota is registered. They are usually allowed six quarts of distilled liquor, or twenty bottles of beer, a month.
I asked him about the bombing in 2008.
“No one knows who did it. Osama bin Laden maybe. RDX bomb, sir.” RDX packed with TNT and mortar.
“Are you afraid to work here?”
“No, sir.” But his face said otherwise.
It was said that on the night of the bombing, thirty American Marines about to drop into Afghanistan were staying at the hotel, as well as an unspecified number of senior CIA officers. (A navy cryptologist named Matthew O’Bryant, working with the Navy Information Operations Command, was killed.) I looked down at the pulsating “stars” in the dance floor and wondered when that floor was last crowded with revelers. The barman said that in fact the bar was often full. Monday, he said proudly, was their busiest night.
“But,” I said, “it’s Monday night tonight.”
A twitch. “Yes, sir.”
“Is this really the busiest time of the week?”
“Most certainly.”
At that moment the power went out. The barman lit a ghostly match, and we stared at each other across the bar in total darkness. Monday night at Islamabad’s hottest spot. He managed a fatalistic smile.
Perhaps every bar now is a potential target. Nobody knows who masterminded that immense explosion that was heard miles away—Al Qaeda? an obscure group called Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami? a group known as the Fedayeen Islam?—and no one ever will. U.S. officials have stated that they believe the bombing was masterminded by Usama al-Kini, Al Qaeda’s operations chief in Pakistan, who was himself killed by a drone missile strike in January 2009.
In a sense, it doesn’t matter. Modern 1960s Islamabad, Pakistan’s Brasília, sits on the fault line of a lethal culture war. There were many reasons to hit the Marriott, but its association with booze was certainly one of them. Because not only does the Marriott house a famous bar, it also offers a curious Pakistani institution known as a “permit room.”
A permit room is an unmarked liquor store sometimes tucked away at the back of a top-end hotel. Clients armed with a permit book or suitable foreigners can creep around to this secretive facility and buy bottles of vodka and Murree beer and then take them back to their rooms. The one at the Marriott is next to a laundry, around the corner from the main entrance. Surrounded as it is by sandbags and armed guards, you would never see it unless you were directed there explicitly. I’ve bought bottles of Scotch there, then had to do a kind of “walk of shame” as I hauled my boozy loot back to the main road, the Pakistani soldiers glaring at me with barely concealed sarcasm. It’s like buying unwrapped pornography in a Walmart Supercenter in Salt Lake City.
As I sipped my over-iced gin and tonic and watched EastEnders, I recalled that Pakistan was not always hostile to drink. When it became independent after partition from India in 1947, it was still a country where alcohol was legal, as it had been under the British. Indeed the revered founding father of Pakistan—the British-educated lawyer Muhammad Ali Jinnah, known in Pakistan as Quaid-i-Azam or “Great Leader,” who died in 1948—is widely thought to have drunk alcohol until he renounced it at the end of his life, though no books published in Pakistan may mention the fact or even suggest it as a rumor. (He was also reputed to eat pork.)
Alcohol was more or less freely sold and consumed from 1947 until 1977, when Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, eager to appease the country’s religious leaders, outlawed it months before he was himself removed from power in a coup by General Zia ul-Haq.
Zia softened some of the original prohibition, allowing alcohol to be sold to non-Muslims, but the ban for Muslims stuck. The prescribed punishment for infringement was set at six months in prison. Pakistan suddenly went dry, and Zia’s overall determination to Islamize Pakistan made that fact permanent. As Zia supported the mujahideen in Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation in the 1980s, a gradual conversion of the country from secular British common law to sharia religious law was set in motion by the American-backed dictator, who apart from privatizing much of the economy also instituted Islamic hud laws, whereby a person convicted of theft can have their hands and feet amputated. Alcohol would never return—officially.
For in reality alcohol pours illegally into Pakistan from all sides. It flows in from China and through the port of Karachi, bootleg vodka, gin, and Scotch that can be found ubiquitously in private homes and at private parties. “Bootleg wallahs” operate in all the big cities, plying the well-off with contraband liquor. Johnnie Walker, as everywhere in Asia, is as desirable a brand as Gucci, symbol of an entire way of life and consumed with the relish that we reserve for cocaine. The poor, meanwhile, gorge on moonshine.
In September 2007 more than forty people died in the slums of Karachi from drinking toxic homemade moonshine, an incident that scandalized the country. The producer of the lethal brew was a cop, as was one of the victims. The press wrung its hands, and legislators asked if the suppression of alcohol might not be connected to the rise of drug addiction in the young. A Treasury member called Ali Akbar Wains made the argument publicly after the parliamentary secretary for narcotics told the lower house of parliament that there were now four million addicts in the country. Parliamentary affairs minister Sher Afgan Niazi stated for the record, “It is a fact that restrictions in liquor have resulted in a surge in the use of deadly drugs in Pakistan.” But the problem precisely is that alcohol is not just a drug.
It is a symbol of the West, a tool of Satan that denatures the true believer; it is also associated with sexual laxity, the mingling of men and women, and, one might say, the bar itself—a free public place quite distinct from the mosque or the bazaar, the two forms of public space that Muslim cities otherwise accommodate. Islamic radicals are right to hate and fear it. In bars, people leave their inhibitions behind.
A 2006 article in Der Spiegel put it bluntly: “The front line of the struggle against fundamentalism in Pakistan isn’t in the mountainous border regions. It’s in the country’s permit rooms. Alcohol is sold there—and customers dream of the West.”
Nowhere in Pakistan is this more evident than in the one place where it’s legal to have a nip of Satanic distillate: the Murree Brewery in Rawalpindi. The brewery, for years the only one in Pakistan, was founded in 1860 by the British to produce beer for the troops stationed in Rawalpindi. Murree is high in the hills, and in the age before refrigeration, its location was ideal. With the coming of cooling technologies around 1910, the British moved it down to the hotter plains. Rawalpindi, meanwhile, became the headquarters of the Pakistan Army as well—and a sprawling, dangerous city filled with radicals. In December 2009 five suicide attackers stormed a mosque used by the Pakistan Army and shot dead thirty-seven retired and serving officers inside it. The Taliban claimed responsibility. To put it mildly, it’s a bad neighborhood to be making beer and flavored vodka.
The Bhandara family, who are Parsis, took ownership of the brewery in 1961, when they bought majority shares in it. The present owner is Isphanyar, whose celebrated father Minoo ran the brewery for decades; Minoo, who died in 2008, was the brother of the noted novelist Bapsi Sidhwa, a remarkable writer afflicted by polio who wrote a beautiful book called The Crow Eaters, which I read years ago.
They are a cultured, literary family, and I supposed it was because they were Parsis that they were allowed to run a plant that produces a bewildering variety of drink. Aside from all the vodkas and gins, they malt their own whisky as well as turning out Pakistan’s most famous beer, Murree. The beer’s logo is known everywhere, even though only 5 percent of the population can drink it: “Drink and make Murree!”
Isphanyar is one of those youngish Pakistani go-getters who never seem to be able to sit still for a moment, as if everything needs to be done instantly in case—for some mysterious reason—it’s too late. I met him in his office at the brewery, where he sat restlessly behind a huge desk, blinking, pressing buzzers and bells, and casting a watchful eye on the video security monitors. He wore a ring on each hand, a pink-striped shirt, and a Rolex. The walls were hung with regimental British Raj calendars with vignettes of mounted Hussars, and the desk itself was dotted with garish little beer mats showing Pheasants of Pakistan. A small desk sign read “Don’t Quit.”
In wall cases stood rows of Murree products: Kinoo Orange Vodka, Citrus and Strawberry Gin, Vat No. 1 Whisky, clear rum, and beers. There were also the fruit juices and fruit malts that Murree sells to Muslims, foremost among them a thing called Bigg Apple. When Isphanyar spoke rapidly on the phone, his Urdu was mixed with urgently crisp English words: “maximize,” “incentivize,” “target,” and then “look after him!” From time to time he paused to sweep a deodorant stick into his armpits and laughed a little nervously. He was handsome, quick, and on edge.
I asked him if running a brewery in the world epicenter of Islamic extremism bothered him. Or worse.
“Well, is it perilous for you?”
“All I can say is, we try to keep a low profile. I don’t want my children to be kidnapped.”
He pressed another buzzer. There was a whiff of Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory, of delirious energy. “Strawberry juice?” he whispered into the intercom. “To Peshawar?”
He twiddled a pen and looked momentarily distracted as underlings came in and out, and I then observed that it was strange that a brewery in Pakistan could not sell anything to the vast bulk of the population; nor could it export. But this seemed self-evident to him.
“We cannot very well put ‘Made in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan’ on our bottles of vodka. But between you and me, the non-Muslims in this country are not the big drinkers. It’s one of the ironies of Pakistan.” He smiled cattily, and we were served a shot of Murree Whisky. To my surprise, it was excellent.
“What do you think?” he asked eagerly.
“It’s very fine. Twenty-one years?”
“Our best. I will say, by the way, that it is widely enjoyed inside the country.”
I had noticed that the brewery lies at the end of an unmarked track along an unmarked slip road, as invisible as such a large facility can be. It was protected by high walls and the usual armed guards. Ex-president Pervez Musharraf’s house was nearby. It was like a town within a town, its dark red British brick, mostly from the 1940s, lending it a somber elegance of line. The air was thick with the sweetish smells of the whisky malting plant. As he led me outside, Isphanyar reflected on the volatility of the society to which he is, in effect, the leading supplier of a religiously outlawed intoxicant.
“The Muslim attitude is getting harder. Liquor, you see, is associated with a Western lifestyle, so it has become a flash point of some kind. Muslim hostility to the Western way of life finds its focus in alcohol. Hatred is directed at alcohol because it’s a symbol of corruption. But at the same time the extremists tolerate beheadings, drugs, heroin, and kidnapping, and they grow poppies. It’s bewildering, ah very. Do you not find it bewildering?”
“Very bewildering.”
“We are most bewildered, I must say.”
I was then taken around the malting and bottling plant. It’s a self-contained production line: Baudin malt from Western Australia, Chinese bottling machines, Spanish labeling machines, cellars of Latin American oak casks that would not be out of place in Islay or Jerez. It was curious to watch the Muslim workers operating the machines as rows of Nip bottles of Vat No. 1 came pouring out. What was going through their minds? The foreman showing me around reminded me, as we strolled past whitewashed whisky casks, some of them dated 1987, that everything produced here had to be consumed inside the country. It was, to say the least, an enormous paradox. Five percent of 160 million is a fair number of drinkers, but I wondered if it could account for all these casks.
A little later in the day I went to a tasting of new vodkas that Murree is developing. The development meeting was attended by six staff members headed by Muhammad Javed, Murree’s general manager, and each man gave the vodkas a score on a piece of paper. I joined in. Some of them were highly refined, with a soft “fruit” and a sense of serious purpose. Serious vodka, then, for a nation of serious drinkers? Javed explained that they were trying to develop vodkas even though their most popular drink was whisky. Vat No. 1 accounted for 40 percent of their total sales because it was relatively cheap. A bottle of twenty-one-year, on the other hand, cost about 2,500 rupees, in a country where the daily minimum wage was 230 rupees. Yet they couldn’t make enough of it. Especially, he pointed out, when you considered that the government levied enormous taxes on it and they couldn’t sell to the public except through permit rooms.
“Of course,” he added, nodding with finite mischief to the others, “we all know that non-Muslims buy it for Muslims. A thriving trade.”
My mouth rinsed with vodka, and quite tipsy, I staggered across the courtyard to visit Retired Major Sabih ur-Rehman, who was, as his card explained, Special Assistant to Chief Executive.
Rehman once participated in a study by the customs department that determined that about $10 million of drink was being confiscated every year, suggesting the presence of an enormous alcoholic black market. For every bottle confiscated, he told me, there were probably three in circulation. The study put the value of the alcoholic black market in Pakistan at about $30 million. This, he added, was driven by non-Muslims selling to Muslims. A bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label cost about 1,200 rupees in an airport duty-free, but its black market value was closer to 5,000.
“Moreover,” he went on, “the biggest bars in the world are the bars of Islamabad households, I can assure you. The bootleggers who deliver to your house are almost never prosecuted. The police protect them. Very powerful people run this.”
He recalled that when he was in the army, they had bars called “wet clubs,” though he wasn’t sure if they still existed. Either way, he was sure that Pakistan was awash with booze, even if no one could admit it.
“I think people are drinking more, even if some figures show official consumption going down. We don’t have alcoholism here per se. What we have is something else: it’s that alcohol has glamour. It’s desirable because it’s forbidden fruit. That’s the logic of human nature. By the way, did you try our Pineapple Vodka?”
What a shame, he implied, that they couldn’t export it to the West.
“And before you leave, I’ll give you a bottle of our whisky and some other things. Take it to a non-Muslim party if you’re ever invited.”
“Is it legal?”
His head jiggled, and he went all sly.
“Ah, legal—that I cannot say.”
He smiled and jiggled his head again, and later, as I was driving back to F6 in Islamabad, I took out the beer, a bottle of Strawberry Gin, and a Gymkhana blended malt whisky they had given me and looked at the pretty labels. I felt like a heroin trafficker, though technically I was doing nothing illegal. I drank them alone in my room that night, sitting on a terrace filled with crows and listening to muezzins competing in the dark. It was, in a sense, like drinking alone at a bar when you have no one to talk to.
I tried the Strawberry Gin, assuming it would be too strange to stomach, and found instead that it was childishly comforting, well made, as if by people who knew its charms inside out. I would never have drunk it anywhere else. But it was a supremely delicious drink at that moment, and as I lay on my Spartan bed listening to the name of God ringing through empty streets, I felt a subtle intoxication reaching the ends of my fingers and the tip of my nose. A Pakistani fruit gin. What could be more seditious?
A week later my hennaed friend got me an invite to a private party not far from where I was staying in F6. I decided to bring my bottle of Gymkhana as a present, carefully disguised in a paper bag. The house of the affluent hosts—anxious as always about their anonymity—was one of the low, flat-roofed white villas surrounded by dry gardens and high walls that seem to make up most of Islamabad’s housing stock. Inside, behind the discreet high doors and shutters, the house was filled with a mixture of Islamic art and reproduction Louis XV chairs, with cut-glass ashtrays and leather poufs and Kashmiri rugs. It was an older crowd dressed in Shetland sweaters and tailored shirts, businessmen and import-export men and their impeccable wives, and at one end of the long front room stood a little bar with a server in a bow tie. He was pouring out tumblers of Black Label and imported cognac, and the men were sipping from them as they sat in the Versailles chairs, assured that they were behind closed doors and that everyone knew everyone.
My friend asked me to relate the company a trip I had made to Murree the day before. I had driven myself two hours out of Islamabad to the old British hill station where the Murree brewery was started 150 years ago. I had visited the old brewery ruins, Victorian picturesque, and the abandoned British church, now surrounded by barbed wire, and finally the Pearl Continental Hotel, where I had had an eerie lunch overlooking the snowcaps of Kashmir.
“Is there still a bar there?” they asked.
Well, I said, that depends what you call a bar. After lunch I had asked the staff where the bar was—it was by now a familiar exercise—and they told me it was outside and on the ground floor next to the swimming pool. Off I went. After a half-hour search I eventually found an unmarked obscure door with a glass window that looked like a storage room. I knocked. A panicked face quickly appeared on the far side of the glass. We gestured to each other; me, upending a glass to my lips, he wagging his finger in a frantic negative. We pantomimed for some minutes. End result: no drink.
“Ah,” they said, jiggling their heads, “we’re glad there’s still a bar at the Pearl Continental!”
They said it as if civilization had not yet fallen to the White Huns, and I had no idea what they meant. I opened my bottle of Gymkhana, observing that it was good to drink something local instead of the ubiquitous Black Label, and this was greeted with a chorus of approval.
We poured it out. It was not Murree’s top whisky, but I thought it was a pretty good drink all the same. I noticed that everyone licked their lips contemplatively and stared down into their glasses for a moment. Was it a drink they knew so well that each bottle had to be savored for minute differences from the last one? Someone put some Rabbi Shergill (a Punjabi techno pop star) on the CD player, and soon half the room was dancing, some of the men holding their tumblers of Gymkhana aloft and twirling their women around. I recognized the song at once because it was a number-one hit in India, a beautiful techno rendering of a mystic Sufic poem by Bulleh Shah, the eighteenth-century Punjabi poet buried in Pakistan. Bulleh writes that he is “not the believer in the mosque,” that he is neither Hindu nor Muslim nor Parsi, and that indeed he does not know who he is or what he is. Shergill’s lyrical video of “Bulla Ki Jana” comes over as a plea for peace and tolerance in the Sufic spirit, strung along on the rhythms of global dance music.
“It reminds us,” one of the women said, “that Pakistan was once a Hindu, a Buddhist, and a Sufi culture, and that all those things are still in us somewhere.”
Did the Sufis drink? Did wine once flow through these parched hills when Bulleh Shah was alive? It was unclear. In the present moment, the alcohol seemed to have gently spread through the whole gathering, bringing everyone to life. A man waddled up to me and collapsed onto the same sofa. He was clearly mildly intoxicated, and he was enjoying it. He could say things that later he could disown.
“This country is fucked,” he said simply in English, looking me dead in the eye and smiling. “We’re going to be run by a bunch of clerics one day. We’re going down the drain, down the drain.”
I looked down and saw that the bottles on the coffee table were all empty. The barman was mixing cocktails—margaritas, as far as I could tell, with salted rims—and it was already long past midnight. The Koran had been forgotten, or shall we say revisited, and I picked out the strange words from the music, words after all written by a Muslim who had disavowed the religious orthodoxy of his day. They cut through the pessimism of the man who had fallen asleep beside me and seemed to move the hips of the people dancing to Rabbi Shergill:
Not in the holy Vedas, am I
Nor in opium, neither in wine
Not in the drunkard’s craze
Neither awake, nor in a sleeping daze
Bulleh! to me, I am not known