Part Five

...With A Final Flourish...

Delhi

Events conspired to make Mark Twain’s visit to Delhi a short one. Firstly, his schedule was still recovering from the two-week sick leave in Jaipur, delaying pre-booked Talks in Lahore and Rawalpindi[72]; secondly, he himself was still recovering from his illness in Jaipur and wasn’t in the physical or mental mood for more than cursory sightseeing, and one can only presume that Clara and Smythe were also still wheezy; thirdly, he had no Talk planned in Delhi and so no reason not to move on swiftly; fourthly, Delhi was suffering from “smallpox & water famine threatened”; fifthly, Delhi was still a quaint, provincial, cultureless city compared to the commercial capital, Bombay, and the administrative capital Calcutta; and lastly, they had every intention to make a more leisurely return to Delhi on their way back to Calcutta when he and the city should be in better health. As bad luck had it, the return trip was never made and so his twenty-four hours in Delhi was only a flying visit, albeit one made in some style residing in some style at the only mansion on top of the only hill.

His party arrived from Jaipur at midnight - nine and a half hours late - at what was the old Delhi railway station, which was then being transformed into the Old Delhi Railway Station we see today. In fact it is now being transformed again with a heavy investment in digital signs, CCTV and even - praise the Lord - a coat of paint. Only the red-coated porters have remained the same down the ages: in Twain’s time they were called “coolies” as they still call themselves today. But whether they are coolies or porters their numbers are declining, put out of business by wheely luggage and voracious overpricing, often right under a sign giving the correct rate - half a dollar a bag. Even twenty years ago Indians traveled with their own bedding, it not being expected that hotels or hosts would provide any; another nail in the coolie coffin.

All the modernization does throw up some amusing quirks. At Old Delhi Station they have also invested in a new push button phrase announcer. A delightfully accented English female voice this morning echo-purrs: “The... 12.45... Jandiphur Mail... to Jandiphur Junction... will leave at... 12.45... sharp... we apologize deeply for any inconvenience caused.”

Outside the station is the epicenter of Old Delhi, which should more accurately be called Medieval Delhi. This is not meant disparagingly, it’s just the prefix “Old” gives the impression of a city far newer than it actually is.

Unfortunately the concept of the medieval only has negative connotations these days, conjuring up images of plague and pestilence in the dark days before sanitation, sleeping quarters, civic pride, footwear, reason and Renaissance. Perhaps Quentin Tarantino sums up the modern image best in Pulp Fiction when the gangster-baddie tells the pervert-baddie, “now I’m gonna get medieval on yo’ arse,” meaning the former is about to torture, in none too pleasant a fashion, if memory serves, the latter. Unfortunately this sort of careless banter gives a bad name not only to medievalism but to sado-masochism as well.

The fascinating point about medieval Delhi, or The MedDel Experience if it were ever Disneyfied, is that it transports one back to the India of Mark Twain’s time and to the Europe of Donatello’s paintings. The great qualification, of course, is the density of population. Now the Census Board estimate India’s population at 1.2 billion; they estimate that in 1900 it was around 150 million[73] or about an eighth of what it is now. In pre-capital Delhi it was less than half a million, a fiftieth of what it is today. An early morning walk, when forty-nine out of fifty people are yet to rise, serves as an indication of the density Twain would have seen here in Delhi.

And it’s all still here. The impromptu hairdresser, the trinket salesman, the old notice board, the open sewer, the stagnant mud puddles, the hand-pump well, the ear-cleaner, the cooper, the wheelwright, the beggar child, the sleeping bundle, the urinater, the random roadside pitch, the tailors’ stalls, the tea stalls, the liquor stalls, the hawkers and hustlers of the this and the that, the snoozing mange dogs, the shy cats, the boxed fowl, the goats, the cows and the cow pats, the street seamstresses, the street sweet sellers, the street shoe shiners, the street shavers, the street sleepers, the street sweepers, the scavengers and the spitters, the maimed and the infirm, the rats, the open shops with raised floors, the man as a beast of burden worth less than a donkey and more than a child, the cottage industries, houses in the lanes so narrow neighbors can stretch out to touch each other, the lanes strewn with detritus variosis, the smell of farmyard and urine and rotting fruit and mulching vegetables, the smell of decay and heat.

And the good news? The people are the good news. Of course, one would prefer not to move back to medieval times, even as a courtier or squire, but we have lost something on the road to long life, freedom and prosperity; the immediacy of our relationships with everyone and everything around us; the immediacy of lives driven by the rather stark imperative: if you don’t earn, you don’t eat; the immediacy of a life led by the stick and carrot, the snake and the ladder, of religious belief. If one stands accused of patronizing voyeurism it is worth remembering that compassion in its original meaning is to feel sympathy with someone and not to feel sorry for someone, the latter the meaning the concept of compassion has drifted into.

***

For the late arriving Twain party it was bed-time. They trotted in their tongas past the sites they would see the next day: Kashmere Gate, Nicholson’s grave, Civil Lines, up Delhi’s only hill to The Ridge, past the 1857 War Memorial and so on to the mansion in which they were staying. It was quite a place, in quite a spot, with quite a history.

The Delhi of twenty million now and the Delhi of half a million then is built on the plains, all flatlands but with one exception, a small hill in the center called, reasonably enough, The Ridge. In 1830 the British Indian enthusiast William Fraser[74] built a fabulous white Palladian mansion on top of The Ridge; it was indeed the mansion on the hill and was occupied in 1896 by the Twain party’s hosts, Mr. and Mrs. Burne of the Bank of Bengal; bankers clearly did as well than as they do now. Twain remembered it as “a great old mansion which possessed historical interest. It was built by a rich Englishman who had become orientalized - so much so that he had a zenana. But he was a broadminded man, and remained so. To please his harem he built a mosque; to please himself he built an English church. That kind of a man will arrive, somewhere. In the Mutiny days the mansion was the British general’s headquarters. It stands in a great garden - oriental fashion - and about it are many noble trees.”

It is still here - after a fashion. It has now been absorbed, swamped, by the enormous, sprawling, filthy Hindu Rao Hospital[75] whose turn it now is to occupy the prime location in Delhi. The main part of the old mansion is now the Plastic Surgery Ward; the annex, where the zenana would have been, is the Endoscopy Unit. The building itself could certainly use some plastic surgery; the introduction of any kind of endoscope into its foundations would probably cause it to collapse.

The rambling two-story mansion where the Twain party stayed was never the prettiest building in India but next to it now is rotten fruit fallen from the ugly tree. The Sub-Continental Hideous-style Nursing School was erected in 1957 and has not been touched since. What were probably maroon walls have long since faded to a shade of dirty rust; the window frames and lintels are all rotten and crumbling; the ground floor windows are either broken or cracked. The nurses’ uniforms are shabby too and the nurses themselves look like they’ve just crawled out of a glorified squat, which they have. It is adjacent to the old zenana. Now say what you like about zenanas, but the harems and their inmates were magnificent feats of decoration - at least the ones of my imagination are - and it doesn’t seem fair that their memories should have to live next to a squalid block of put-upon nurses.

One constant from Twain’s time are the monkeys, who together with the patients and the staff, the pigeons and the bats, the cockroaches and the rats, go to make up Hindu Rao’s population. Twain noted that:

...they are monkeys of a watchful and enterprising sort, and not much troubled with fear. They invade the house whenever they get a chance, and carry off everything they don’t want. One morning the master of the house was in his bath, and the window was open. Near it stood a pot of yellow paint and a brush. Some monkeys appeared in the window; to scare them away, the gentleman threw his sponge at them. They did not scare at all; they jumped into the room and threw yellow paint all over him from the brush, and drove him out; then they painted the walls and the floor and the tank and the windows and the furniture yellow, and were in the dressing-room painting that when help arrived and routed them.

Two of these creatures came into my room in the early morning, through a window whose shutters I had left open, and when I woke one of them was before the glass brushing his hair, and the other one had my note-book, and was reading a page of humorous notes and crying. I did not mind the one with the hair-brush, but the conduct of the other one hurt me; it hurts me yet. I threw something at him, and that was wrong, for my host had told me that the monkeys were best left alone. They threw everything at me that they could lift, and then went into the bathroom to get some more things, and I shut the door on them.

***

If the Sepoy Uprising’s most heroic resistance was played out at Lucknow and its most shameful episode happened in Cawnpore, it was here in Delhi that some of the most ferocious, close quarter fighting took place. Survival informed every action; Stalingrad springs to mind. There were over thirty actual battles and hundreds of skirmishes during the long summer of 1857 and many of the fiercest took place around the mansion in which the Twain party stayed. No doubt battle scars still remained. The resistance was heroic here too as Delhi, being the seat of the last Moghul Emperor,[76] was the rallying point for sepoys and fellow travelers from Meerut, sixty miles northwest of Delhi and from across the northern plains. The British were outnumbered by perhaps much as fifty to one and their ranks were depleted by cholera as much as by the attacks.

The next day, 17 March, Mark Twain set off to see the battle sites, still fresh as legends in the minds of the British officers showing him around. Next to the old mansion and new - well, quite new - hospital is the 1847 War Memorial set high in the middle of The Ridge. The War Memorial is well cared-for but The Ridge is in a sorry state. What could be a lovely strolling or picnic spot for the beleaguered Delhiites, or a forest or garden park on the only high spot with any hope of fresh air in Delhi, has been taken over by layers of old litter, troupes of reputedly rabid langur monkeys - not all of them of the live-and-let-live variety - and by trollops of hijras.

A hijra is a eunuch, a breed with a reputable past and a disreputable present. The use of eunuchs[77] may have died along with the harems they served but in India, where change takes its time, they have survived as a kind of sub-caste of transvestites. There are reputed to be a million of them but Indian statistics can be dressed up both ways too. Unlike the TVs of Eastern Asia who can easily pass themselves off as women until the moment of passione porpora, the TVs here make no effort to hide their hairy, deep-voiced male origins expect by plastering themselves in cheap rouge and loud lipstick and wrapping themselves in the most gaily colored sarees.

If they make no effort to hide their male origins one has to say they make a massive effort to hide their male organs. Mala, one of the hijras on The Ridge, a hideous concoction in bright yellow, his/her black face whitened then rouged like a parody of femininity, explained the process after a hundred rupees helped her remember it. I’m too squeamish to write it down and you’d be too squeamish the read it, but castration is only the half of it... well, use your imagination. Mala claims that the process is entirely safe and the bleeding stops within a day. Older hijras perform the cuts and indentation, while the younger ones nurse the new recruit back to health.[78]

Indians see them as a curate’s egg; some give them money to bring good luck to a bride or new child, some give them money not to be touched by them, especially at traffic lights where they camp up and down the lines. Others give them money for sexual favors, the trade they ply up here on The Ridge: they are after all the girly-boys of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s disdain and indeed Mala’s first thought was that I was a great white punter.

Eventually one finds one’s way past the unpredictable monkeys and hideous hijras to the octagonal Gothic steeple that is the War Memorial. The Inscription reads: “This monument was erected in 1863 in memory of those who died in the fighting of 1857 during the Mutiny. It is built on the site where Tailor’s Battery defended this position. The names of the Officers and Jawans are inscribed herein, in memory of their bravery and sacrifice in defeating the enemy.”

Below it is another plaque erected twenty-five years after Independence: “The ‘Enemy’ of the inscriptions on this monument were those who rose against colonial rule and fought bravely for national liberation in 1857. In memory of the heroism of the immortal martyrs for Indian freedom.” So there.

After the War Memorial they rode down the hill to the area still known as Civil Lines, the scene of some of the bitterest fighting. Many of the buildings still showed their scars. Today one better take an auto-rickshaw down as the monkeys lie in wait on either side of the road. I say to myself: whatever you do, don’t take a banana out of your pocket. Then, silly, you don’t have a banana. True, but they don’t know that.

Civil Lines was from where the British governed Delhi in the nineteenth century, a sort of Old Delhi version of New Delhi, which of course is exactly what it was: where all the great and the good lived before being decanted into Lutyens’ new city. Civil Lines is still a broad, tree-lined avenue with comfortable bungalows behind high walls. When King George V visited India in 1911 he announced, on what with hindsight seems like almost a whim, that the capital would move from Calcutta to Delhi and the empire would build a new Delhi, New Delhi, to accommodate it in the most sumptuous, jewel-in-the-empire style. Civil Lines, the old New Delhi of old Delhi, then went into a decline and one feels particularly sorry for the owners of the opulent Maidan’s Hotel, who opened in grand style in 1903 in the prime spot in Civil Lines only to find their hotel more often empty than full ever since.

(I still find it amazing that the British should have built New Delhi at all, let alone built it so generously: they must have known by 1911 that the end was nigh, yet they chose to build this one last magnificent statement, nothing less than a capital city, in honor of empire and their idea of good government. Any other imperial power would have taken the money and run - although there are many Indians who would suggest the British already had.)

In Twain’s time the bungalows were occupied by the great and the good of Delhi. Now they are occupied by the officers of the dozens of lesser spotted government departments that Indian bureaucracy spawns; it has become a sort of civic cantonment. Next to Maidan’s is the Indian Police Officers’ Mess - the same officers whose average wage is $2,500 a year but who drive up to the mess in cars worth an average $25,000. Maybe they all play the lottery and win every week.

Their next stop on the Delhi tour was the famous Kashmere Gate, famous for its elegant symmetry and famous for being a bloody witness to some of the toughest battles in the Sepoy Uprising. For three hundred years before the British arrived Delhi had been the capital of Moghul India and its most famous builder, the Taj Mahal’s Shah Jahan, had built a wall around what was then called Shahjananabad. The Red Fort red-stone wall is beautifully sculptured, both decorative and defendable. In retrospect, the one-and-a-half-mile wall was more decorative than defendable. Fifty years after it was finished, with the Moghul Empire in decadent decline, the Persian Emperor Nadir Shah (whose first name lives on to describe a low point) sacked Delhi and massacred over one hundred thousand of its inhabitants in one night in a Christian crusader-style killing spree. It was with this memory still fresh that the East India Company was welcomed, initially at any rate, by the remnants of Moghul Delhi.

The Kashmere Gate now has the misfortune to be under the care of the nincompoops of the Archaeological Survey of India and as such combines the worst of all worlds: reliance on officialdom and hostility to visitors. There is no sign of the fighting that took place there and it is now just another bashed-up ruin heading towards a rubbly future. The British started the vandalism in the Red Fort itself immediately after the Sepoy Uprising was put down, demolishing the old harem and out-palaces and building a row of completely inappropriate barracks. But worse is seen all around its walls: the immediately adjacent section of the old Moghul wall at Kashmere Gate has been bulldozed to make way for a massive and meritless concrete monstrosity, a shopping mall-cum-metro station. The Barbarians have been at the Gates since 1856 but are now fuelled by revenge and bulldozers rather than revenge and philistinism.

Next to the still-proud Kashmere Gate was the grave and pedestal to Brigadier General John Nicholson. Never was there a better example of history being open to interpretation. To the British of the time, especially back home, he was the Hero of Delhi; to the Indians of the time he was the Butcher of Delhi[79]; it is safe to say now that all agree he was a thoroughly unpleasant man who happened to be a brilliant soldier - not the first one of that particular breed. After Independence the new government decided to move his grave out of India and sent it back to Ulster, to his old school, the Royal Dungannon.

***

Whilst in Delhi Gillian and I have to apply for a Pakistani visa at the local High Commission. Sita has no wish to go behind enemy lines and the enemy probably wouldn’t let her in anyway.

One needs at least a tourist visa to enter Pakistan but it soon becomes clear they don’t really want any tourists - at least not in a joined-up thinking kind of way - and they don’t really like issuing visas much either.

I started - and gave up - the process in London. There in Knightsbridge stands the beautiful Regency building that is the Pakistani High Commission. The High Commission had a visa department; so far so good. I went through a gate into the gardens and found a scene resembling a refugee camp. There were five tents marked A, B, C, D and E. There was no explanation for the system and no lines within any of the tents, just a mad scramble. On the other side of the garden was an open-air desk with piles of forms in English and Urdu. It had been sprinkling rain London-style on and off all morning and the top ones were soaked; they were held in a pile by a broken brick which had left its crumbs all over the place.

I asked a fellow lost-looking-soul, a Pakistani, if he knew what was happening. He said, you fill in the form three times, add the photos, and take them to the correct line. Ah, but how do you know which is that line? He shrugged and said he had heard that in theory A was for enquiries, B and C were for handing in the forms in Urdu and English, and D and E were for collections, but in practice everyone just piled into what seemed like the shortest line.

I had already printed off our forms from the High Commission website and attached our photos so I joined the end of the jumble of the C line. There were no ropes separating the lines and people were jostling and pushing and raising their voices not only within each so-called line but across lines too. There was no point in being English about this; the tactics were arms and elbows and the strategy pushing and shoving. After twenty minutes I was standing sideways one line back from the front. At the desk a harried look official - poor man! - looked up, saw a foreigner and reached out for my forms.

“Wrong forms,” he shouted.

“But I printed them this morning from your website”.

“New forms now. New security. Forms are on the table.” He turned back and grabbed another sheaf from another supplicant. Case dismissed.

This was a double disaster as on the internet forms it had asked that the passport photos be glued to each of the three copies - and they were. Starting again was the only way forward. Outside the sprinkle had turned to London light and the forms were soaked at the top, sodden in the middle and damp at the bottom. I took three damp ones and retired home via a revisit to the photo booth to try again the next day. I had been at the High Commission for an hour and a half, plus a further hour to-ing and fro-ing. I am writing this in Delhi and have been in the Sub-Continent for two months - and two and half hours wasted hereabouts seems like nothing at all, almost time well spent. Western readers living in a busy capital will agree that two and half hours wasted in a working day is a lifetime.

I tried again the next day, making sure I was there well before the 10 a.m. kick-off time. (They close at noon - no, I don’t know either.) The new form was a lot more detailed and complicated than the previous one, requiring notification in advance of exactly where and when one was going to be at any given time, as if every tourist was on a pre-arranged package tour. I did my best but there was one part with which I couldn’t legally comply: they asked for our last three months’ bank statements. Now, it’s illegal in most Western countries to reveal anybody’s bank statements, including your own. I wrote a little note to that effect and gave our banks’ names and addresses.

It was forty-five disorderly, frustrating, barging minutes before I reached the front - or near the front - of the C scrum. The same poor man was there, dealing simultaneously with eight outstretched arms and four raised voices. He grabbed our forms, gave them a quick glance and put them on a pile. I asked him to check the bank boxes were alright as completed. “No problem. It’s just a form. Come back in four weeks. Phone first.”

“Four weeks? You mean four days, it said five days on your website.”

“That was the old form. Now four weeks. New procedure. All forms must go the Foreign Ministry in Pakistan.”

I didn’t even need to think about it for a nanosecond; apart from anything else our flight to Mumbai was leaving in ten days. I took back my passport and forms and retired for a rethink.

I have a good friend who herself has a good friend at the American Embassy in New Delhi. I had the latter’s contacts and she in turn was expecting my call - and dinner - once we had arrived here. Did she know if it was possible to obtain a tourist visa from the Pakistan High Commission in Delhi? Ten minutes later the phone rang. Yes, no problem but it will take three days. Three days! Job done, see you in Delhi.

Fast forward to Delhi. Scene: four days ago outside the Pakistan High Commission. We are in the diplomatic quarter. Delhi, like other artificial capitals such as Canberra and Brasilia, has such a quarter. Built around wide, gridded, litter-cleared boulevards and open, grassy, tree-lined spaces, the embassies crouch behind high security walls. Only the flags on top of the poles give each country’s game away. Outside each embassy is a sentry box, maybe two in the case of the American, and that’s it. It’s clinical, empty and quiet, except outside the Pakistan High Commission when suddenly, as one turns the corner into the entry road, one is back in India - except, of course, it’s Pakistan-in-India. There are squat tents, lean-tos, people sleeping on the pavements, dogs sleeping in the road, chai-stalls, litter everywhere, auto-rickshaws arguing, a kind of functioning anarchy - the general Sub-Continental melee.

Actually it’s even worse than London as there is not even a hat titled toward the lining-up tradition. But I’ve been in India a couple of months and become quite accomplished at what would have seemed like ungentlemanly conduct two months ago. Push, shove, manhandle, elbow, trip, shoulder, fart, shout, then start all these again, repeat three times and I’m within shouting distance of the front of the ruckus.

“I’d like two tourist visas please.”

“What is your mother country?”

“UK.”

“Then you must go to London. Here is just for Indians.”

“I can’t go to London. I’m here. Look, is there someone on the cultural or diplomatic side I can see?”

“Are you a VIP?”

“Yes.” Forgive me Lord, for I have sinned.

He dials a number and above all the shouting supplicants and jostling hubbub speaks to someone and gives me the phone.

The phone says: “Where are you staying?”

“At the India International Centre.”

“Give the man at the desk your card. I’ll be there at seven this evening. Let me speak to him again.” I hand the phone back to the desk jockey and give him my card.

***

Like the diplomatic quarter, the India International Centre is in New Delhi but not in India, not in India-India; in fact it’s a UN and NGO outpost that doubles up as a Foreign Correspondents’ Club for visiting journalists. Into this oasis of tranquility, only half an hour late, wanders our potential benefactor. For the next twenty minutes, over a beer in the bar, he and I discuss my visa requirements and all the very many problems associated therewith.

“But maybe there’s a solution,” he eventually says.

I want to say straightaway: “Go on then, how much?” but years in Arabia tell me to play the face game.

“Oh well, it would be wonderful if you could, somehow, you know, think of a solution. Of course anything I can do to help...”

“Well, I have a friend in the High Commission. You see, he has family worries. His wife is ill and not able to look after his son who needs special treatment.”

“And doctors are expensive, even here.”

“Yes, that’s the trouble. Doctors. He cannot afford to pay the doctor,” he says.

“I can imagine. Dentists are just as bad. Meanwhile his wife and son are becoming worse.”

“Yes, nothing is easy. We feel sorry for him but what can we do?”

A long pause into my beer glass. “If it isn’t too expensive perhaps I can help with the doctor. For your friend.”

Another long pause, this time into his beer glass. “I see what you mean. That would be much appreciated.”

“And could he help me? I mean, with my tourist visa?”

“Oh, I’m sure that could be arranged. It’s only a formality after all, nothing compared to a doctor’s help.”

Another pause, this time into my beer glass. “And did your friend mention a doctor’s fee?”

“No, but I believe such an Indian doctor would be two hundred and fifty US cash.”

“Would an Indian doctor take pounds and euros instead? I believe I have that much upstairs.”

“Oh yes, I’m sure that would be quite acceptable.”

“And if I give our passports when could I have them back?”

“This time tomorrow.”

And so it was done. I’m sure his friend’s wife and son made a quick recovery; for our part we have two six-month tourist visas issued three weeks ago in Brussels, Belgium.

Whatever minor thrill there was at beating the system was tempered by the sadness of saying goodbye to Sita. Pakistan was not for her; nor she for it. She has been a constant source of amazement and amusement - and knowledge. Her last words are, “I really hope the book gets published” so if she is reading these words she will know her wish has come true.

Lahore

I am anxious - as ever - to not just follow the same route as Mark Twain but also to use the same form of transport. From Delhi to Lahore then was a simple and quick train journey on the Flying Mail, one of the fastest and most prestigious Raj train routes connecting Karachi, Delhi and Lahore. Not so today. Since Twain’s time we have had the disaster of Partition in 1947 and Lahore now finds itself in Pakistan. Between Delhi and Lahore the India-Pakistan border is one of the tensest in the world, especially now since roguish tendencies in the ISI, the Pakistani intelligence agency, have been shown to have sponsored the 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai. It is also one of the most poignant train journeys in the world, the scene of inter-tribal religious massacres just prior to Independence and Partition when half a million people died - and as many as sixty thousand of them making this very train journey, massacred along these very tracks.

***

It is beyond the scope of this book to rehearse the events and massacres leading up to Partition except to make a few quick points as events today are still affected by the horrors perpetrated then. Between the end of World War 1 and the outbreak of World War 2 it became obvious to the more thoughtful imperialists on the ground that India would one day be independent; the “if” was becoming the “when”. As ideas and plans for the “when” were floated during the late 1930s the British and Indians envisaged one large country to replace the Raj; this would include the three countries that are now Pakistan, India and Bangladesh.[80]

By the early 1940s a counter-move grew to have a Muslim homeland in the west and east of India and out of this grew the idea of a West Pakistan and East Pakistan. The one country divided into two only lasted until 1971 when a particularly nasty civil war resulted in the western half becoming Pakistan and the eastern half Bangladesh. The man behind the idea of dividing India, a brilliant advocate and natural leader named Mohammed Ali Jinnah, is now a national hero in Pakistan as its founding father; everywhere else he is blamed for, inadvertently, causing the horrors of Partition - and by extension the horror that is Pakistan today. (Interestingly enough, in view of these horrors, Jinnah was not a particularly religious man. Neither, for that matter, was his Indian counterpart Nehru, although both men used religion as a rallying point and power base.)[81]

I think this common view of Jinnah’s culpability is a little unfair. True, he rabble-roused the groundswell that grew into the Muslim side of the massacres but by then events had spiraled out of his and everyone else’s control; once again religious fervor was humanity’s enemy. It suits all sides now - and Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs massacred with equal ferocity - to blame a British policy of divide and rule for Partition. That is a little unfair too as both Britain and India were equally aghast at the idea of a divided country, especially one divided along religious lines - the mixing of politics and religion as surely incendiary as a spark to gunpowder.

The British viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, is now especially blamed for the massacres by his decision to bring Independence and Partition forward from 1949 to 1947, a date at which Pakistan in particular was not ready for self-governance and way before the great twelve-million soul shift of populations along the religious divide could have been completed - or even the final frontiers of the divide drawn. If there is any irony in his defense, it is that he did so in an effort not so much to stop the massacres, which were already long beyond stopping, but at least to minimize the time in which more of them could take place.

No one will ever be able to second-guess that decision but he took what at the time the British - and a great many Indians and future Pakistanis - thought were the two least worst options: for the sake of the Sub-Continent an early Independence and Partition and for the sake of the war-depleted British Empire an early cut and run.

To travel along this train track now is to be reminded of the impossibility of a smooth Partition. There is no natural border. Hindu and Sikh families who had been living as far north as the Afghan border fled to Hindu-controlled Indian Punjab, while Muslims families who had settled right across the plains of northern India under centuries of Moghul rule fled to Muslim-controlled Pakistani Punjab. Punjab, now a state in both countries, could equally well be its own country, a Sikh country, as India is a Hindu one and Pakistan is a Muslim one.

Since Partition the normalization of relations between India and Pakistan is what one might call a moveable feast. Pakistan has started, and lost, four wars against India. Both countries have armies they cannot (Pakistan) afford and should not have to (India) afford. Both have nuclear weapons aimed straight at each other. Suspicion and paranoia about each other come before reason and reconciliation. They are after all the same race of people; only their man-made religions - and whatever politically or culturally spins off from these - are dividing them.

Nevertheless, from time to time, efforts are made to be reasonable with each other. From the ebb and flow of negotiations someone had the good idea to resurrect the old railway line between Delhi and Lahore that the Twain party took on 17 March 1896. They gave the new train a name, the Samjhota (in Hindi) or Samjhauta (in Urdu) Express, depending on where it was originating; either word means concord or agreement in English. The train would make the round trip twice a week. The original plan was to have the whole rake complete each round trip and although Pakistani locomotives and carriages didn’t mind trundling two hundred miles across the Indian Punjabi plains - any more than the Indian version minded delving the twenty miles into the Pakistani Punjabi plains - the trade unions and security wallahs on both sides soon agreed it would be less stressful to have the passengers disembark and re-embark across the respective frontiers.

In Mark Twain’s notes he reported that he left Delhi at midnight and arrived in Lahore at 05.30 a.m. next day, 18 March. I can only presume something is wrong with the note as no train then, not even the Flying Mail on which he would have been traveling, turned in that sort of speed. Nevertheless one thing is certain, it would have been a lot quicker then than the slow chug of a folly that makes the journey today.

As I am sitting, swaying and jolting on the Samjhota Express it is good to read his notes again, if only to remind myself why we are making this trip this way at all: only to follow in his train tracks, as every guide book and tourist forum insists this is the worst possible way to journey from Delhi to Lahore. And the border crossing complications haven’t even started yet. And two sets of unpleasant, deadly memories are right here with us on these tracks.

Apart from the Partition massacres, on 18 February 2007 a bomb exploded on this train, killing 68 passengers and injuring a hundred more. It was just days before the two governments were due to meet for peace talks. The case remains unsolved. WikiLeaks reveals that the CIA’s top suspect is David Headley, a name-changed, Pakistani-American, Pakistani-intelligence-sponsored terrorist behind a number of other massacres, including the 2008 Mumbai terrorist atrocity. Other investigations point the finger at Abhinav Bharat, a right-wing Indian group with links to retired Indian Army officers. The memories of that blast and the religious hatred of humanity behind it haunt the slow train journey now; the very slowness of passing through the scene of the horror stops the memory moving on.

Is there an easy way, a pleasant way to go from Delhi to Lahore? Yes, and an amusing way too. One takes the Delhi to Amritsar train, the Sachkhand Express. This ends twenty miles from the border, and taxis and buses abound to help with the final leap. Once at the border the respective armies put on a display of bravado and machismo as they strut and goosestep round their countries’ flagpoles and barriers. It has become quite the tourist attraction with numbered seats and postcard sellers - photography in theory being forbidden. The show - and there is no other word for it - lasts for half an hour. Rumor has it that once the tourists have gone they all muck in together, not surprisingly as they are all Punjabis after all.

Border show over, one then walks through the two frontier posts without excessive botheration. Once into Pakistan an equal number of taxis and buses abound to take one the final twenty miles into Lahore. That’s the easy way, the amusing way.

And there is the other way, this way that the Mark Twain sleuth hounds are taking. Eventually the Samjhota Express reaches Attari on the Indian side of the border. All change! I had noticed that we were the only people in our carriage and when I went to find a serviceable loo saw that there were only three other passengers in the next carriage - backpacking tourists from the Far East. Now as we jumped down onto the shale (there is no platform as such) it is clear we are the only five passengers from all of the six carriages.

If you don’t mind I’m going to compress the next four hours into four sentences. Exciting it was not (1). Ironical it was; the fact that there were just the five of us clearly aroused both sets of guards’ suspicions and so prolonged the process: why would anyone sensible chose such a stupid way of travelling from Delhi to Lahore? (2). A further complication was completing “Occupation” on the forms: I didn’t want to put “Tourist” as just a quick look through my cases, crammed with books and notes and the “magic letter” from the Indian High Commission would reveal I am slightly more than that, leading to unknown further delays (3). “Writer” could mean - dread word - journalist; “Historian” won the day. And there was plenty of idle time for mathematics: five people, four hours, twenty-two guards equals five and a half guard/hours per entry (4).

***

An hour later the Pakistani version of the Samjhota Express grinds its way into Lahore station, Platform 1 no less. Lahore Station, like the one at Lucknow we visited three weeks ago, was designed post-Sepoy Uprising to be both train station and fort. At first sight it looks like the son of St. Pancras in London but in fact the turrets are reinforced and the clock towers bomb-proof; it’s a classic piece of Oriental-Gothic Raj style and a classic piece of once-bitten-twice-shy Raj intent.

Lahore Station is as busy as any in India and one is met by the usual hordes of porters and taxi touts. Luckily I had said “yes” when the nice PRO at the Avari Hotel in the Mall not only asked, but insisted that we should be met. And so it is done; a tall, young, spring-footed, tousle-haired British Pakistani meets me - and greets me with a British Midlands accent. He is Muji from Birmingham, here on a three-month hotel management placement and the sort of chirpy person to whom one warms immediately. He is good news but he has bad news: we cannot reach the hotel; there’s a full-scale demonstration on outside, probably for the next hour. What’s it about? Blasphemy.

“For or against?” I ask.

“Not for,” Muji replies.

We cross the square outside and find a chai shop to watch the show. The marchers holler past the station, a mass of green and white flags and placards, black or white clothing, anger on the faces and hatred in the voices. They all look like they have been cloned from the same anger/hate hybrid gene.

“They all look alike,” I say and sip. To a man they all seem to be twenty-two years old with unshaped beards, no moustaches, and shaking right raised fists.

“They are all alike. Fuckin’ nutters,” says Muji.

“I’m pleased you said so first. What are they shouting about?” There seems to be only one slogan shouted.

“My Urdu’s a bit shaky and I don’t read it, but something like ‘Hang Munrid a thousand times!’”

“Gosh, who’s Munrid?” I ask.

“Fucked if I know. Blasphemy is a big deal here now. Every day, that and the CIA yank they’ve locked up. Or something else. Have you heard much about the blasphemy business?”

“Only the headlines,” I reply. I retrieve yesterday’s Times of India out of my carry-on. Under the headline “Pakistan Assassinations Highlight Sway of Radical Clerics”, I read out “Yousaf Qureshi made headlines when he offered $6,000 to anyone who kills a Pakistani Christian woman convicted of blasphemy. She was seen in public making a sign of the cross, a definition of blasphemy in today’s Pakistan. Now, the cleric told worshippers packed into his 17th-century mosque his followers had done a ‘marvelous job’ days before, by assassinating a cabinet minister who had defended the woman.”

“Yeah,” says Muji, “there’ve been two assassinations of cabinet ministers here lately. The last one, guy called Bhatti, was shot by his own bodyguard. They’re all fuckin’ batty if you ask me. There’s no police at all; they’re all bent as fuck anyway. Mind you, the whole country’s bent. It’s run by the army and they’re rippin’ everyone off too. I just keep me head down, that’s what the hotel says we all have to do. Not that I’m that interested. I hate politicians in England too.” He looks up and out at the emptier street. “I reckon we can go if some bastard hasn’t nicked the car. We’re meant to have a driver waiting. Last one we employed drove off with one of our cars. That happens all the time too.”

“How come you’re staying at the Avari?” Muji asks as we drive through the rickshaws and rubbish. I notice the English road names: Aikman, Tollington, Club, Davis, Durand, Shalimar, GT.[82] “Not that there’s anything wrong with it. Best in town I think.”

I explain: the Twain party all stayed at the Nedous Hotel in Mall Road. It was sold in 1946, revamped and renamed the Park Luxury Hotel. That was knocked down and made into the Lahore Hilton. Then they gave up and now it’s the Avari Hotel. I had emailed them after the visas were sorted and asked if by any miracle they had any of the Nedous archives. They said no, but come and stay anyway. Too expensive, I said. Not with a media discount - you are a travel writer, aren’t you? I am now, I said, and so here we are. And, it has to be said, they didn’t exactly have to squeeze us in.

***

That first night Mark Twain lectured at the Railway Theatre, but it has sunk without trace. I am disappointed because this is the first time I’ve drawn a compete blank: elsewhere even if no Twain venue still stands there have been records and a location, somewhere to go and mope about. Actually I couldn’t have gone to the Railway Theatre for a show even if it had existed: the 10 p.m. Karachi curfew had been extended to Lahore.

“Not that it’s an official curfew,” says Ahmed from a bar stool in The Tollington Pub in the depths of the Avari Hotel. “You are somehow just meant to know.”

We introduce ourselves. Ahmed is a 45-year-old Pakistani Canadian, a researcher from Toronto working on a new HBO series about the Mujahideen. This is his first trip to Pakistan; he’s been here a month, up north, and is only in Lahore overnight to fly home out from here tomorrow. His family was Kashmiri; his father a railway engineer working where Ahmed has just been, in the North West Frontier, at Partition. His parents were not worried, Muslim Kashmir was bound to be part of Muslim Pakistan; it wasn’t, another Partition disaster. His family was homeless but at least his father was well trained and qualified and Commonwealth Canada welcomed them, with generosity too. He cannot say enough good about Canada, the home he has come to have, and enough bad about Pakistan, the home he never had.

He is interested in India and the contrasts, there and here.

“I haven’t been here long enough for the contrasts,” I reply, “but you can’t help being impressed with India. I love the way they live in the past and embrace the future. If knowledge will be this century’s most valuable raw material they are a generation or two from being on top of the world. Everywhere you look in India are colleges or advertisements for colleges. You could write a pamphlet with all their exam initials.”

Ahmed says, “There’s no education happening here. It’s another scam. They call it the ghost-school racket. The politicians take money from foreign aid and NGOs for new schools and put up a shell. There’s a big opening, VIPs cutting tapes, usual bullshit. Then they go and that’s it. All the money for books and teachers - even students - gets no further than the politicians’ pockets. Even if you can find a teacher, they’re paid squat. If they are paid at all. They were out on strike in Peshawar last week. Hadn’t been paid for months. If you want to take a higher exam you slip some money into your answer sheets. If you want to pass you slip some more in. No wonder they got madrasahs everywhere.”

“How does that work?” I ask.

“Only a quarter of girls - a quarter right? - and half of boys complete primary school. The literacy rate in the country as a whole is only fifty percent, much less among the under thirties. They are way behind Nepal and Bangladesh - and as for India...”

“But the madrasahs?”

“They spend half the day teaching the children to learn the Koran by rote in Arabic. Imagine your schooldays learning the New Testament in Aramaic by rote. But the other half they do spend teaching them how to read and write. And they are free, Saudi money mainly, and the kids get fed, fed well too. If you’re a poor Muslim anyway and you want your children to read and write you send them to a madrasah.”

“That’s all they learn, the Koran in Arabic, and reading and writing Urdu?”

“That’s it. No sports, no culture, no technology. No computer skills, not in the Koran. No English, not in the Koran. No science, especially no science, not in the Koran. You think the literacy rate at fifty percent is bad enough, but that fifty percent know nothing about the world at all. Half the population is under 25 and half of them illiterate.”

“And the rich?”

“Pakistan is run by 27 families, extended families. Some are in politics, some the military, some in business but one way or another they have the place all sewn up. None of them pay any taxes. They couldn’t give a shit. They’re all educated abroad, a lot of them only speak English. Switzerland is where they all bank. But even the Swiss got fed up with President Zardari, told him not to be so blatant, even took him to court. The Swiss!”

“The famous Mr. Ten Percent.”

“That name started when he was married to Benazir Bhutto ast the time she was Prime Minster. Man, she was a crook, big time, a real scammer. He is even worse. Now he’s President. When he was sworn in he had to declare his worth. The world was watching so he couldn’t put nothing. He put down 1.9 billion US dollars. Transparency [International] reckons he has stolen ten times that amount and five times more than that if you include his cronies. It’s like Nigeria without the oil. They don’t need oil, they’ve got US aid. And that’s not all.”

After a month of buttoning his lip Ahmed was in full flow. “Zardari has been in prison for murder, twice, and indicted for four more, then mysteriously they were both pardoned - Benazir for corruption and him for ordering the murders - including, by the way, her brother.”

A few beers later and we have put the world to rights. The Americans created a lot of the problems by throwing money at the Pakistanis to spend on the Mujahideen when they were fighting the Russians in Afghanistan. Once the Russians had been defeated the Mujahideen were left to stew. Some became the Taliban and now the Americans are throwing more money at the Pakistanis to fight them. Meanwhile the Pakistani Taliban are gaining ground rapidly as the drones policy, bombing Pakistan territory in search of the Taliban, is backfiring on patriotic hearts and minds. The politicians let it continue as the army feeds some of the American money back to them. The 100,000-strong ISI, the army’s intelligence unit, is riddled with Taliban sympathizers and assassins, such as the dead cabinet minister Bhatti’s bodyguard. The ISI created various terrorist groups to fight the army’s wars by proxy in Afghanistan and Kashmir and these have now become self-funding through guns and drugs and are no longer under anyone’s control. The best any outside government can do is stop giving the Pakistanis foreign aid or military funding which simply disappears and encourages corruption - and irony-free American politicians please note, the Taliban, which brings us back to where we started. In fact, if you sat down with a blank piece of paper and US$20 billion you would not be able to invent a more counter-productive, ill fitting and yes, morally bankrupt set of policies however hard you tried. SNAFU, I believe is the appropriate acronym, or as Mark Twain said “Politician and idiot are synonymous terms”, or even Sita’s favorite: “Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.”

***

The next day I knew I was going to be disappointed even before I was disappointed. This was one of Mark Twain’s favorite days, lunch with the Lieutenant Governor in Government House and then a ride through Lahore on one of the governor’s elephants. Government House is reputed to be surrounded by troops. A bit late, one would have thought: only a few months ago the resident Governor of Punjab, Salmaan Taseer, was assassinated too over his support for repealing the blasphemy law. Taseer was a highly successful international investment banker turned politician, a sort of Pakistani version of Michael Bloomberg but without the annoying prissiness. And as for finding an elephant...

In Lahore the Lieutenant-Governor lent me an elephant. This hospitality stands out in my experiences in a stately isolation. It was a fine elephant, affable, gentlemanly, educated, and I was not afraid of it. I even rode it with confidence through the crowded lanes of the native city, where it scared all the horses out of their senses, and where children were always just escaping its feet. It took the middle of the road in a fine independent way, and left it to the world to get out of the way or take the consequences.

I am used to being afraid of collisions when I ride or drive, but when one is on top of an elephant that feeling is absent. I could have ridden in comfort through a regiment of runaway teams. I could easily learn to prefer an elephant to any other vehicle, partly because of that immunity from collisions, and partly because of the fine view one has from up there, and partly because of the dignity one feels in that high place, and partly because one can look in at the windows and see what is going on privately among the family.

The Lahore horses were used to elephants, but they were rapturously afraid of them just the same. It seemed curious. Perhaps the better they know the elephant the more they respect him in that peculiar way. In our own case - we are not afraid of dynamite till we get acquainted with it.

It’s only a short walk along the extension of Mall Road and into the Mayo Gardens from the Avari Hotel to Governor’s House. For once I don’t take a guide as I know about the Nedous Hotel and the Railway Theatre. Governor’s House is close at hand and although unvisitable is, I presume, photographable and gawpable. Instead we amble through the city streets and market, keeping Governor’s House on our left, somewhere. There’s no hurry and the amble turns into a half-marathon, ambling-wise.

Lahore is noticeably poorer than Delhi, Old or New, and I suspect that outer or tribal Pakistan is noticeably poorer than outer or tribal India. Certainly its religion-bound, education-free prospects are much poorer. Delhi’s streets are covered in trash but occasionally, just occasionally, it is swept up and sifted for trinkets and, even more occasionally, bits of it for recycling. Here in Lahore the trash is denser and older and without the benefit of cows and goats chomping on it as a first line of attack. Twice I saw makeshift bonfires near the market; when the garbage gets too bad someone takes the initiative and burns it, creating more pollution. In Delhi they are making some effort to tackle air the foul air, introducing four-stroke and LPG rickshaws, gas-powered town buses and the like, while here the smelly old two-stroke rickshaws and old, old cars and buses belch out smoke unabashed. In Delhi if one is lost it is certain that at least a shop owner will speak enough English to set you back on track; here even the pharmacy owner I ask doesn’t speak English. In Delhi beggars have their pitch and are, by and large, passive; here they wander around and are active and persistent. In Delhi one sometimes feels like one is in the twenty-first century, with hope and pride in the air; here in Lahore one more often feels like one is in the nineteenth, with fear and despair in the eyes. And I miss seeing women out and about, especially brightly dressed and bangled women.

Eventually, with many vague attempts at left turning, we come out on Staff College Road, the wrong side of, but still adjacent to Governor’s House. There’s another demonstration but this one is very different from yesterday’s. The demonstrators are older, quieter and are waving sheets of paper and not placards. There is no sign of Islam or hatred. Simply anger.

I find a man in a suit and ask him, “What’s all this about?”

“Oh, the electricity. Wish I was with them but I need to be in my office.”

“What about the electricity?”

“Haven’t you noticed the generators?” Actually I have, especially around the market. “The Lahore ESC just sends out these enormous bills whether you are there or not. There are no meters. And no electricity for a lot of the time. These are mostly shop keepers and stall holders. They’ve had enough.”

“But if there’s no electricity there should be no bills.”

“Ha, then they cut you off. Then only reconnect with baksheesh. The supply company was denationalized, then given to one of Zardari’s cronies. Ever since it’s become another scam. They sell to the highest bidder. It’s called hot-wiring, a guaranteed supply. But you pay. Where are you staying?”

“The Avari.”

“Ask them. I better go.”

I cannot get anywhere near Governor’s House, another fine architectural example of Raj confidence, not just in an endless future but in experimenting with different classical motifs from the Palladian portico to the Moghul sepulcher rear and Oriental-Gothic wings. It is indeed surrounded by troops. Gillian’s one noble attempt at photography is instantly banned by frantically waving lines of incoming camouflage.

Decision snaps sometimes replace camera snaps and I decide to bale out of Lahore there and then rather than wait for tomorrow. I’ve seen all there is to see here, story-wise, my bar buddy Ahmed has left and Lahore is sinking in anger. I walk back to the train station and for a while enter a parallel Pakistan, one with purpose and old world charm and one without testiness and disruption. The unkind thought arises that the railway track is an umbilical chord back to an easier, more pleasant life in India.

Rawalpindi

Trains to Rawalpindi, combining with its neighbor and Pakistan’s capital Islamabad, run every other hour and three hours later I am on the 4.30 p.m. Subak Kharmam Express up towards the North West Frontier. Gillian has joined Livy and Clara on strike; all three need a rest and stay behind in Lahore while Mark Twain and Carlyle Smythe and I make the trip up to Rawalpindi.

Once out of Lahore one sees yet another Pakistan, Pakistan the picturesque. Twain made this same journey but made no comments about it but here I’m reminded of his impressions of Bengal more than I had been in Bengal; or maybe - apart from the nakedness - it was the insidious Pakistan-now-equals-India-then mindset:

And everywhere through the soft vistas we glimpse the villages, the countless villages, the myriad villages, thatched, built of clean new matting, snuggling among grouped palms and sheaves of bamboo; villages, villages, no end of villages, not three hundred yards apart, and dozens and dozens of them in sight all the time; a mighty City, hundreds of miles long, hundreds of miles broad, made all of villages, the biggest city in the earth, and as populous as a European kingdom. I have seen no such city as this before.

And there is a continuously repeated and replenished multitude of naked men in view on both sides and ahead. We fly through it mile after mile, but still it is always there, on both sides and ahead - brown-bodied, naked men and boys, ploughing in the fields. But not a woman. In these two hours I have not seen a woman or a girl working in the fields.

He wouldn’t see one outside a house now either, but that’s a different matter.[83]

***

Three hours and a glorious sunset over the plains later, I reflect on how the good the trains are - and such excellent value; presumably a service not yet farmed out to one of Zardari’s crook-cronies. In fact this Rawalpindi railway line was a source of great pride to the British and Indian - and of course future Pakistani - engineers and managers who built and ran it. The terrain up to Rawalpindi and beyond was difficult and the rush for a quick completion, caused by the need to have a reinforceable garrison in place near the Afghan border, made the building of it even more challenging. It was only finished eight years before Mark Twain and Carlyle Smythe arrived, by which time the garrison had become the largest in the British Empire with 40,000 soldiers encamped, including “one regiment of British and one of Native cavalry; two regiments of British and two of Native infantry”.

It is still a large garrison town now and the headquarters of the Pakistani Army and Air Force. Twain stayed and lectured in The Club, Rawal Pindi, in the cantonment area, so attached to but not exclusive to its military clientele. From old photographs it looks remarkably like the Poona Club and it met the same fate: burned down by a blaze started in the open-fire kitchen. It was rebuilt as the Artillery Officers’ Mess, a status it maintained through Partition and its take-over by the new Pakistani Army.

Like much else it has now been semi-privatized by an unholy alliance of politicians and generals and when not in use by the officers can be hired for special occasions. I wander in late morning the next day and share a soft drink with three young officers at the bar. They all speak perfect English. Like the Indian Army, the Pakistani Army is cloned from the British Army - the commercialization here, with advertisements for wedding hosting, BBQ & Tombola Parties and Karaoke Evenings are a later development. I’m still trying to imagine a sober karaoke evening, or wedding reception for that matter. Outside are the famous old tennis courts where the first ever Davis Cup was held but now half full of paying parked cars. A ticket booth stands where the main court umpire must have sat.

The eldest officer, Humza Yousaf, striped up as a captain, asks me where I am staying. I say Flashman’s Hotel opposite. (I couldn’t resist it, being a lover of George Macdonald Fraser’s yarns; it is also the nearest hotel to what was The Club.) It turns out he has family in England only thirty miles away from mine and our prep schools used to play against each other at soccer and cricket. We agree to dine together tomorrow evening; and a very informative dinner it will be too.

The area around Flashman’s Hotel is Saddar Bazaar, a wonderful collection of alleys and shops and a thriving business center, a self-contained town within a city. Wandering further afield reveals Rawalpindi, or just Pindi as the locals say, to have a distinct and robust flavor. One warms to its cool atmosphere, welcome even now in late spring. The people reflect the geography: although we are still in Punjab it is nearing its end and more exotic-looking mountain tribesmen mingle with local traders and a disproportionally high number of men in military and mullah uniforms.

Unfortunately it also attracts its share of fanatics. This is where, in the old East India Company grounds, Benazir Bhutto was assassinated in late 2007. It was also where her father was hanged by General Zia, a particularly unpleasant religious maniac-cum-military dictator-cum-serial-embezzler, and from whose rule the psychotic warrior-gangster-priest nature of Pakistan has never recovered. It was also where in 1951 the first elected Prime Minister of Pakistan, Liaquat Ali Khan, was assassinated. One would be a brave Bhutto, or any politician, to go anywhere near the place. Sometimes it feels like a politician in Pakistan has the life expectancy of a rear gunner in World War 2.

It’s not just politicians. More than three hundred people have been killed and many more hundreds injured in the eighteen bomb blasts here since 1987. All have been religiously inspired and politically driven. The nature of the outrages has changed too: up to ten years ago anonymous car bombs were in vogue but now the suicide bomber holds sway. And it’s getting worse. The recent attacks on mosques were inter-Muslim internecine affairs, an ominous shift pointing to a religious civil war.

The rampant terrorism affects everything. The Cricket World Cup is being held right now. Pakistan is cricket mad and was due to co-host the tournament. Then some Islamists sprayed the Buddhist Sri Lankan cricketers’ bus with AK-47 bullets and the World Cup games were taken away from Pakistan. One of the venues was to have been the local Army Cricket Ground, already host to a test match, in the grounds of The Club and now adjacent to the Artillery Officers’ Mess. Many Pakistanis cannot even bear to watch it on television being played in India, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, and unlike in India, where the World Cup is talked about constantly, the country’s shame has made it taboo in Pakistan.

***

Flashman’s Hotel, with its low-rise and evocative colonial fort front and prominent position on Mall Road, is a joy. It has recently been refurbished and they have resisted the temptation to carve up the old Raj suites into smaller bedrooms as has been done in hotels elsewhere. I am the only foreigner staying so maybe it’s not driven by good taste but good business. It was owned by the Pakistan Tourism Development Corporation but that has since been privatized, possibly why they insist on guests paying cash. Sleep is sound but broken at dawn by an hour long amplified prayer melee. One gets used to the pre-dawn muezzin all over the Muslim world; the call to prayer echoes out over the loudspeakers and normally only lasts for a minute, leaving enough time for the visitor - and most of the faithful - to turn over and snatch another hour or two sleep. Here in Rawalpindi they broadcast the whole service and the combined and echoed noise from the half a dozen minarets in earshot not only makes re-sleep impossible but sends the day off with a most discordant racket, an electronic Babel.

I meet my new officer friend Humza for dinner. Inevitably the subject turns to Pakistan, the failed state. A few glasses of Pakistani beer, aka mineral water, later we conclude that it is a failing but not yet a failed state; it is certainly a rogue state. There is one more leader in it to turn it around. Another Zia or Zardari and it’s finished. The problem is no leader is on the horizon, hardly surprising given the constant assassinations of leaders and hopefuls.

Gillian and I had been in pre-1979 revolutionary Iran a couple of times and Pakistan now reminds me of being there then. There the state, in the shape of the Shah and his coterie of crook-cronies, had abandoned responsibility for governance and had descended into outright gangsterism; the same could be said here. This quickly spirals into a self-fulfilling prophecy: the regime knows the good times cannot last forever, so uses what time may be left to focus solely on getting even richer even quicker.

True, there is as yet no outstanding mullah, no Ayatollah Khomeini around whom the illiterate and dispossessed could rally, but one feels that if a new leader is to arise he will be religious rather than political or military. Right now the danger is not much the strength of the mullahs but the chronic weakness of the state, which is allowing the fundamentalists to push towards their Sharia goals without any resistance. As in old Iran, the reality for the mass of the population is uneducated joblessness with no hope of reprieve while they stare aghast at the blatant misuse of power by their elite. Also as in old Iran, growing anti-Americanism, due to their pursuit of the Afghan War on Pakistani soil with increasing Pakistani causalities, is leading to a corresponding mistrust of all Western values. Most of those with these Western values may scoff - albeit politely - at the primitive theology behind the mistrust, but if all you know comes from a man-made interpretation of a man-made religion the resulting world views are going to be, well, primitive. There are now no fewer than thirty Islamic parties who all unite around toppling the civilian government and creating an Islamic state.

The politicians take the blame for the American presence in Pakistan, but by a sort of internal Pax Pakistanica control of foreign policy and national security lies with the military and both parties are making respective fortunes from skimming off American spending, now at US$22 billion and increasing by a further US$3 billion a year. In fact, Pakistan has been under total military rule for half of its existence and it is no surprise to find that - like the Prussia of old - it is not a country that has an army but an army that has a country. Under its wing it then has two statelets answerable only to itself: the ISI, now out of control, and the nuclear weapons program shrouded in effective secrecy.[84] It consumes an extraordinary twenty percent of the national budget, employs a million people and runs extensive business interests all over the country, including raw material and import monopolies and extensive property portfolios unhampered by any planning restrictions.

It doesn’t take a genius to see that American foreign policy in South Asia is as foolhardy now as it was in Southeast Asia forty years ago. Reasonable people in Pakistan are helpless, as with one hand the Americans throw money at the deeply unpopular activities of the military-intelligence establishment while on the other demand that the hapless civilian-gangster government wrest back control of the country.

The terrorist groups that the ISI has sponsored with US money are now so drug- and gun- rich and out of control that they have taken to attacking the ISI’s paymasters, the Army itself to protect their fiefdoms or, more accurately, thiefdoms: 2,300 military personnel have been killed by the ISI’s proxies in the last five years. Of more concern to my dinner companion is the other 100,000-strong force, nominally under military control, which controls the 110-strong nuclear weapons program. Already Pakistan has sold nuclear technology to North Korea, Libya and Iran against all international rules and even harbors the scientist, A. Q. Khan, responsible (harbors is a polite way of saying openly fetes). Quite why America has funded it all in the first pace is unclear, especially as the sole purpose of the weapons is to blow up the West’s neighboring ally, the multiracial, multicultural, secular democracy of India.

The real danger is one that everyone acknowledges but seems powerless to prevent. The Taliban has turned its attention from Afghanistan, where it is suffering such heavy losses that even it cannot sustain them, to the much easier pickings of Pakistan. The worst-case scenario, that the Taliban acquire Pakistan’s entire arsenal of nuclear weapons, is not at all beyond the realms of possibility.

On that happy note we say goodnight. Like Mark Twain, I “had intended to penetrate the north west Frontier as far as Peshawar, only a few miles from the Khyber Pass, portal of Afghanistan”, but sickness had dislocated his schedule and two more days were lopped off by a message that his ship was sailing from Calcutta ahead of time. I needed - well, wanted - to get back to the life afloat too.

***

The next morning I wish Rawalpindi good-bye, and back in Lahore Gillian good morrow. Then we both wish Mark Twain, Livy, Clara and Smythe goodbye; they are re-shugging along old train tracks to reach Calcutta quickly, as it were, to catch the steamer to South Africa, following more of that equator. Pakistan we wish good-bye too as we fly out from Lahore to Dubai and then on to Istanbul to rejoin Vasco da Gama in southern Turkey.

Good bye to everyone, it’s been fun... if a little exhausting; ten weeks on the road in India is boxing enough for that writer then - and this writer now.

72 Both now in Pakistan.

73 Or 250 million if you include India as it was in 1900, so including Pakistan, parts of Nepal and Bangladesh.

74 Also an assistant, almost a disciple, of our friend Ochterlony from Calcutta.

75 Named after the post-Fraser, pre-Sepoy Uprising owner, Hindu Rao.

76 The East India Company had told the 82-year-old Bahadur Shah II that the title would die with him.

77 Etymologically from the Greek “bed guard”.

78 Meanwhile, trained doctors perform the lucrative operation known as genitoplasty, turning an estimated 300 girls a year into boys by grafting a penis and injecting hormones. At US$5,000 parents reckon it is cheaper than a wedding and dowry - and morally better than sex selection abortions which have left India with seven million more boys than girls under six.

79 He believed in the idea of exemplary punishment pour encourager les autres: having decapitated a local hoodlum he kept the head on his desk.

80 Burma, now Myanmar, although part of the Raj, always had a different fate.

81 Mahatma Gandhi, like Jinnah and Nehru a London-trained lawyer, seems to have created a new religion of his own - using elements of Hindu and Buddhist ascetic practices.

82 For Grand Trunk. There are GT Roads in towns all along the old Grand Trunk Road that connected Peshawar near the Afghan border to Calcutta, via Rawalpindi, Lahore, Amritsar, Meerut, Cawnpore, Allahabad and Benares.

83 It’s sobering to reflect that a woman who leaves the house and is even suspected of tarnishing her owner’s “honor” can be sentenced to gang rape by a village kangaroo court, some members of which carry out the “punishment” - with the woman’s owner’s consent.

84 Only by chance did the CIA find out that three top-ranking officers on the nuclear team were Taliban double agents. All attempts to find out about others have been repeatedly rebuffed.