On the Hunza bus I met Ghulam, a man of maybe forty. He was gaunt-faced and thin. There was a crucifix round his neck; he is the only Christian in Hunza. Christianity exhorts us to love our neighbours; Ghulam delights in their downfall. There is something of the goat in the man: a demonic giggle, a Pannish mischief. He holds his atrophied left hand in his right, and consequently walks with a rolling gait, like an old sea-salt. He runs a café in Karimabad, which is the main township in the Hunza valley. The café is no more than a shack. Karimabad is now served by the Karakoram Highway. When poor Biddulph left Gilgit to reach the palace of the Mir of Hunza, the journey took a fortnight. Now a minibus will be in Ganesh, at the roadside, in some three hours.
Karimabad is suspended high above the road, looking over the deep roaring trench of the Hunza river to the Auld Enemy, the Nagar side.
We reached the township by leaving the highway and walking slowly up a dusty track, past apricot trees and the civil hospital, and the stooks of harvested wheat drying in the sun. On an alarmingly steep street, booths sell Hunza handicrafts and juice. Karimabad has become a tourist centre. Jeeps of tourists in scarves and dark glasses sweep up and down the track to the main road. There are several concrete hotels, and the foundations for more because the view is fit for a king; and the tourist is king. An entire realm is laid out at your feet. Bound by the white soaring wall of Rakaposhi, cleft by the Hunza river, there are green terraces and apricot trees, little flat-roofed houses huddled together and their fields around them. Around Ghulam’s café are pastures of wild flowers, and Ghulam’s familiar, his little black goat tethered to a rock. Goats feature a lot. At the roadside below, there are rocks covered in petroglyphs. Herds and herds of goats and ibex make their way across the rocks, older than Islam, older even than the standing Buddha carved on the rockface on the outskirts of Gilgit.
When night fell and the stars came out, I was watching the belt of the Milky Way reach over the dark wall of the mountaintops. The constellations and villages appeared like a mirror-image of one another, as if the patterns of lights of the villages below were reflections of the stars in a lake.
Ghulam crouched beside me, holding his arm. The wind was cool and fresh. Far below the river roared. Now and again a startling crack like gunshot echoed from the mountains. I’d learned it was not gunshot, but rocks falling; and the deep low banging and trundling was the river rolling rocks the size of taxis along its bed.
Ghulam said, ‘This Milky Way; in Burushaski language, we say “Charkay Palash”; it means “turn the world”. These Burushaski people believe that it is the power of this Milky Way that turns the world round.’
The clear skies didn’t last long; the next day clouds began to converge from Rakaposhi side, from Golden Peak and Spantic, and by evening the sky was thunderous and black. Behind Karimabad stands the mountain Ultar, whose basin is filled with cloud like a bubbling cauldron. Before Ultar, on a knoll at the top of the town, is the old palace of the Mir like a lone tooth. Its washed and stained walls gleamed eerily in the stormlight, its decayed balconies were held up by poles. Many storms had battered it, perhaps six hundred Himalayan winters. I went up the steep hill to the gates, where the gun-maker was brought to make his exploding cannon, from whose carved portals the old Mir rode out on his yak, through which entered emissaries and spies from China, India, Britain, and their plenitude of gifts; all was falling into ruin and decay.
The clouds darkened and darkened, a wind began to swirl about the mountains and glide down the glacier. It gusted hard and bowed the slender plane trees.Waves of dust blew up from the road into eyes, teeth. I ran blinded and manhandled back to shelter. Medieval figures scurried with sacks drawn round their features.
By the time I reached Ghulam’s, lightning cracked the sky. It filled the Ultar basin with a bowl of eldritch light. Backlit, the palace on its hilltop looked like a mad Frankenstein film set. Lightning and more lightning began to leap between the mountaintops, and thunder rolled. We were bound on all sides by mountains, whose summits were picked by lightning to grin for a moment in a terrible light. Then the rain began. First it pocked the dry dust, and then it came down in sheets. Ghulam had pulled a bench on to the shelter of his verandah, and there we sat to watch. All over the valley, the electric lights went down.
Away below, in the pitiless, wind-driven rain, little trains of orange torchlight processed among the fields, as if in a carnival. A bolt of lightning flashed and for a moment lit the fields in grey, then darkness came again and the little torches moved.
‘This very bad, very bad!’ Ghulam called above the wind. ‘This villagers, you know, it is their harvest. Ruin!’
The lights ran back and forth. By the way they turned and twisted you could see they were following the edges of the fields and terraces.
‘All is rain. Apricots, ruin. This wheat, soak.’All the stooks that were cut and drying by the side of the road or in the fields would be soaked and smashed, the apricots drying on the flat-roofed dwellings would turn rotten by the morning were they not gathered in. And we were sitting on a bench like judges, watching sheet lightning bring out the summit of Rakaposhi, then fork wildly down the valley. The awesome rumbling of thunder echoed off the mountainsides. In the light of the flashes every poplar stood clear as day, in a chilling green-grey light. The lightning wrote some terrible message across the sky, the thunder applauded, and a new, reinvigorated deluge of rain followed on behind.
We said silent prayers for the villagers’ harvest and, as the storm moved east over the Baltoro glaciers, for the mountaineers who would be camped at high altitudes, enduring a wrath of snow and wind we could barely imagine.
The rain fell all night long. Everyone – Ghulam, his cook, a friend a couple of guests – slept fully clothed on benches inside his café.Mice scuttled about the roof, the rain drummed on and on. After the searing heat of the summer, I woke stiff and damp and felt at home. The cloud was still low enough to beard the hills, and fill the gullies and high valleys. When it lifted it revealed Rakaposhi plastered with more summer snow than anyone could remember.
Ghulam giggled, and with difficulty lit a cigarette one-handed. ‘My neighbour, he has a good hotel. His roof is leak! There is water coming!’ He tugged a blanket round his shoulders and dragged himself, coughing and giggling, into the scullery. ‘Road is block,’ he called. ‘But harvest is okay.’
If you ask the people of the remote villages their opinion of the road-building programme which will connect them to the towns, they sigh. They know there is much to be lost, but it means they won’t starve in a bad winter. If a single storm wipes out the winter’s supplies, there is always the jeep to the towns downside.
The day wore damply on, a day for drinking tea and reading what books could be found.When the sun broke through again, with it rose a high pungent smell – rotting apricots. By some mysterious means news came through from other parts, which Ghulam cheerfully relayed. Landslips had blocked the road north to China and south to Gilgit. Skardu was cut off because bridges were down. The road would be closed for a fortnight at least, because the men and machines to rebuild the bridges couldn’t reach them until the landslips were cleared. Fuel would soon run out because the highway south to Pindi was blocked in ten, twelve, thirteen different places.
‘But, you know,’ he giggled, ‘is good business!’ It was very good business for hoteliers. Everyone was stuck.
Where jeep drivers were caught between two landslips they were making plenty of money shuttling back and forth. Travellers who, like myself, climbed the slips that kept them from their destinations paid good money for a lift to the next roadblock; there they put their luggage on their heads and climbed that; stopping to tell the poor souls coming the other way that they would find a vehicle waiting. So good business is done until that jeep too runs out of petrol. The more Ghulam found to relate, the more merry he grew.
‘So! All is block!’ He grinned.
Late that night, when all the cooking was done, Ghulam sat and let his friend massage his neck because his injured arm still pained him constantly. Then he whispered to his friend who stood, pulled a shawl round his shoulders and indicated that I should follow him. Ghulam said,
‘Yes, go with him – he will show you something!’
I was led up a darkened lane, and shown into another small shack, no bigger than a garden shed. It looked like a kitchen, or a laboratory, with large pots and rubber tubes. Two other men were already there, young men from the village, who wore perfect white, despite the mud, and spoke in low voices. I sat on a wooden bench against one wall and watched as they worked by the light of a Tilley lamp. Around us on slanting shelves were piles of aluminium cooking pots, and a huge water filter. From a jerry can they poured a cup of liquor. At the very smell of the thin mulberry wine, all three men began giggling.
‘Hunza water!’
‘Illegal, you know?’ said Ghulam’s friend, raising the tumbler. ‘But this District Commissioner, this government staff: always drunk.’
‘They don’t get arrested?’
‘Of course not! The policeman who made the arrest would be suspended.’
We took sips in turn as the tumbler was passed round.
‘And if some little man is drinking and comes to court, does this Commissioner fine him, or imprison him? Of course! And then this official is every afternoon at the river, drinking, drinking!’
They set on the stove a pressure cooker of mulched-up mulberries, which had been left to ferment. They lit the stove. A pipe led to a bottle, suspended in the water tank to cool.
Now the still was set up, we drank, and told stories. One of the men in white said, ‘You did hear of this driver, next village, my friend? He was driving me, I was his last passenger. Only two days ago. He is come home, and is drinking Hunza spirits. This thing he is drinking from, this can, before was batteries. Acid. From lorry engine. Little little is in this can, it was not cleaned. Now he is dead. No problem. Drink! this can is clean, no acid.’
It tasted nutty. There is Hunza water, a spirit, distilled from mulberries or apricots, and there is simple wine too, such as we were drinking. It tastes nutty, they said, because it’s stored in stone boxes underground. Because the stone is porous, it’s waterproofed with walnut oil. Again the cup of wine was filled and passed around.
Shaheen, one of the white-clad men, was a tour guide. He was one of those keen, engaging, young professional men whom a visitor will meet in disproportionate numbers, because they gravitate towards foreigners. These are the men educated or influenced beyond the scope of the village. Their college or travelling days have made them aware of many things beyond the mountains, but their culture holds them fast. They fall between two stools and are often unmarried, because if they reject their parents’ choice, where will they find a girlfriend? They occupy a difficult place.
Shaheen held the cup up to the stormlight. ‘Tourism is good for people like me, but our parents talk of the olden days – before the British, the Mir’s day. In the Mir’s day, people used to make wine, apricot, mulberry. Like this, but now this is illegal! Now the government is strong. I will tell you: I am in Pindi, in Flashman’s Hotel, you know? Buy alcohol.’
I nodded; I had been there myself to sign the bit of paper which declared that as a heathen, I was entitled to a few bottles of weak beer. A sordid affair it was, but astonishingly tolerant. It is hard to imagine the British government permitting the sale of hashish to those whose culture or religion condones it.
Shaheen went on: ‘One police, he is watching.After he come to me and say: “Have you permit?” No. No permit. He say: “Okay, we talk about this, don’t worry, come to the restaurant.”We talk, he say: “I will not take you to police station; give me 5,000 rupees.” “No!” I say, “Take me to police station. I will stay two or three days. Is okay, I go.” “No!” he say, “Is no good!” Down he come, down, 1,000, 500 rupees. “Okay,” I say, “take it!” Two bottles vodka.
‘Yes, in the Mir’s day. If I have garden, apricots, grapes.You can come and eat fruit, take away. I no say: “Why are you in my garden?” Now these people have business mind, selling.’
I told how the making of whisky had been banned in Scotland, centuries ago, and the story from Neil Gunn’s novel: how Young Art saves Old Hector’s still from the excise man by dragging the stinking carcass of a sheep across the entrance. They laughed in recognition.
‘It is your culture!’ said Abdul. ‘I will tell you our culture. Hunza is fairy culture. In the Mir’s day. Now, there are four seers remaining. Only. If a boy is a bit – crazy, you know? – his family know he is seer. This is what they do. The drums beat faster and faster, and the shaman is breathing this smoke – juniper smoke – and he is listening to the drums faster and faster and he is trance, in this circle of drumming, then comes – then he can see the fairies – on the mountaintops, and then he can speak with them. Quietly he is speaking to the drum, the fairies tell, tell … then a lamb is killed and the seer drinks until he is blood, all his clothes are blood …’
The cup was pressed into my hand and I took some more of the thin wine. I could believe in fairies, on such a night as this, in a little shack on a Himalayan mountainside.
Back at his place Ghulam showed me some architects’ drawings, and a file of papers to do with purchasing land. The drawings were made by an English friend, and showed a modest three-sided building around a courtyard, flanked with those lollipop trees beloved of architects. On the roof was a Hunza skylight, a feature of local building. The plans showed four or five bedrooms, a couple of bathrooms. It was to be his new hotel.
‘You are losing very much of your culture,’ I said.
‘Tourism is good.We need more development,’ said Ghulam. ‘This is small hotel, not too big.’
I thought: There’ll be a funicular railway here one day soon, like Scarborough. You don’t need a seer to tell you that.
‘Haven’t you enough? It’s like Switzerland.’
‘USA, Saudi have! Why not Hunza people? Hotel-building is self-help.We need money.’
‘And if you make a lot of money, Ghulam, what would you do with it?’
‘I would go to Karachi, maybe Europe, to get treatment for my arm.’
In the late afternoon, when the sun was past its worst, I took a walk along the irrigation canal that runs through Karimabad and down to the neighbouring township of Alliabad. The water which irrigates the Hunza villages is saturated with mica, hence Ghulam’s huge water filter. The mineral colours the water a deep unlovely grey, and forms unsettling swirling patterns, like shampoo. It makes tea taste funny, even if it’s filtered. On one bank of the canal is a wide sandy path, overhung with apple trees and vines. Like in a miniature Venice, the balconies of little houses lean over the water. They are reached by a plank bridge and a ladder. On the quiet back paths one meets women, a spirited bunch and sharp on business. They sell embroidery and garnets and tiny flecks of ruby. Hunza women wear their hair in two long girlish twists, brought forward to hang on either side of the face. They’re given height by an embroidered pillbox hat, usually covered with the ubiquitous shawl. A barefoot woman called Silma walked with me a while; she gave me apples, then invited me over the little bridge and up the ladder to her home. There was a lamp in the form of an unexploded shell, with a blue bulb. She was proud of it. She brought a child, some apples and pears, a blunt knife, and a stack of embroidered cushion covers. The child brought a handful of tiny garnets and rubies. They tried to entice me to buy.
I walked on, and fell in with a man called Abdul. Like Shaheen, he was a professional sort, you could tell by his clothes, his coiffure, his fluency in English. I could have walked a long mile with Abdul. Our conversation was constantly interrupted as he stopped to pass the time of day with almost everyone. Women waved to him and smiled, little children toddled towards him, men climbed the stone walls to shake his hand. He worked for the District Commissioner. I asked:Would he like to be District Commissioner? He said, Of course! He had studied downside, political science.
He asked, ‘Scotland is colony of Britain, no? Like Hong Kong?’
I tried to explain the Act of Union, humbled by his knowledge.
He growled. ‘I don’t know why these peoples cast their vote for Margaret Thatcher. This Mr Kinnock, no one is casting his vote for him?’
We passed a crooked old man, walking the same crooked mile, who shook Abdul’s hand joyfully.
‘This man, he is to leave for Islamabad to receive an award for his help in rescuing an injured tourist. There is another, he rescued a drowning man from the river, he too is to receive an award. They are very happy. All these Ismaili people, very happy. We are not Shias, like these Nagaris.’ He gestured to the hillsides opposite. ‘You know this Muharram? When they beat themselves with sticks and chains, for the same reason we beat drums and are happy that Ali sacrificed his life for us. Nagar side wail and are in sorrow. Ismaili people makes music and dance – it is the same occasion.’
Ismaili. He pronounced it I-smiley. These I-smiley people, cheerful, I-smiling men and women. It was hard to reconcile them with their reputation as muggers and highway robbers, who controlled the pass and looted the caravans.
There is a huge school in Karimabad. Karim is the Aga Khan’s name, and the Aga Khan is the spiritual leader of the Ismaili people. The school was provided, like so much else, through his Foundation. All the way up the Hunza valley are little green signs indicating some building or project, some school or clinic or irrigation system sponsored by the Aga Khan; for of all the Ismaili people to whom he is the glorious Imam, he loves these Hunza people best. It is requited love: on impossible scree slopes high on mountainsides above the villages, messages are laid out in white stones. They are visible for miles, visible from a helicopter. In Urdu and English they cry ‘Welcome, our beloved Imam! Welcome, welcome!’ A visit from the Aga Khan is quite an event. His photograph is ubiquitous. He is everywhere framed in shops and homes, he is made into key-rings, he dangles from the mirrors of Ismaili minibuses and jeeps. And everywhere he has the same benign, rather overwhelmed expression, like an unassuming bank-clerk presented with a retirement gift. Little does he look like a playboy and racehorse keeper.
Our return path took us past the academy, a modern building which, as chance would have it, would be seen to best advantage by the Shia Nagaris on the other side of the river. From our path we could see the sunbaked playground, where a dozen girls were playing volleyball. Girls in school uniform, a simple sky-blue shalwar-kameez and white chador. The shawl was tied firmly about their middles for the game. It is a sight you never see in downside Pakistan – girls playing in full view, running, shouting, laughing. These I-smiley people, a one-time powerful offshoot of Shi’ism, the sect of the dread Assassins.
Abdul said, ‘There can be no Islamic state. There is no unity among Muslim sects. Without unity, Islamic state is not possible.’ This was near-sacrilege, denying the possibility of Pakistan. And then: ‘You know this Salman Rushdie? Rushdie did disturb the world. You have this book? Please, next time, bring for me. I would like to read. In Pakistan, it is not possible to find.’
I’d taken a dry whitewashed room in a hotel, one of a row of rooms built into the hillside like caves.My door opened to a grey irrigation stream, which spilt down into the yard of the building below. Every day an old man came there to do washing. Several times a day another cheerful old codger walked by tugging a goat on a rope. Sometimes the water ran, sometimes he diverted it with a shovelful of grey earth. I fell into a sort of lethargy, and remained in my room for four days. I read a novel by James Baldwin, and marvelled at the articulacy of the characters. I marvelled at the amount of drink they consumed – every page contained drinks, gin, ice, fridges. The storm had long passed and the summer temperatures climbed again. As the day outside grew hotter, I heard the ice I read about chink into tall cool glasses. I saw cold tonic sparkle over that ice and cover the gin at the bottom of the crystal glass. The ditch outside my door flowed grey and swirling. As Baldwin’s people spoke and drank and drank and talked, I lay on a hard bed and read them. The sun reached its zenith and fell, mercifully. I learned the wooden window-frame, and the red quilt. By day I kept the window and mesh closed against the heat, but opened it at night to catch any passing breeze. From my bed, therefore, I could see the valley, moonlit. It stood still and expectant like a stage. Ridges of mountains came in left and right, like painted scenery. I read the graffiti on the wooden beam of the roof: Shazaman Aziz 1986. Olam Lahore.
On the second day, five army helicopters came, circled the basin, futtered away south again beyond the mountains. I saw my reflection in the glass window, and could see where the lines would form on my face. Washing was difficult; a bucket of silt-saturated water was all one had to clean the dust from skin and clothes. Every day, in the stream outside, the old washerman swung wet sheets around his head and beat them rhythmically against a wall. A spate of open jeeps with ‘Pakistan Adventure’ painted on the side daily roared in and out of the township. Each jeep had two bright tourists with naked fleshy arms. Our bodies are lumpen and our clothes unflattering. There is a big sign at the top of the hill, near the fort. It says, in English: PLEASE, WEAR LOOSE CLOTHING.
Above the rooms was a café, favoured by gangs of dusty porters who would slam the screen door as they piled in, tired and hungry, to settle round a long table. Before them were set chapatis, and huge amounts of rice and dhal. Because they had just been paid off, they were good-humoured and rich as any oil-workers coming on shore. They were Balti men from Askole, two kingdoms and two languages away, who’d been carrying for trekking groups over the Hispar Glacier.
‘No-good members!’ they’d cry, and the commonplace porters’ complaints were aired, between huge mouthfuls of food.
‘Rupees, no!’
‘No-good food!’
‘No-good members! American memsahib, pah!’
The road has brought tourists, and for them it has brought thousands of plastic bottles of mineral water, which are stacked in crates at the door of every hotel or shop, or laid to cool in the grey silty waters pouring from the mountainside. The empty bottles are still being absorbed into households for various purposes, but once each household has a plenitude of bottles, what then will become of the empties?
On the morning of the fourth day there was a banging on my window: ‘Miss! Miss Kat-line!’ A nose squashed itself against the pane. ‘Miss Kat-line. Come here!’
It was half-past six in a grey dawn. I opened the door. There stood Mr Durrani, shivering in his thin southern clothes.
‘Miss Katline!’He turned and opened his arms to embrace the mountain scene before him.‘Have you seen the Natural Beauty?’
Mr Durrani was a dealer in aquamarines from Karachi, with none of the dark guile one would like to expect in gem dealers. He had taken the room next to mine, and had shown me pictures of fabulous diamonds with names like racehorses. I looked blearily out at the steely dawn. Shreds of cloud wafted around the scree slopes.
‘It looks like home.’
‘In Karachi is much hot.’ I realised I was feeling trapped by the Natural Beauty. Unless you manage to climb to a summit, you can go a long time without seeing far long vistas. I looked at the Natural Beauty while Mr Durrani engaged in some physical jerks and pulled the cold air into his lungs. It was indeed a far cry from Karachi. I felt a perverse longing for the desert. I wanted to see the sea, the long low hills of home. I wanted a sense of ancientness, emptiness, mourning. Water-light. But you can’t describe the Himalayan mountains; all you can do is pour adjectives and superlatives like libations at their feet.
We took breakfast in the hotel restaurant, at a collective table pushed against the window. The red-and-green curtains, never drawn, hung heavy with years of dirt and grease. A big, handsome, cross-eyed man in brown ate paratha. Local music beat from an old cassette deck; a music of percussion and pipes without the flying strings that set my teeth on edge. On the wall were a silver-plastic-framed photo of the Aga Khan and a Chinese clock. This latter evinced all the glory that is Chinese design. A plastic-gold horse reared over a gilt-laced clock face. On the tip of the minute hand was a plastic butterfly, which alighted upon each passing minute. Our lives are as a plastic butterfly’s, but a fleeting moment. Stuck to the walls were photos torn from a calendar. They showed idyllic scenes of Hunza with a pop or film star superimposed in a corner to suggest that the overweight and over-made-up Karachi singer really was crouching guiltily in a field. But, surrounded by the glory of Pakistan’s manhood in the form of film heroes and pop stars, I couldn’t take my eyes from the cook-boy, a shy and furtive youth. He had the most extraordinary face, round as the clock’s. His eyes and mouth were round, his ears pointed.He never smiled as he leaned against the doorway, but looked at once harmless and angry, because of the two deep, deep lines between his round and heavy eyebrows. I knew I’d seen that face before; but where escaped me. Not a person, but a painting. As he stood in the kitchen door and watched me eat, it came to me – I’d seen the cook-boy painted fiercely wild and blue on the walls of Buddhist temples. He was the spit and image of the Yamatondo, defender of the faith.
Nothing was going to Nagar; no jeeps, no minibus. I waited at the monument to the dead road-builders of the Friendship Highway. One life per kilometre, someone said. Under an awning a man stirred a great vat of chicken broth.Vehicles came and went, and the notion to be anywhere but here grew in my breast. At length a boy leaned out of a minibus and shouted Sost-Sost-Sost, and I thought:What the hell.
At Sost the air was blessedly cool. A breeze with a hint of snow on its back blew downriver from the high watershed of the Khunjerab. Donkeys grazed among the flat stones of the riverbank. The river here is slow, yet to plunge into the gorge. A different atmosphere prevailed. This is the frontier. There is the ennui of a border post, and the excitement.
I never did send the immigration officer his postcard, but he was no longer there anyhow. In the yard, a soldier sat guard on a wicker chair. A garden umbrella shielded him from the sun, a sub-machine-gun lay across his knee. He gazed at the customs shed, perhaps wondering what he had done to be sent to Sost. A few shacks had been hurriedly erected to sell tea and biscuits, Pakistani provisions and Chinese ‘varieties’. In the no-man’s-land of rubble between the shacks and the road sat a litter of jeeps. A smart hotel with a lavish dining-hall gave the first – or last – glimpse of Chinese decor. Formica tables spread with plastic cloths with pictures of a dancing Minnie Mouse. Fold-away chairs with a design of squirrels in a branch. Bamboo screens. There were piles of hot plates, and stacks of attractive blue Chinese bowls, but only dhal and chapati to eat.
There was no one around but a lone Kashgari man who poked about the shit-strewn building site next to the hotel. A row of concrete boxes was being built to serve as motel rooms. The old man was an illustration from a fairy tale. His boots were black, his coat was long, he held his hands behind his back and nodded his thin grey beard. On his head was a wheel of black velvet and fur.
The sky is wider here than at Karimabad, and I went to the river to sit quietly. Still I had that longing for space and desert, water, plateau, steppe.
The quiet was torn by a convoy of seven Chinese trucks which rolled up to the barrier. The drivers gathered to lean against the radiator of the first truck and looked into Pakistan. They were Han Chinese, each in a scruffy utilitarian blue suit, shrunken, with the trousers turned up at the ankle to show their little high-heeled shoes. They wore dishevelled white shirts and blue caps. One squatted on the ground and concentrated on spitting between his knees. They drew on cigarettes, made comments on the scene before them: a typically Pakistani scene of amiable disorder. Beside the Chinese the Pakistanis looked even more clean, coiffured, well-dressed. The Chinese faces revealed nothing. They watched everything cool as cowboys.
The trucks they were bringing into Pakistan were Japanese. Isusi. Three were huge and laden with unmarked containers. Ropes lashed down the cargo, and to prevent the ropes fraying on the metal edge of the truck they were cushioned by old Chinese slippers. The four smaller trucks were blue, with ‘Sinotrans’ painted on the door. On them were boxes and boxes of ‘Fine China, made in China’.
It’s hard to imagine two more disparate cultures bordering each other, though Sost is hardly Pakistan, nor Kashgar China. On this side of the barrier the Pakistanis are neat, dapper, mill about with shawls thrown over their heads in the unaccustomed coolness. They have not the quite frightening efficiency of the Chinese. To get their enormous packages through customs may take some doing. In a tea-house, one merchant sat unhappily on a bench reading and rereading a scrap of paper stamped by the customs people. It said – in English – ‘Confiscated: 4,000 very tiny padlocks’. Beside him sat a majestic Sindhi man, with a pillbox hat and curly-toed slippers.He had, he said, come back from a three-month trip from Karachi to Shanghai, Beijing and Hong Kong. He bought mechanical parts and shipped them home by sea, but he himself endured the journey overland.
‘So I come home with several thousand!’ He laughed. Several thousand what? Tiny padlocks?
‘Oh, you know – tourists, tourists, business, business!’
The Chinese trucks were given clearance, and rolled off into the Hunza valley. It’s all downhill from here. Tomorrow they would be in Gilgit, bringing to Pakistan gas meters and fire extinguishers, tea sets, silks, pencil sharpeners cunningly disguised as pink pianos, nail clippers in the form of green plastic elephants. The trucks followed each other out of sight: past the spate of new hotels celebrating the old trading – the Marco Polo Lodge, the Silk Road Inn, and the bank – a huge safe at the roadside.
As ever, a few steps off the beaten track and life moved more slowly undisturbed by the business of the border post. On a plateau overlooking the road is the village of Nazirabad. Its track leads steeply off the road.Now the day’s business had been done, the trucks had passed and, the Gilgit bus long gone, a rural quiet again fell upon the place. The river roared and the flags fluttered. A man cycled hard to keep up with the white-eyed mule he chased along the Friendship Highway. I laughed, he laughed, the mule took its chance and veered off towards its mates at the river-bank. The dust-track up to Nazirabad petered out at the Aga Khan school, where a red motorbike, perhaps the teacher’s, waited. The village was flat, not banked up on a hillside. New houses peeked between apple trees, whose fruit grew fat and heavy. But for that, it could have been a Highland village, with the quiet road as a spine. As in the Highlands, the road had brought its own detritus: beneath the trees a couple of knackered vehicles stood on stones. As in Highland villages, new bungalows shone beside the old croft cottages which began to fall in and decay, their roof-beams gone. The new buildings had chimneys and electricity.
I walked across an apple orchard and through the village. A woman was flailing the crop of beans; she offered me some, they were hard as bullets. Chickens pecked at the grey gravel. A girl offered me a huge rosy apple, and a man some butter-tea in a Chinese bowl. In his home was a baby swaddled tightly in blankets, asleep in a cradle hewn long ago from some venerable tree. It had rocked for generations and accumulated a plenitude of charms, talismans, ribbons and beads. A solid-looking object wrapped in red cloth was tied to the cradle’s end: the Qur’an. The little packages worn by children to banish night-fears dangled from its handle. A huge cowrie shell on a string, beads and bows, to keep the sleeping baby safe.
I left, full of apples and tea, just as school was coming out. Washing was spread on the briars to dry. The enormity of Pakistani trousers, and vast shawls. Children spilled around me, girls and boys mixed. This village is divided from the next by a deep ravine. I walked down the twisting footpath, met no one, and crossed the little plank bridge into the next village. At the mosque there, children were sitting outside for a lesson. They were supposed to be singing, or chanting, but the girls gave me shy stares as I passed.
That night, after dark, I sat on the doorstep of my hotel. Inside several young Germans, who were going to China, pored over guidebooks. A young man rode up through the dark on a bicycle entirely without lights. He was in fatigues from head to toe. I recognised him as the man I’d seen in the green verandah of the mosque, leading the girls in their lesson. He was very young, scarcely older than his eldest pupils. We sat on the step of the Mountain View and looked at the stars in the northern sky.We talked about China. When he wasn’t teaching, and sometimes when he was, he dealt in silks. He’d been to Kashgar, Urumchi, for them – the first time in 1986, when he was seventeen.
He looked up at the black mass of the mountains which surrounded us. He said, ‘My father, mother, at this time are in the high pasture; it is in Khunjerab, 50 kilometres from here.’
‘For how long?’
Three months up in the high pasture. It sounded like bliss. ‘What do they eat?’
‘Food!’
‘There are no fields.’
‘They take from here. Eat animal food: meat, butter, cheese. Now they are fat, and soon come down.’
‘What do you do in winter, when the Pass is closed?’
‘Nothing!’
‘Nothing?’
‘Sleep. Twenty-four hours. Winter is marriage season; dance, sing. But I no marriage. I do not like winter. I go to Karachi, Peshawar. This road is difficult in winter. I don’t know the story of this place, but our grandfathers came from Tashkurgan, and this Wakhi is also spoken in Afghanistan.’
He talked about teaching – he’d studied way down south in Karachi and came home to the northernmost tip of the country, back to the village. It was a good job, he said, a good thing to do, to help the village.
There was little transport south the next day. The bus had gone, and in the yard which housed minibuses, only chickens pecked. Over the wall was a midden, and round the back the plumbed-in toilets of some new commercial enterprise just spilled their contents on to the rocky river-bank, to dry stinking in the sun. On the reddish pillars of rock through which the road has been cut, there hung the shadows of choughs.
A minibus eventually appeared, was repaired, and did a few turns up and down the road, drumming up trade. The driver leaned out of the window, persuading all and sundry to go to Gilgit.Without eight passengers he would not go. You never see a vehicle in this country less than jammed full. There were few takers, though. The restaurateurs and customs men had their own thing to do. Four fellows with enormous boxes were involved in an argument in the customs shed. A soldier emerged from his tent to lift the barrier for a tractor adorned with tinsel. When it had gone and silence fell, you could hear the calls of the women in the fields. They never come down here.
The minibus stopped for the umpteenth time outside the tea-houses and the driver called to the assembled shopkeepers. It was a waste of time; no one would come, there were no spare people. I resigned myself to another day in Sost – but no, there was a confloption, and there emerged from a tea-house a very old, thickset gent, a Uigur, with a green Kashgari skullcap on his bald dome.
Several people helped his progress. He walked slowly, leaning heavily on his stick. He had a Parkinsonian shake. The sliding door was opened, and slowly, with infinite shaking progress, he was ensconced, the stick between his knees and his old head nodding over it, for the journey to Gilgit.
The driver, the old gent and the cluster who had assisted got involved in a heated discussion, until the driver’s friend said ‘Chelo’, and we at last set off.
Though the journeys are long, you get used to them, and even still I feel a huge exhilaration driving around the Northern Areas. Though you ache and are bored stupid, you’ve thought every thought, dreamed every daydream, but some corner will turn and the river thrashing below or the soaring mountain above or the sheer wild beauty of a village will remind you why you came. Sost is a charmless collection of breeze-block buildings and tents and shacks, but cool and refreshing. I was happy to head back to Gilgit. As buses go, this one was underdecorated, just the poor Aga Khan dancing about from the mirror as we veered round corners. Now he had sufficient passengers to be in handsome profit, the driver gloated: ‘You are my passengers, it is my luck!’ There was the venerable old Uigur man, the driver, a mysterious friend of the driver (there always is – ‘he is my onegoodfriend’ means he is my friend, or I owe this bloke some favour, or I can’t see a thing in these specs so he must sit on top of the gear lever and direct me). The day was turning hot.
By the time we left town we were half full. ‘It is my luck!’ cried the driver. The old man fished sweeties from his pocket and sucked in a solemn grandfatherly manner. The friend of the driver, who wore a dashing Jacquard jersey, turned and said, ‘This Chinaman, he is come from Kashgar to Saudi Arabia! From Saudi Arabia he is coming to Kashgar, but his visa is not correct, and now he must go all the way back to Islamabad, and then all the way back to Sost.’
‘He’s come to Saudi and back, and they won’t let him cross, a poor old man?’
‘It is his visa.’
‘But he’s obviously a Kashgari, they should just let him in.’
‘What can he do?’
The poor old fellow looked very calm about this disaster. He would have to lean shaking over his stick for forty hours of bus.
‘He is travelling all on his own?’
‘Yes!’
‘No family?’
‘Lone. Like you!’
For a moment I understood the consternation that met lone women in Pakistan, the same concerned astonishment I felt for this poor old trembling man, nodding his old cap over his stick, being mucked about by customs guards far from home. The driver turned and had a word with him; he gave a monosyllabic grunt. I admired his self-possession.
The road turned and turned, following the river. Now we passed a couple of abandoned buildings, strangely affecting in their barren surroundings. They looked on us with skull-like staring windows. The single telegraph wire, the river and the empty road all journeyed together. We passed squalid villages which the road seemed to have done little to improve, where shawl-swathed girls averted their eyes and cows lolloped out of the way.We had to slow down where the snout of a glacier had simply bulldozed the road into the river; you could lean from the window and touch the grey-gravelly ice. There was a twig bridge over the river, and an alluring path propped up by slender tree trunks led round a rocky bluff and on to some remote valley, days away. The road passed through deserted wastes, bound by mountains. These are places which in my perversity I find more affecting than all the gardens of Hunza. Derelict buildings, empty oil-drums, bare rubble, so far from the ‘Mountain Trip Soup Hut’ and the fruit stalls of Karimabad. On high scree slopes, the message ‘Welcome, our beloved Emir!’ Men flagged us down, and every time a deal was negotiated, the passenger clambered in, the driver giggled: Is my luck! By the time we reached the township of Passu his luck had brought him quite a throng: his onegoodfriend, the poor old Uigur, an English carpenter, assorted hill-farmers with sacks of potatoes on the roof, two smiley Japanese students of agriculture, and a wandering Sufi mystic.
I’d always wanted to meet a wandering Sufi, and had in my head some image drawn from dervishes. I imagined long conicular robes and a tall hat. This one was wearing loud golfing trousers and a tweed jacket.He looked like an eccentric Bavarian entomologist, but he did have a grey beard, and sunglasses. We had stopped for a cup of tea, served on a rustic bench beneath a shady tree. He appeared like a vision by the bumper of the bus. He was alluring. I went to see what this extraordinary figure could be. He grabbed my hand, pumped it up and down and clapped my back; he cried ‘Welcome to my country!’ and I realised he was no Bavarian, and had no teeth whatsoever.
‘You are from …? Ah! I like Scotch whisky! I had an English professor. Now I am going from here to there teaching on Human Rights!’
A small crowd surrounded him.He took the Japanese students in a warm embrace from which they tried to extricate themselves, smiling and smiling.
‘Human Rights?’
‘Why not! We cannot solve the problems of the world like this …’ – he crashed his fists together – ‘… but at the table! Sufis …’
‘You are a Sufi?’
He inclined his grey beard. From the corner of my eye I saw the bus driver and his onegoodfriend exchange glances.
‘Sufis say: If there is man, I am holding him in affection, I am speaking my heart to his heart, he is my brother, and he …’
‘What about she?’
‘Ahh! My dear!’He took me in a great bear hug. ‘Sufism knows no distinction between sex, old age, big, small. Human Rights I am speaking! Also I am palmist, you know, telling fortune, and also I am head of Acme Insurance Company, Lahore.’
I wanted to know how such a fatalistic people bothered with insurance; but it was time to pile aboard the bus. The driver looked uneasily at the several hundredweight of potatoes on his roof. Apricots were past, now it was potatoes. Every lane or track that came down from the hills to join the Highway was piled high with potatoes.
We set the Sufi down at the next village, there to talk on Human Rights.As we pulled away, he shouted to one and all:‘My second daughter is to be married in Lahore in four months. Should you be in Lahore, you must come to the wedding celebrations! Goodbye!’
We left him standing by the roadside, smiling away to himself.
‘Carpenter?’ said the driver to the carpenter. ‘I was also carpenter, in Saudi.’
‘That’s how you speak Arabic?’
‘Yes; you see I speak with this Chinaman. Also he is speaking Arabic.’
‘You speak Arabic and English.’
‘And Wakhi, it is the language of Sost.’
‘Also Urdu,’ said the friend. ‘And Pushto.’
‘Stop!’
‘I can understand this Burushaski, not speak. I have a degree from Karachi, in Arts.’
‘And you are author?’ he said to me. I said I was, of a sort.
‘Also my friend is author.’ The friend asked: ‘In your country, who earns more, author or carpenter?’
‘Carpenter.’
The author sighed, as if this confirmed some terrible suspicion. We fell into silence amid the shouting throng of the tea-house, and ate our potatoes. The poor old Uigur man chased a piece of potato around his tin plate with a scrap of chapati. It was too painful to watch; his hands shook so much he could hardly make the journey from plate to mouth. Over and over again he dropped his potato, and splashed fat on his clothes. I was having some sort of Proustian experience with mine; the taste of the mutton-fat made me think of Scottish Sundays, broth, Sunday School, uncomfy skirts, my nana shelling peas. Out of the window the sun blasted on the earth and stones, too harsh to look at. There are places so hot the stones have turned to glass.
‘Why are you driving a bus up and down to Sost? You’d be a professor in my country.’ Then I thought of all the graduates I knew, waitressing.
‘This is a private bus. I have luck, many passengers!’
‘You’ve got a degree and umpteen languages.’
‘I also have a shop, but no problem, someone is there today, I didn’t want to go there. And it is my luck! When I came back from Saudi, I bought this wagon, a shop, and a flour mill for my village. From Karachi.’
His luck held. At Abbotabad he was turning away sacks of potatoes, but with bad grace accepted a simpleton, whose father was in some state of concern lest he forget where to get off again. Two glaciologists piled in, and a silent threesome.
‘Teef!’ hissed the driver. ‘I do not like this persons. Look your baggage, they are teef persons!’
A woman in full billowing black burqa stepped down from a Suzuki and walked straight into our path. He missed her by inches, directed a well-aimed spit at her back, and shouted something foul in Arabic. A boy on a man’s bike warranted the same treatment when he wobbled from a track on to the road. No concession for villages was made. No one was killed, it was his luck.
On a bridge was graffiti’d: KSO. Nationalism is our aim. Karakoram Students’ Organisation – We wants kill you. KSO! You are our enemy!
An itinerant storyteller had appeared in Gilgit. He was not of these parts, but dark-skinned and plump. He sat on a rock outside the ammunition dealer’s, and drew crowds of woollen-capped boys and men to hear his swooping voice and dramatic flights on the squeeze-box. A row of wagons had rolled into town, and were unloaded by Dark-Age figures in hessian shrouds. On their backs they carried sacks of sugar and flour.
To touch one of these trucks was like touching a remote and fabled creature, slightly unpredictable; an elephant, perhaps. The doors of these majestic Bedfords are carved like the portals to a castle, the cab within lit bordello-red. The running boards and footplates are wrought iron or shining embossed chrome. On top of the cab is a howdah, for the truck is surely evolved from the elephant. In the howdah travel the boy, tarpaulins, and perhaps a goat. The front of the howdah is raised like a tiara, painted with scenes of fighter aircraft, or a busty Fatima on a white horse, or rivers and trucks. There must be an entire guild of truck-painters, masters of the kind of art we see only on travelling fairgrounds. The wagons’ high sides are a bestiary, an aviary, an aquarium of beasts and birds.Many of the images are religious: mosques, the Kaaba. Some are decidedly secular – a passenger liner, a tropical island with palm trees, a spread eagle, gold and blue.
Above the cab, but beneath the Neanderthal forehead of the howdah, there must be some crowning glory, say a whirring windmill. The wheel arches and window surround shine and gleam with mosaics of chrome. I like the names best. In Jackie magazine there used to appear an advert – hands with long nails typed this cryptic message to teenage girls: ‘f u cn rd ths msg y cn bcm a sec & gt gd jb.’ I could read the message, but never did get a good job; instead ended up in Pakistan amusing myself in tea-houses by translating the calligraphy of trucks. They used the same strange shorthand, so as to cram the words in. In gold, green, red, jewel colours they read ‘LHR RPD GLT FWD AGY’. Lahore-Rawalpindi-Gilgit-Forwarding-Agency. ‘SWT GDS TPT COY RGD G. MDI RPDI.’ Sometimes a list of the driver’s favourite things: Disco Rado Bed Ford. F1.11.
With their frequent appeal to discos I began to wonder if trucks didn’t enjoy the slightly risqué reputation suggested by the red lights of the cabs at night. I had a lift in one for a slow mile or two, an old-fashioned one where the doors were of carved wood – none of your chrome. Behind the driver was a panel of mirror-work. Pinned to the ceiling, magazine pictures of this year’s film stars. A sticker showed a saucy girl in the act of winking, with her finger pressed to her lips: Shhh! Do not disturb. Fixed to the centre of the dashboard was a specimen vase with a spray of plastic mimosa. An astonishing number of people inhabited the truck and climbed around it while in motion, like trick riders at a circus. A circus! At last I had run away with the circus.
Jamila was making chapatis on an outside fire. She pulled the soft dough up on to her forearm, making perfect circles. She didn’t look up when I came in through the green gates. ‘Why were you in Sost?’
I said, ‘How the hell did you know I was in Sost?’
She said, ‘Rashida, her Ali’s one brother was also there, he did see you, he tell Ali, Ali tell Rashida, Rashida tell me.’
‘Nothing’s secret, is it?’
‘No!’ She laughed. ‘No secrets!’