Among The Believers Part 14

You have made my life a tale of sorrows.

In my eyes you have awakened a world of longing.

Untranslatable, that magical second line, with its unexpected conceit, that world (duniya) of longing (intizar-ki) awakened (jagga-ge) in the lover's eyes (ankho). It was the line that had kept the song alive for forty years; whenever the line came around again on the tape the driver's boy sang it.

Ik tees si dilmen ut-ti hai.

Ik dard sa dilmen hota hai.

A sort of dirge rises in my heart.

A kind of pain happens in my heart.

People were still on the march, though the night was now advanced; there seemed to be no set hours for marching and camping. Once we slowed down for a group chasing a bull that, all alone, had broken away from the caravan and was running back hard the way it had come.

Then we appeared to lose the road. We got out of the jeep. It was very dark. The driver sent his boy ahead to prospect, and then went to prospect himself. He came back, and drove the jeep on slowly, leaving us where we were. We lost the jeep's lights. The boy, returning, led us forward with the help of a flashlight. He offered me his little hand: his touch was unexpectedly gentle. We seemed to be walking over mud and rocks. We saw the jeep's lights again. In the blackness it was hard to a.s.sess distance. The lights of the jeep seemed far away, as though the driver had gone some way before finding the road again. But then, seconds later, the jeep was just there, a few steps ahead.

It seemed we had been walking over mud and rocks. But later, on the way back, in daylight, I saw that a glacier had come down and cut the road. The snow hung over the stone retaining wall of the road. The snow on its surface was old and dirty; but below that seemingly solid snow there was, at the end of the Himalayan summer, a great white cavern, and out of that dripping cavern there flowed a torrent.

We were now among glaciers and torrents. The chilling sound of water was everywhere.

The rest house at Naran was lit up, but no one answered. At Balakot, when we were bargaining for the jeep, the jeep driver had said there was a government hotel that charged one hundred twenty-five rupees for a room. Now he said the charge was over two hundred. Since I was calculating for four rooms-myself, Masood, the car driver who had brought us from Rawalpindi to Balakot (and had since been silent and self-effacing), the driver of the jeep with his boy-my heart sank. But Masood, who, with his anxiety about infections, also had something like a hypochondria about money, about being overcharged, Masood said that he had made it clear that the jeep driver and his boy had to make their own arrangements. But it wasn't to the government place that the jeep driver took us. He took us to the Park Hotel, whose bright, crude signboards we had seen at various places on the road.

The Park was a long, low building set well back from the road; it had a dimly lit verandah. The driver blew the horn, and a man in a blanket came out from a smaller building at the side of the plot. It was cold, had been cold for some time; but there was no warm room in the hotel to go to. The man with the blanket showed us a bedroom: two wood-framed beds, wall lights. He and Masood bargained, and Masood took me out from the cold bedroom to the freezing verandah to tell me that if an extra bed were placed in the room, I would be charged seventy-five rupees. So, from being a traveller with a little caravan, faced with a bill of a hundred dollars for the night, I had become part of a dormitory and liable only to a charge of seven dollars and fifty cents. I said I would sleep alone; I said I was a bad sleeper. Masood talked with the smiling hotel man, and it was agreed that the extra room would add twenty-five rupees to the bill.

I asked for a fire in my room. The hotel man smiled and said it wasn't possible. The chimney didn't work; the room would be full of smoke if he lit a fire. That explained the comparative cleanliness of the fireplace. I asked for hot tea. Yes, that would come, with the dinner. What about the dinner? What did I want?

Did they have eggs? No, there were no eggs. I thought of the clear river and said, "Trout?" Masood, translating for me, repeated the English word: "Trout?" The hotel man swung his head in affirmation and said, "Trout." And Masood, still translating, said there was trout.

Masood said, "Forty rupees for the permit."

"Permit? Do you have to have a permit for everything?" The word had made me think of the trouble I had had in Rawalpindi in posting books and changing traveller's cheques.

Masood said, huffily, "No."

It was too cold to talk any more about permits. I had looked forward to the cold. But now it was like pain; and the room seemed to grow icier every minute. I had no woollen shirt or pullover with me. I decided to put on a second shirt below my safari shirt. When they saw me stripping they left the room and went out to the verandah. The door remained open; it was a freezing kind of half-privacy. I would have preferred the company, even a little help. My fingers were too numb to manage the b.u.t.tons easily; and all around there was the very cold sound of tumbling water.

When, double-shirted, I went out to the verandah, the hotel man had four limp trout to show: he clearly hadn't had far to go. The jeep driver and his khaki-shawled boy now left us. As Masood had said, they had made their own arrangements; some warm mud-roofed peasant house no doubt awaited them.

Masood and I (and our own silent driver) went to the kitchen, for the warmth. It was in the smaller building at the side of the plot. And though we had arrived only minutes before, though the negotiations had only just been completed and the four trout had only just been bought, there was a veritable staff at work in the kitchen on our dinner, and a wood fire was burning below a baking iron, and a man in a long-tailed blue shin was flattening b.a.l.l.s of dough between his hands for the roti, the tail of his shirt jumping with every festive gesture, and the trout had been filleted and sliced and spiced and laid out on a low wooden table.

I stood before the fire, in the way of the cooks. Masood sat on a cane-bottomed chair in front of the low table. We both constantly moved to close the kitchen door; the staff, as regularly, going in or coming out, left it open. Nothing was so important as the fire: not the state of the table on which the blue-shirted man was dusting the dough b.a.l.l.s in flour, not the quality of the water in the red plastic bucket, not the chipped low table on which the filleted trout lay.

The cook, always brisk, and satisfied now with his roti, used a knife to sc.r.a.pe off old charred fat from the round baking iron. He threw oil on the iron, withdrew the blazing wood to moderate the heat, put the fillets on the iron, put an aluminium pot-lid on the fillets, bent down to pick up an old brick from the blackened floor, and put the brick on the pot lid.

Masood said, "Shall we eat the dinner right here?"

He spoke my thoughts. And that was where we ate.

A big, grand-looking man came in, with a fur cap and a slate-blue shawl. He wasn't a villager or a man of the mountains. I thought he might have been a landowner or someone connected with the hotel; or a policeman, someone from an intelligence department, come to have a look at the strangers. He said he was a "compounder," a chemist or druggist. He had a shop in Balakot, and a shop here in Naran. I said, "So you have two shops?" He said, "I have one shop." The Naran shop was open in summer (officially, that was still the season); the Balakot shop was open in the winter.

There was, in addition to the trout, a dish of meat for Masood and our silent driver (self-effacing even in the matter of food: he was anxious to appear to be eating less than Masood or myself). Hunger and cold made Masood forget himself, forget his anxiety about infections. He asked for water, with his meat. The kitchen boy, who had been staring at us all the time, leaning against the fireplace platform, dipped a gla.s.s into the red plastic bucket, handed the dripping gla.s.s to Masood, and Masood drank to the end.

The compounder went away. He had had little to say, after he had told us what he did and where he lived and had found out who we were and what languages we spoke. The blue-shirted cook pulled out the wood from the fireplace. The flames were beaten out; the embers darkened fast. The kitchen was no longer open to us; we had to go out into the cold again. But the food had warmed us. It seemed less cold in the yard, less cold in the room. But Masood had been touched by the solitude and desolation of the valley. He stayed in my room to talk of himself and his anxieties.

His anxieties were about his father and his family and about money. He felt he should be supporting his family; but he was in no position to do that. At the same time, he was anxious about his own scientific career, which had stalled for lack of money. He was twenty-seven; he had been a student all his life; and for some time yet, because of the field he had chosen, he had to continue being a student. It was hard on his father. His father hadn't complained; all his father's pride lay in his children and their education.

"My father can't go on working. He works so hard, from morning till night. He is a man of sixty-one."

"But if he retires he will have nothing to do."

"You don't understand. I have told you what my father's rank was in the army. My father was a noncommissioned officer, a very junior man. You don't know what that means here."

At sixty-one, his father was earning seventeen hundred rupees a month as an accountant. And Masood was tormented by this and by his own helplessness, and also by his need to stick to his field.

"It's not an applied field. If it was an applied field, there would be money in it."

"Do you want to leave Pakistan?"

"I don't want to leave. There are jobs here I can get. But right now the government has stopped recruiting people. It might be temporary, this stopping. But I don't know. I applied for a scholarship at an American university. They turned me down. They said that people from Indo-Pak were abusing the student visa. They got the visa and went and worked for a month or so, and then they disappeared. I can go to England, to Telford. They've given me a place. But where am I going to get the money? In some countries you can believe in the life of struggle. You can believe there will be results. Here there is only luck. In this country you can only believe in luck."

He didn't know how directly he was speaking to me. The idea of struggle and dedication and fulfilment, the idea of human quality, belongs only to certain societies. It didn't belong to the colonial Trinidad I had grown up in, where there were only eighty kinds of simple jobs, and the quality of cocoa and sugar was more important than the quality of people. Masood's panic now, his vision of his world as a blind alley (with his knowledge that there was activity and growth elsewhere), took me back to my own panic of thirty to thirty-five years before.

Masood's parents had migrated to Pakistan from India in 1947. They had migrated, as Muslims, to a Muslim state ruled by Muslim beliefs. The state hadn't altered; but Masood, liberated by that migration, had evolved; he (and his father) needed more than a Muslim state now. The regret Masood said his father sometimes felt about leaving India was both right and wrong: Masood's father, in 1979, was not the man he had been in 1947. Masood himself, who knew only Pakistan, had no religious or political heroes; his Pakistani hero was a scientist, Abdus Salam, who worked in Europe (and a few weeks later was to be awarded a n.o.bel prize).

Masood said, "They can give me a job at a university. I used to have one. But I no longer have it. Everything here is politics. For people to give me a job now will be for them to get into trouble with the authorities. I've been active in student politics."

"How good are you?"

"I was one of the five best in my university."

He had talked of a thesis, the work he was doing, a doctorate he might soon be getting from a local university. Now, surprisingly, he said, "In a month I may be going away. A friend has arranged a contract for me with a West African college."

"Which one?"

"A college."

"What's the name?"

"It doesn't have a name. It's just a college. A secondary school. They call it a college. I've worked out how much they will pay. Thirty-six hundred rupees a month." Three hundred and sixty dollars.

"That isn't a lot."

"My friend says I can live on eight hundred rupees."

"I don't think that will be possible."

"So I will save twenty thousand rupees."

"What about the tax? Have you found out about that?"

"I haven't found out about that. But it will solve the money problem for me."

"Will it damage your career?"

He said irritably, "Of course it will damage my career."

"Don't go."

"It will solve the money problem. I have to look after my family. My father is a man of sixty-one."

A year: ten months perhaps. I said, "All right. Go. It will improve your English, too."

He didn't like that. "In 'English as a Foreign Language' I did well." He gave the percentage. His English was variable, though. But he was a man of degrees and diplomas.

The smiling hotel man came in.

Masood said, "He wants the forty rupees for the fishing permit now. The rest he will take tomorrow."

He had also brought, for the bed, not a sheet-for which I had asked and which I thought he had promised-but a tablecloth. He took off the heavy eiderdown; spread the tablecloth evenly on the bed, as on a table; folded the eiderdown and left it at the bottom of the bed. Then he was gone.

I began to make up the bed.

Masood told me it was important to have the sheet (or tablecloth) below the eiderdown. "You don't know who's been using it." He demonstrated. "Sleep in it like this. Don't let the eiderdown touch you." This kind of bed-making was something he-like me-had had to learn. In hot countries you don't sleep below a blanket; you use a cotton sheet to cover yourself. What Masood was pa.s.sing on to me was knowledge he had acquired. He had come from so far; he had had so much to learn; he had no one to follow. His simple origins showed in the way-when eating-he spat things out onto the floor; his distance from those origins (mingling now with his general anxiety) was expressed in his fussiness and hypochondria.

He said, pointing to the pillow, which had a green damasklike cover, "And cover that, too."

When he left I did that, using the safari shirt I had worn during the day, putting the outside of the shirt against the pillow. I drew the thin cotton curtains; they didn't meet. It was cold, but the eiderdown was heavy and comforting. In no time I was lulled by my own trapped warmth. I fell asleep to the roar of water. And-to my relief and pleasure-when I woke up it was morning.

I had thought it was the river roaring. I saw now that it was a waterfall, tumbling down the hill that was just at the back of the Park Hotel. At the foot of the hill, at the side of the hotel, a stone channel led the water away. In this valley of melting snow, ca.n.a.ls were not for irrigation but to prevent flooding.

The hills at the far side of the valley-beyond the hotel yard or plot, the main road where blanketed men and boys were walking, the low houses of the little town, the hidden river-were lit up by the morning sun, and the folds in the hills were soft and hazy. The sun hadn't yet risen over the hill at the back of the hotel; the hill and the hotel were still in shadow. But a little way down, where the hill dipped, the sun shone through the branches of some pines: a narrow shaft of light, creating a transparent, ferny effect.

The smiling hotel man brought tea for three. He set the tray in my room. I went to get our driver and Masood. But Masood was locked away in the bathroom and didn't appear for some time. When he did appear he said he hadn't slept well. His stomach was upset. What had he had that I hadn't had? The meat? The water? Yes, it was the water.

He said, "The water here looks pure. But it has certain minerals. Have you been to Gilgit?" Gilgit was farther to the north. "The water there is black."

He had his pills, though. But then, immediately afterwards, the other side of his nature coming out, he sat down and ate right through the starchy hotel breakfast of thick fried bread slices and limp, oily potatoes, green with curry.

It was a small settlement of low stone houses, nondescript, some old, some government-built and new (the roof of the government hotel was bright red); and it ended abruptly in wilderness, after the bazaar. Some of the shops or stalls had cooking platforms. Sc.u.mmy water from the shops ran out into the rocky road; there were animal droppings; the softer ground between the rocks was churned black. Sheep and cattle, even at this early hour, were being driven down.

Comfortless as the settlement was, makeshift and half ruined as the bazaar looked, the site was old, on an old mountain route. And the route was peopled: always there were the flat-roofed houses, set against the hillsides and the road embankment and half hidden, the thick roofs of insulating mud supported on heavy beams or tree trunks, which could in addition take the winter snow. Winter kindling-drying pine branches, shrubs-lay on the roofs and was like a further camouflage.

Sometimes, in pebbly, rock-b.u.t.tressed terraces, grew poor crops of potatoes or peppers or maize (wheat the early-summer crop, maize the late-summer crop, millet the winter crop). Grain and potatoes-and peppers! Pines were scattered. Gra.s.s grew in tufts on the steep mountainsides, creating a mottled effect, and suggesting, when you rose above them and looked down, hills or mountains netted with goat tracks.

Snow, melted now, had scoured and abraded the mountains. Old snow lay in clefts and the colour of this snow was indeterminate: not white, not brown, more like a water surface catching the light. This old snow was firm on the surface; but-though winter was about to come again-the snow was melting, and each snow cleft fed a torrent. At ten thousand feet the land opened out between the mountains: blackened remnants of snow in shadowed crevices; snow thick and white on the mountaintops, softening sharp lines; moss growing on the cleansed red rock of sunlit mountainsides; and, in the middle of the openness, a green lake, with a meadow with forget-me-nots and the small yellow flowers of a summer water meadow, growing for the few weeks before the snow came again. On the far side of the lake there were a few tents, the tents of the nomads: dark triangles against white canvas. The traffic of men and animals never stopped.

On the way back, down the valley again, the jeep driver stopped near an Afghan encampment. He shouted out to the girl or woman preparing roti in front of her tent. When she understood what the jeep driver was saying she smiled and shook her head. Masood said he was asking for some kind of root. It was a medicinal root; it cured pain. I later thought it was probably ginseng.

The jeep driver had other concerns as well. Many times this morning, he stopped to chat to the drivers of minibuses. He was a man of local reputation, our jeep driver; I hadn't guessed that on the way out. So he was more than a man of the mountains; his elegance-the full white trousers, the tan shirt, the beautiful hair-was studied.

The whispers now, with the other drivers! The air of conspiracy! I thought he might have been asking for another kind of root or drug, less healing. But he was talking about politics, about the local elections the military government had decreed. In spite of the goats and the sheep and the camels and the tents and the cooking fires and the Afghans with their red-and-black costumes and their silver jewellery, the valley was full of politics. The jeep driver's party was the party of Mr. Bhutto. Mr. Bhutto had been hanged five months before; but his party still drew the people's affections in the valley.

Mr. Bhutto, the jeep driver said, was the only man in Pakistan who had ever done anything for the poor. Before Mr. Bhutto, in the time of General Ayub (ruled 1958a69), poor people could get pa.s.sports only for countries like Afghanistan and India, bad countries, countries with no jobs, no opportunities. In Mr. Bhutto's time you could get pa.s.sports for everywhere-Europe, America, Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, everywhere. Now once again you couldn't get pa.s.sports.

Masood (wearing a blue nylon zip-up windcheater and an embroidered white skullcap) said to me in English, "It's the foreign governments that stopped it. But he doesn't think so."

The jeep driver said he was born in the valley. His father kept a shop, so he was better off than most. He became interested in politics only in the time of Mr. Bhutto. "This place," he said (in Masood's translation), "had big landlords in the old days. They grew their three crops a year. They sold their crops. They got local people to work for them, and the people worked for them only for food. This is what used to happen in this place."

And that bridge there, across the Kunhar River, that bridge was built by Mr. Bhutto.

The jeep driver talked on, whipping himself up. He seemed quite different from the man who had driven us into the valley, who had been playful enough to bargain for the Afghan rug for me. Masood stopped translating.

After a while Masood said, "He's being emotional now. Very emotional. He is saying that Mr. Bhutto isn't dead."

We had travelled out with sad and sweet film songs about love: they had given a mood to the dusk and the river and the lights of the far-off houses. We were travelling back with this other pa.s.sion. And I began to look at the people on the road with another eye: they were the poor, the neglected. But that wasn't quite what the driver was seeing.

"These maulanas," the driver said, in Masood's translation, "are using Islam as a tool. We are all Muslims. We are not Muslims in their way. They want to destroy Pakistan. Our Islam is better. We are the only people who can save Islam and Pakistan."

We had to stop. A truck was being loaded with pine logs. The logs were being manhandled from the mountainside onto the truck. The road was narrow; we had to wait until the log-loading was completed. A red Suzuki minibus was waiting ahead of us. We got out. The road was trampled into fine dust by the flocks that had pa.s.sed. The jeep driver scrambled up the road cutting to talk to the loaders, and then to sit and watch them.

Masood and I stood beside the gorge of the Kunhar.