Among The Believers Part 15

Masood said, "I agree with what he says about the maulanas. It is my att.i.tude. There is fifteen percent literacy in this place."

I said, "But isn't it strange that the only freedom he wants is the freedom to leave the country? He doesn't have any idea that the country might be developed, that there might be jobs here."

Masood didn't understand at first. The idea of escape was too much in his own mind. When he did understand he said, "But the rulers of the country have never had that idea or given people that idea. Now the army is in control."

So now, seeing them as the poor and the unrepresented, and not as people wearing a certain kind of costume or having a certain cast of features, I considered the labourers, the herdsmen, and the idle people watching the log-loading, above the green-and-white river. And something of Masood's gloom and the jeep driver's hysteria touched me.

I said, "What will happen to these people?"

Masood said, "G.o.d alone knows."

Later he said, "Nothing will happen. What will happen?" And later still, after a flock of dyed sheep picked its way past us, grinding the fine dust finer, causing it to rise, colouring his white skullcap and greying his walrus moustache, Masood said, looking down into the river, "They have empty hands. They don't have guns. Millions will have to die." And that was not rebellion speaking; that was despair. "Do you know how many political parties there are in this country? There are ninety-four political parties in this country. What can happen?"

I said, "When did you start getting worried about the future?"

"Nineteen seventy-one." That was the year of Bangladesh. "No, I think it was before. I think I started worrying about the future in matriculation."

Masood had misunderstood my question. I had asked about Pakistan. But he was so choked by his own anxieties that he had taken the question to refer to himself. He had taken the question to be a continuation of our talk the previous evening.

The jeep driver was sitting on the hillside, knees up, white-trousered legs apart, watching the loaders.

Masood said, "I used to do tuitions. I used to get four hundred rupees a month for that. But I had to stop. The parents of the children treated me like a servant. They never treated me like a teacher. If I had to get to the house at four and got there at five, they made trouble. If their children failed they blamed me."

Money, his career, his family: after the previous evening, these were the topics to which Masood returned.

He said, "My father now asks himself why he came. 'Why did I come? Where is the dignity I thought I was coming to?' " But that, as I had felt before, was only half true. Masood's father, the Muslim army sergeant, migrating to Pakistan in 1947, had found the dignity he had wanted in 1947.

The truck was loaded at last. The heavy logs were beaten into place with staves, and ropes were twisted tight around the logs. The truck moved off. The red Suzuki minibus moved off. We followed, after a tussle with the opposing traffic that had also built up.

We stopped at the town of Jared. It was famous for its woodcarving. But the examples I saw were poor-wooden daggers, trays, ashtrays: poor design, poor carving. Masood bought a walnut ashtray for fifteen rupees. Clearly there was once a tradition; now the absence of skill, eye, judgement, was like part of the human desolation.

We pa.s.sed the truck with the logs again, and then again we were behind the little red Suzuki. We ate their dust.

All at once there appeared to be some kind of commotion at the back of the Suzuki. Someone was hurled out onto the road. And then someone else was thrown out.

I said, "They are throwing people out of the bus."

Masood said, "A fight."

The Suzuki was moving on. But then it stopped. We avoided the first man; he was uninjured, and on his feet again. Then we pa.s.sed a young boy or man-his slack, string-tied trousers opened, his genitals exposed-lying on the road. People from the bus were already running up to him. We pa.s.sed the Suzuki-there was no one in the driver's seat-and stopped about a hundred yards ahead, where the road widened.

I didn't want to see blood. I was glad our driver had stopped where he had. What had happened wasn't clear. But the Suzuki's windscreen was smashed, and on the steep hillside above was the explanation: a herd of goats, part of the migration, wandering off the road. They had dislodged a stone; the stone had smashed the windscreen and wounded the driver. For some seconds the Suzuki would have been out of control on the mountain road. That was no doubt when one of the pa.s.sengers at the back had thrown himself out. Then the wounded driver had fallen out; and someone, perhaps the man beside the driver, had brought the Suzuki to a halt.

The driver was now being lifted, to be brought to our jeep. And our jeep driver was climbing, sure-footedly (he was a man of the region), up the rocky slope to where the goats and their herdsman were, high above the road. What was our driver doing? Why the haste? The answer was simple: it was to knock the herdsman about, to beat and drive him down to the road.

The quaint tribesman, the man driving his flocks down to their winter pasture, was now only someone very small and vulnerable. He was. .h.i.t about the face and abused by our driver. His black turban-his dignity-fell loose from his bald head, became a dingy length of cotton; and he was pushed and punched all the way down, leaving his precious goats behind. There, on the road, various people from the Suzuki took runs at him and punched him and then ran back to where they had been standing. Then anger came to them again, and they ran up again to the old herdsman-crying and, without his turban, looking as small as a child-and beat him about the head and chest.

I said to Masood, "They're going to kill that man."

Masood said, "No. They're going to stop beating him now. You see, they've put him in the bus. Now they're going to take him to the police station."

But it had been an accident. And what about the man's goats? But it was the custom of the place; Masood saw nothing to object to. Yet our jeep driver had spoken so feelingly about the poor. The poor were his fellows, people of the valley; outsiders were not among his poor.

They brought the Suzuki driver to our jeep. He was unconscious. One man held him in his arms in the front seat. Masood and I sat on the back seat; the jeep driver's boy held on to the back of the jeep. The wounded man wasn't bleeding.

Masood said, "His wounds are internal. They say it was a very big stone that fell down and hit him as he was driving."

I had thought, seeing him half exposed on the road, that he was a boy or a very young man. I saw now that he was older; that he was very thin, with a face and body shrunken from undernourishment. He remained unconscious. The man cradling him spoke to him softly, as to a child. But the wounded man never replied, never opened his eyes.

We drove as fast as we could down the Kaghan Valley to Balakot, beside the Kunhar gorge, the lines of the hills, the tall pines, the terracings of maize, the flat-roofed houses. From time to time Masood or the jeep driver felt the unconscious man's cheek with the back of a hand. They said he was alive; but he never stirred or made a noise.

For an hour or so we drove. And when we got to Balakot, to the little grey hospital, there were only children in the yard, and no one came out to take the wounded man. The doctor had gone to Peshawar; the compounder was in Mansehra. It was to Mansehra that the wounded man had to be taken. But that was no longer our responsibility; we had to surrender our jeep.

And the responsibility of the jeep driver was also at an end. There was nothing more he could do. He had worked himself up into a political pa.s.sion; he had expressed this pa.s.sion in his persecution of the Afghan herdsman, his tenderness towards the wounded man. But his solicitude-and his sense of drama-could not survive the long, exacting mountain drive to Balakot. When we left him there-handsome, idle-he was like a man enervated and empty.

We drove away-in our borrowed car and with our borrowed driver-through the late afternoon and early evening. After the mountains, the land was softer, drier, with more varied vegetation.

Neither Masood nor I spoke much. There was little to say. Masood's troubles made him heavy, made neutral conversation difficult.

The bicycles on the road carried no lights. The buses and trucks often had no lights at the back, because there was no point in lighting up where you had been. The horse carriages had no lights at all.

I said, with sudden irritation, "They have no lights."

Masood said, flatly, "They have no lights."

I set him down on the Peshawar road-Peshawar, the military town to the west, in the flat, wide valley leading to the Khyber Pa.s.s and another part of Afghanistan.

9.

Agha Babur

In Rawalpindi the newspapers carried news of government cuts. Six ministries were to be wound up. There were to be economies in Baluchistan: no new jobs were to be created, and there were to be no salary rises for people in jobs. Twenty-nine officials of the Weights and Measures Department were to be dismissed. The Pakistan Times said that the officials concerned had "urged the government to provide them alternative jobs to save them and their families from mental agony and starvation in these days of high prices." According to The Muslim, however, the officials had asked only to be relieved of "mental agony and frustration."

The minibuses that plied between Rawalpindi and Islamabad had gone on a one-day strike to protest against police hara.s.sment. The bus drivers told the newspapers that the police wanted higher bribes. The police said the drivers had been "misbehaving" with pa.s.sengers.

Thirty-four teachers told The Muslim that they hadn't been able to leave for their jobs in Oman in southeast Arabia because the emigration authorities in Pakistan had raised questions about the teachers' "no-objection" certificates. In the same issue of The Muslim there was an investigative report about the high costs of an extension to a government-run tourist inn in the far north: a job that should have taken seven months had taken five years.

In the Pakistan Times a retired army man wrote an article about indiscipline. "It is now openly acknowledged that ours is a corrupt society, practising every conceivable social evil imaginable. Children growing up in a domestic atmosphere where smuggling, black-marketing, h.o.a.rding, bribery and corruption ... are indulged in quite blatantly, should not be expected to accept discipline in any form. When these children go to the educational inst.i.tutions, they naturally try to project the home atmosphere there...." The solution was a greater firmness, "an iron hand," in the schools (no politics to be allowed there) and in the courts. "Imprisonment, flogging and even capital punishment will do the needful."

On the wider subject of the Pakistan crisis there was an urgent leader-page article in The Muslim by A. H. Kardar, the former cricket captain of Pakistan, and an Oxford man. "We look back in shame and anger at the utter lack of homework and preparedness of political leaders and administrators vis-a-vis economic issues ... shame and anger at the ever-increasing shipload of imports of foodgrains...." What-after this pa.s.sion-was his solution? Nothing concrete. Only, less politics; and a little more of what had gone before. "Clearly, the choice is between materialism and its inseparable nationally divisive political manifestoes, and the Word of G.o.d."

With all this there was a review in the Pakistan Times of an Arts Council art exhibition. The artist was Hameed Sagher. It was his first show; and the reviewer was at once frank and tender.

"As one enters the aged hall of the Council's premises, and treads the wooden floor, the eye is caught by a number of bright panels and the mind is gripped by conflicting reaction to these panels. There is a bewildering variety of techniques and styles.... To understand all that variety of styles, some of them clash with each other, one has to know a few things about the artist. Hameed Sagher was poet for some time. Then he started the vocation of art in the commercial field with a professional experience as his guide. He has no formal training as an artist.... As a poet he is fascinated by ideas. As an artist he has to capture those ideas in colours and he feels inspired by the provocative ideas of his friends. He therefore has developed a tension with which he ill.u.s.trates his ideas rather vehemently and sometimes rather obviously....

"His 'Intellect' looks a head on fire. The panel captioned as 'Struggle' in pastels is hands with fire emanating from them. 'The Movement' is another rendering a political struggle in flames and smoke. Somewhere in patches the cool green tends to disturb the fiery impact of figures on fire. 'The Pray' is hands in supplication, with big eyes looking in between and minaret with birds around it.... The bright colours, the movement and the tension hold out a promise. With more experience, and less of economic pressures, Hameed Sagher is bound to emerge as a significant artist."

The exhibition was in the Freemasons' hall. The Freemasons had been banned a few years before as a Zionist organization (and also, I was told, because they exalted Solomon above all other prophets); and their hall had been taken over by the Arts Council.

It was in the street at the back of Flashman's Hotel, a street of shawl-sellers and carpet-sellers and cloth-sellers. It was a solid brick building of the British period-Public Works Department style-with a lawn, a semicircular drive, arched windows, and a portico. On the pediment of the portico was still the Freemason emblem of the two dividers, like an unfinished star. (Rawalpindi was full of these usurpations, these reminders of expulsions and the cleansed land. The president's house had belonged to a Sikh; Poonch House, one of the palaces of the Hindu maharaja of Kashmir, was due for demolition.) The man responsible for the Hameed Sagher exhibition was Agha Babur. He was a humorous middle-aged man, slender and attractive, with a fringe of white hair, long at the back. His office was in a room off the exhibition hall. He was busy-the vernissage was to be that afternoon-but he gave me a little time.

A woman of some size (Agha Babur's wife: he told me later that her health was not good) sat silent but companionable at one side of Agha Babur's desk. A deferential man from the radio faced him across the desk. I sat at the free side of the desk.

Agha Babur had written the short note about Hameed Sagher's work for the catalogue card.

"I had to write it. It is important for our artists that they should have these brochures of their exhibitions when they go abroad. They can't just show a price list. People abroad in France and Germany and Italy wouldn't give them exhibitions if they just show a price list. They need these brochures."

The Hameed Sagher prices were not high: from fifty rupees to two hundred, five dollars to twenty dollars.

Agha Babur was in the army before he joined the Arts Council. "I came to the Arts Council because it was a sinking ship. I brought it on the map. I was able to do so because I am a man of ideas. I will give you an example. Nineteen seventy-five was the Year of Tourism. The ministry here was doing nothing about it. Tourism in the beginning didn't do well here. I wrote letters to all the emba.s.sies here to please get me their tourist posters. I got posters from ten countries and we held an International Exhibition of touristic posters. We gave prizes. We gave the first prize to Poland, the second prize to Turkey, the third prize to Spain. We had to give it to Spain. They had a poster of a bullfight."

Sitting in his chair, making toreador's gestures with his hands, he did a sudden sideways arch with the upper part of his body; and his eyes danced with pleasure.

"Full of movement. So this got publicity in all those countries. I wrote a letter to the minister here saying, 'This is what I've done. Your department is sleepy.' And he said, 'Agha Babur, you are a man of ideas.' I didn't leave it there. I got him to get the ministry to give me troph-ies." He made the word rhyme with "toffees." "And we gave out these troph-ies, and that was projected on the TV in Warsaw and Ankara and Spain.

"The ideas come to me just like that. In the morning, when I shave. For example. This is the fourteenth century of Islamic Hijra. Our president said this in Havana: 'Fourteen hundred years ago a revolution took place.' " (The president had said that a few weeks before at a meeting of the Nonaligned Nations, which Pakistan had just joined.) "Now that gave me an idea. You're the first person I'm telling. You have that privilege. When we enter into the new hijra I'm going to arrange an exhibition on the calligraphy of the Holy Koran."

In the Hameed Sagher brochure Agha Babur had written: "Hameed Sagher utilizes a poetic atmosphere in his paintings where the retranslation of nostalgia and agony is represented in a naive style. He is searching for ident.i.ty and strength.... His work represents an individualism of the artist who is confronted with half baked, mixed feelings as if closeted and couched in the treasure cave of Ali Baba." And it was signed, in a stylish cursive type: Agha Babur.

He was waiting for a response from me. I read out the last sentence to him. He seemed to enjoy it. Agha Babur, Ali Baba: perhaps the first (Agha Babur liked using his own name) had suggested the second.

We talked about English in Pakistan. I said that not many people spoke it. He disagreed, but then appeared to agree. "The spoken language may be dying. But not the written language. Although I am proud of Urdu, I never forget I am also an Englishman." He meant a speaker of English. "We have this English language now. All the Arabs and Persians would like to have it. It would be bad if we lose it. Now when our Pakistani delegate gets up at the United Nations and makes a speech for two, three hours in this beautiful English, the Arabs run to him at the end and embrace him. We can't lose this English.

"My teacher was Bukhari. The great Bukhari. A terror. He would fling the paper back at you. Back in your face. 'Call this writing? Call this English?' He said something that lodged in my head. He said, 'Writing now is pain. All the rest is pleasure. Remember that. But the day will come when writing will be pleasure, and all the rest will be pain.' Wasn't that a good thing to say? 'Writing is pain. All the rest is pleasure. But the day will come-' "

He broke off and said, "You are like my friend Caro-leen in the United States. She, too, used to make notes of the things I said."

I was writing on the edges of the little catalogue card.

"She was my guide in the United States. A divorcee. I was a cultural guest of the State Department. Caro-leen said to me, 'Agha Babur, most people come to the East Line and feel they've seen the United States. At the most they make a trip to Los Angeles on the West Line. And then they feel they've seen the United States. You are the first one I know to come to Utah. What are you interested in?' I said, 'Being a Muslim, the polygamy.' That was a joke. She told me about a plan for a theatre in a department store. I said, 'Caro-leen, you are putting art in the window shop.' The show window, the shop window. Whatever I said was correct. She was driving. She pulled out a pad with one hand and began to write. I said, 'Caro-leen! What are you doing?' She said, Agha Babur, I just have to make a note of the things you say.' "

He took down an encyclopaedia. On the small map of the United States he had marked his cultural route in blue ink. He had also been to Florida, to Disneyworld.

THE vernissage was to be at 5:30. But this was Pakistan, and the man who was to make the opening speech and cut the ribbon was the amba.s.sador of Iraq. I thought I could get there at 6:00. But, because the hall was so near the hotel, and because I dawdled to look at the shawls and carpets, I arrived at 6:05. There was a policeman at the gate. In the lawn, for the refreshments, there was a shamiana, a decorated canvas enclosure. And I was hopelessly late. The speeches had already been made.

Agha Babur, with his military background, had started on time. He had asked the amba.s.sador to arrive seven minutes after the official opening time, at 5:37; and the amba.s.sador had done precisely that. When I went into the hall with its bare old floorboards, the official group was going round the paintings: the amba.s.sador in a dark three-piece suit, Agha Babur in a light-grey lounge suit, the artist in a white Pakistani costume with a fawn-coloured woollen jerkin. The amba.s.sador, thickset, looked earnest and pained and listened with his head to one side; the artist was small, shy, overwhelmed by the occasion, and altogether winning; Agha Babur was courtly and distinguished, and artistic with his long white hair.

The hall was full. Agha Babur had done it again. In the social desert of Rawalpindi he had created another occasion. And the exhibition was a success. Twelve of the paintings had already been sold. The Iraqi amba.s.sador had bought five (including the head on fire, Intellect); the man from the Indonesian emba.s.sy had bought two; the East German amba.s.sador or his representative had bought one, as had the Russian amba.s.sador (who couldn't speak Urdu, but understood Persian, and had felt the long fingers of the artist and p.r.o.nounced them "artistic").

I met a friend of the artist. He was a teacher; and the small young man with him was also a teacher. The young man-black hair sprouting from his narrow chest-had been in the army, but had left to become a teacher. Now he wanted to go to England to do a thesis. Like many Pakistanis, he claimed to be more than a Pakistani. He said he was of Persian origin; his ancestor had come to India after the Indian Mutiny of 1857. (But that ancestor would only have been one out of sixteen.) He wanted to go to England to do a thesis on the political novel: E. M. Forster, Conrad, Graham Greene.

"Greene?"

"He wrote those three novels about Africa."

"Three novels?" I tried to think.

"He wrote that novel about Africa. Heart of something."

"The Heart of the Matter. I wouldn't call that political."

"It is political. There is some dialogue there about natives being liars. But n.o.body said that it was because of colonialism that people called natives liars. People were made by colonialism. By history. But n.o.body says that."

"But if you think like that, then everybody is a political writer."

The young man-pale, thin-hadn't thought deeply about his thesis; that little idea was all that he had. Changing his tack, he said, "What about Kipling?"

I said, "n.o.body has written as accurately about Indians. You can't fault Kipling there."

But he didn't really know Kipling; he knew only the name. He became confidential. He said, "I didn't want to do the English political novel. It was their idea. I really wanted to do Shakespeare's sonnets. But they said that was too much on the beaten track."

"There's been a lot about the sonnets. What did you want to say about them?"

"I feel that Shakespeare was attracted to a young man. But people considered it unnatural."

I thought that it might be better for him to leave the sonnets alone.

"And because they considered it unnatural-you see, I'm Persian. Do you know Hafiz, Saadi? People in Europe are very naive about h.o.m.os.e.xuality."

He was thirty. But he had read little; he knew little; he had few ideas. I don't think he wanted to do a thesis, really. He wanted a job; he wanted a visa and a no-objection certificate; he wanted to go away.

How could he read, how could he judge, how could he venture into the critical disciplines of another civilization, when so much of his own history had been distorted for him, and declared closed to inquiry? And how strange, in the usurped Freemasons' hall of Rawalpindi, to talk of the English political novel and the distortions of colonialism, when in that city in a few weeks, in the name of an Islam that was not to be questioned, the whipping vans were to go out, official photographs were to be issued of public floggings, and one of the country's best journalists was to be arrested and photographs were to show him in chains.

10.

The Salt Hills of a Dream