Birjees rubs my arm soothingly. ‘That was frightening. I will order you camomile …’
To my surprise Mike suddenly laughs. ‘I think it’s possible you gave them a hundred-rupee note. You can’t have spent anything since we changed your money at the hotel …’
Birjees and Shahid look horrified. I have no idea what note I pulled out of my wallet.
The restaurant is sophisticated, packed and very noisy, but the food is delicious. Camomile tea is no substitute for a glass of wine, though. Mike, guessing what I’m thinking, winks at me.
Shahid and Mike, as always, pretend they are not talking about work. Birjees and I listen. I discover more from Shahid about office personalities and airline politics than I would ever learn from Mike.
Shahid says, placing little dishes in front of me, ‘Corruption is everywhere in Pakistan, I am afraid, Gabby. Some people within PAA, they do not wish Mike to succeed in updating airline procedure. Luckily, your husband is a wily man …’ He turns to Mike and raises his glass of fruit juice. ‘We are very glad that Gabriella is here with you in Karachi, Mike. You must be so happy to have her by your side after the working day is done.’
I can see Mike is uncomfortable. He struggles with his smile but raises his glass. Something in the way Shahid spoke to Mike alerts me. Not a challenge. Not a warning, but something in between.
A look passes between them. Shahid knows something that I do not. I glance at Birjees. Her face is inscrutable, but I can feel her anxiety. She knows Mike needs Shahid, but she does not want Shahid to upset him. Jobs in Pakistan can disappear at a whim or a word.
I hastily chatter about the hotel, about Rana and her insistence on introducing me to every other westerner passing through the hotel, no matter who it is. Thankfully there are few. I describe the embarrassment when the poor visiting Orla Guerin was swooped upon to meet me. All she wanted to do was establish an Internet link and file her story in time for the English evening news.
Sweet Rana’s love of introducing all westerners to each other for fear of their loneliness is sometimes like being caught in the headlights of a car and not knowing which way to run. My story has the desired effect. The tension passes. Everyone laughs. Mike relaxes and tells a couple of Rana stories of his own.
Rana once introduced him to a terrifying Russian businessman in the Cinnamon Lounge. He told Mike he was in Karachi exporting oranges but he was a drug runner and was eventually arrested in a dramatic raid in the foyer one evening.
Shahid drops us back at the hotel. Birjees hugs me, checks I have their home telephone number in case I need her when Mike is in Islamabad. Then they are gone, back to their family, leaving a little space that is hard to fill.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Karachi, 2010
‘Apart from the beggars, it was a good evening, wasn’t it?’ Mike says as we go up in the lift.
‘It was lovely to go out. Birjees and Shahid are so easy to be with.’
‘I’m sorry I’ve been getting back so late this week. I really thought things would ease off a bit …’
It is a familiar mantra that bores us both.
‘You once told me that anyone who works around the clock hasn’t learnt the importance of delegating.’
Mike looks annoyed and walks ahead of me down the corridor to our door. Despite all he said on the roof last week, nothing has changed. I have hardly seen him, and when he is back in the hotel, he is always on his computer or phone.
He goes straight to the fridge and pours himself a glass of Charlie’s wine.
‘Do you want one?’ he asks.
‘No, thanks, it’s too late.’
I hover; at least it is Saturday night and Mike does not have to work tomorrow.
‘I’m afraid I have to go into the office for a meeting tomorrow afternoon,’ Mike says quickly as if he has read my mind. ‘I’ll just go and check my emails to make sure everyone will be there. You go to bed, I’ll bring you a cup of tea.’
I lie, watching the moon. I think about Will and Matteo. I think about Dominique. I think about Emily at the top of my house and Kate and the people in the office. I face the stark fact that I am a middle-aged woman and no longer desirable. It hurts. Whatever Mike says, he always waits for me to be asleep before he comes to bed.
I think I can hear Mike talking on his mobile phone but I can’t be sure because of the air-conditioner. I fall asleep before he brings my tea. Unsurprisingly, I dream of beggar children; they are chasing me down a long dark street, their crutches clumping down the road behind me.
I wake in the dark, panicked, and lie watching the patch of sky in the un-curtained window. The beggar children have triggered a long-forgotten memory of Cornwall, and a girl called Lisa.
I was about six. Maman and Dominique and I were shopping in Penzance. There was a young woman begging, crouched against a shop front playing a flute. The rain was slashing sideways and the wind funnelling down Causeway Head, biting at my legs. People were hurrying past in the rain hardly noticing her.
She was young and silently weeping as she played. She was wearing one of those woollen Cornish hats that have earflaps but she had no coat, just a sweatshirt and fatigues. She was soaked and looked frozen.
Maman let go of my hand, peeled off one of her four layers of clothing and threw her mac round the girl’s shoulders. We bent and emptied the change we had into her little cap.
The girl stopped playing and gazed, unfocused, somewhere above our heads. She was in some place we could not reach. Maman pressed some notes into her hand and told her to put them in her pocket. She asked the girl if she was sleeping rough. The girl shook her head. Maman asked her if she had somewhere to go to get warm and dry. The girl nodded, her gaze still on the glimpse of angry green sea between the rooftops, but she did not move.
‘Stay there,’ Maman said to Dominique and me and disappeared inside the Co-op.
We stood awkwardly with the girl as she rocked and shivered and silently wept.
‘Don’t cry,’ Dominique said. ‘It’ll be all right. Don’t cry, Maman has gone to buy you food.’
Maman came out of the shop with an off-duty policewoman who was carrying a carton of milk. The policewoman bent to the girl. ‘Hello Lisa, time to go home, love, you’re very wet. We’ll give you a lift …’
Maman and the policewoman lifted her to her feet and Dominique and I gathered up her things. She was like a little rag doll with no weight to her and tears caught in my throat. She reached out and touched my thick blonde hair, fingered the texture of it with no expression on her face at all.
The policewoman wrapped her in a rug and put her in the back seat of the parked police car so gently that I thought she must have done this many times before. She turned and drew Maman aside. Then Maman took our hands and in silence we went to find our car.
On the way home Maman told us that a brewery lorry had hit Lisa’s little girl outside the pub, opposite the shop front where Lisa played her flute. Lisa had taken her eye off her child for one second, but that was all it took for the lorry to blindly back into her. Lisa, wild as an animal with grief, had descended lower and lower into drugs and eventually her husband had given up and abandoned her.
Maman, Dominique and I cried all the way home. The sea in front of us spat and threw up rolling white waves. The world seemed abruptly less safe a place to a six year old.
Maman refused to give up on Lisa when most people did. ‘Anyone, anyone can end up on the streets …’ she would tell us. ‘We don’t know their stories.’
It took years, but Lisa did, mostly, get off drugs. She came to work for Maman in the café and rarely let her down. She loved to brush my hair with closed eyes and great gentleness. It was the happiest ending there could have been. I had forgotten Lisa until tonight.
Mike’s breathing beside me is deep and even. There is a growing gulf between us but I am glad of his body in the bed next to me. I try to banish a sense of foreboding that is out of all proportion to my slipping marr
iage which feels sad, but is not life-threatening.
I get out of bed and pad to the kitchen, make tea and curl up in the darkest bit of the room on the small sofa. What happened between the time Mike almost begged me to come out to Karachi and the three weeks it took me to organize my job and get here? Why don’t I ask him? Why don’t I ask him why he is in a place I cannot reach him, either by appeal or obvious loneliness?
Because I want to believe for a little longer that he’s just suffering from stress and overwork. Mike’s mobile, charging on the desk next to me, bleeps into the dark. He has a text. Who texts in the night? I could look but I won’t. I won’t be a woman who spies on her husband.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Northern Pakistan, 2010
Mike and I fly to Islamabad and pick up a car and a security driver in Rawalpindi. We are heading six thousand feet up to Bhurban, a small hill station near Murree in Punjab Province. Rawalpindi has a barren Wild West frontier feel with wide roads, ox-carts and bicycles. It is very different to Karachi.
We pass through a police checkpoint and begin to climb, gears grinding, up the twisting, perilous cliff road that leads up to Bhurban and our hotel. This is the Gateway to Kashmir. Excitement shimmers inside me. I am awed by the landscape and the remoteness of the tiny villages we pass through.
The road has been hacked out of the mountain and because of numerous rock falls we have to take detours through small crowded villages. We drive past stalls selling fruit, red meat and chickens dangling on large hooks. Pots and pans and household utensils are stacked outside along the edges of the roads. Trestle beds lie in rows in the open air, mattresses stacked in neat piles. Home is a bed under the stars.
The narrow streets are full of Pashtuns with heavy beards and closed, fierce faces. Here in the cooler mountains, the men sport leather waistcoats over their baggy shalwar kameez, and boots and turbans of twisted cloth around their heads. They look like warlords. There is an unreal, filmic quality to it all as we drive past; glimpsed lives, a voyeuristic fraction of a moment in another world. As we slide past in the car small boys sitting on wooden steps look astonished as they glance into the car. We are goras (white ghosts), passing through.
This journey north was Mike’s surprise. Shahid and Birjees had not thought it a good or safe one. I sit in the slow-moving car feeling exposed; yet few of the men we pass on the road even glance into the car. They are too busy surviving, finding food for their families, selling fruit, vegetables and household wares by the roadside.
As we travel higher up the mountain we see flashes of bright colour in the shadows of trees but no woman shows her face to the world. We see old men walking in the middle of nowhere along the side of the pitted road between the isolated shacks that dot the edges of the valleys.
Workmen in shabby clothes, faded by the sun, are bent double widening the road out of sheer cliff face, removing huge boulders by hand in old wheelbarrows. They appear to live in crude polythene tents on the roadside. These must be their only shelter at night.
This is a glimpse of the grinding poverty and harsh conditions up here, especially in winter when the villages will be cut off by rock falls and snow. No wonder the young waiters at the Shalimar had to leave their homes in the mountains. No wonder it is a rich recruiting ground for the Taliban.
The heat beats relentlessly down on the roof of the car. The air-conditioning does not appear to be working and my throat is dry and my tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth. We have bottles of water but I am too afraid to do anything but sip; it is a long journey up the mountain and I can hardly ask for a pit stop by the roadside.
I pull my dupatta around my head against the dazzling sun hitting the window. I notice Mike becomes visibly tense when we pass though villages full of turbaned men.
Ahead of us lies the breathless beauty of the Kashmiri mountains. North Pakistan once had a thriving tourist industry and wealthy Pakistanis still have holiday homes up here. We glimpse expensive-looking houses set deep into the hillsides, hidden amongst the trees.
In summer, Pakistanis, mostly from Lahore, still come to get away from the heat of the city, but the tourist lodges and the hotels that once thrived on foreign currency have long been shuttered and closed. Shahid told me that people from all over the world flocked here, filling the small hotels and chalets; marvelling at the raw unexpected wonder of Pakistan’s unspoilt natural resources. Norwegian and Scottish climbing expeditions crawled up the golden mountains. Walking groups of all nationalities trekked through the forests. Fishermen and their families came to the deep black lakes. Hippies descended in droves, to find themselves in one of the most heavenly places on earth.
Now, because of the Taliban, thousands of lives have been stunted and ruined, a thriving industry closed down, a generation lost to poverty and neglect.
It is sad to see. I’ve been cocooned in a comfy hotel. I see only the wealthy, but it makes the rural world I have been reading about and the fractured stories of young men like Naseem and Baseer startlingly real. So many families flying from these mountains, caught between the Pakistani army and the extremists, have to work for a pittance in a city.
‘You okay?’ Mike asks, his voice sounding dry.
I nod. ‘It’s astonishing, wild and very remote.’
Mike smiles. ‘We’re out of our comfort zone, but I think it’s worth it.’
‘I hadn’t realized Bhurban was quite so far from Islamabad.’
‘I think it’s taken longer because of the rock falls.’
We round a corner, the old car grinding upwards, and there, suddenly before us, lie the Kashmiri mountains tipped with snow.
I gasp. No sirens, no bombs, no demonstrations, just mountains, pink-tinged and glittering, ranging across the horizon. Hamid, our driver, is watching our faces in the mirror. ‘Very beautiful,’ he says, proudly. ‘I live nearby in Murree. Not far from hotel now.’
There is another rock fall, another sudden detour inland. Hamid seems unhappy with this. As we enter this last village we are forced to a stop behind an old bus. The food stalls and the press of people are inches from the car window. Young men gathering at the stalls are milling around us and the car is swallowed by bodies blocking the windows.
Heat, claustrophobia and fear clutch at me, make my ears ring with dizziness. No glimpse of a woman or child, just the press of young men against the car. One turbaned man bends suddenly and stares straight in at the car window, inches away from me, making me jump. His eyes are a piercing green, his face biblical. I stare back transfixed. His eyes hold surprise then fierce contempt. I quickly lower my gaze, pull my dupatta across my face as the car moves slowly forward.
In that fleeting second I realize how crazy Mike and I are to make ourselves vulnerable. We have two sons and this is totally irresponsible. In Karachi people stare but they are used to westerners. These devout mountain people are different. We are infidels encroaching upon their territory.
Mike is sweating. Hamid is sweating. He accelerates past the bus and we speed away leaving the village behind. Shaken, we climb up into the mist where bright-coloured dupattas hang for sale, hoisted on washing lines by the side of the road, flapping like cheerful reprieve flags in the middle of nowhere.
The air changes, the sun filters through mist and slants among the trees like strands of a faint rainbow. There is only stillness, sky and mountains.
Mike says, ‘We may have taken a bit of a risk but I wanted you to see something of Pakistan. I wanted to experience this with you. There might never be another chance.’
The driver turns off the bumpy road onto a potholed track as we continue to climb. Here, there are signs of habitation. Goats wander through the undergrowth. There are vivid flashes of colour amongst the green trees. Young girls run amongst the shadows herding the animals.
Hamid slows down. ‘You wind window down, mem. You feel how cool the air. You listen to sound of mountain.’
Mike and I obediently wind our windows down. The air is like a gent
le touch on our faces. We breathe in deeply, inhaling the resinous scent of pine needles and listening to the hum of bees. Large butterflies hover in the air like small bats.
Mike leans back and closes his eyes. There are dark circles under them and his jaw is tense. ‘Do you remember, Gabby?’ he says. ‘Matteo used to call them flutterbyes.’
Hamid stops the car. ‘This very special place. You must take photo of mountain.’
Mike and I get out and stretch. Kashmir shimmers in the distance. I walk away from the car to the edge of the cliff. I long to move into that cool stillness of the trees but I know to step off the path would be foolish.
Small children appear from round the edge of an empty house and peer at me cautiously. ‘Hello,’ I call.
They giggle and jostle. I lift my camera to snap their laughter but they flash away from me behind the house, as I knew they would. I turn to walk back to the car and the raggedy little girls run after me, calling out something in Punjabi and giggling naughtily. I catch gora, gora and Hamid flaps his hands crossly and shouts at them to go away.
I take a photo of Mike squinting into the sun. Then Hamid insists on taking a photograph of us both standing with our backs to the Kashmiri mountains. As Mike puts his arm around me and I lean towards him for the photo I have the same feeling I had in Oman. Here we are, not quite real, play-acting for this snapshot.
The intensity of the sensation makes my heart thump against the backdrop of those golden mountains. As we get back into the car, Hamid says, perhaps to apologize for the taunts of the children, or my hesitation to roam too far from the car, ‘You safe here, mem. You walk anywhere.’
The sprawling building of the hotel appears, unremarkable and disappointing, amidst flowerbeds full of rose trees. Mike thanks Hamid and arranges for him to pick us up on Sunday afternoon to take us back to Islamabad.
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