by Paul Theroux
There is only one train a week on the Khyber Railway, and practically all the passengers are what the Pakistanis refer to as ‘tribal people’, the Kuki, Malikdin, Kambar, and Zakka Khel, indistinguishable in their rags. They use the train for their weekly visit to the bazaar in Peshawar. It is an outing for them, this day in town, so the platform at Landi Kotal station in the Khyber Pass is mobbed with excited tribesmen tramping up and down in their bare feet, waiting for the train to start. I found a seat in the last car and watched a tribesman, who was almost certainly insane, quarrelling on the platform with some beggars. A beggar would limp over to a waiting family and stick his hand out. The lunatic would then rush up to the beggar and scream at him. Some of the beggars ignored him; one hit back, rather lazily slapping him until a policeman intervened.
The lunatic was old. He had a long beard, an army surplus overcoat, and wore sandals cut from rubber tyres. He squawked at the policeman and boarded the train, choosing a seat very near me. He began to sing. This amused the passengers. He sang louder. Beggars had been passing through the car – lepers, blind men led by little boys, men on crutches – the usual parade of rural unfortunates. They shuffled from one end of the car to the other, moaning. The passengers watched them with some interest, but no one gave them anything. The beggars carried tin cans of dry bread crusts. The lunatic mocked them: he made faces at a blind man; he screamed at a leper. The passengers laughed; the beggars passed on. A one-armed man boarded. He stood flourishing his good arm, presenting his stump, a four-inch bone at his shoulder.
‘Allah is great! Look, my arm is missing! Give something to my wounded self!’
‘Go away, you stupid man!’ shouted the lunatic.
‘Please give,’ said the one-armed man. He started down the car.
‘Go away, stupid! We don’t want you here!’ The lunatic rose to torment the man, and as he did so the man pounced on him and gave him a terrific wallop on the side of his head, sending him reeling into his seat. When the one-armed man left, the lunatic resumed his singing. But now he had no listeners.
The translation of this dialogue was provided by two men sitting near me, Mr Haq and Mr Hassan. Mr Haq, a man of about sixty-five, was a lawyer from Lahore. Mr Hassan, from Peshawar, was his friend. They had just come from the border where, Mr Haq said, ‘We were making certain inquiries.’
‘You will like Peshawar,’ said Mr Hassan. ‘It is a nice little town.’
‘I would like to interrupt my learned friend to say that he does not know what he is talking,’ said Mr Haq. ‘I am an old man – I know what I am talking. Peshawar is not a nice town at all. It was, yes, but not now. The Afghanistan government and the Russians want to capture it. It was the Russians and Indians who took a piece of Pakistan away, what they are calling Bangladesh. Well. Peshawar was once great some time back. It is full of history, but I don’t know what is going to happen to us.’
The train had started, the lunatic was now tormenting a small boy who appeared to be travelling alone, the tribesmen – all elbows – were at the windows. It was an odd trip: one moment the car would be filled with sunshine, and outside the head of the valley shifted to a view of a tumbling stone gorge; the next moment we would be in darkness. There are three miles of tunnels on the Khyber Railway, and as there were no lights on the train, we travelled those three miles in the dark.
‘I would like very much to talk to you,’ said Mr Haq. ‘You have been to Kabul. You can tell me: is it safe there?’
I told him I had seen a lot of soldiers, but I supposed they were around because of the military coup. Afghanistan was ruled by decree.
‘Well, I have a problem, and I am an old man, so I need some advice.’
The problem was this: a Pakistani boy, a distant relative of Mr Haq’s, had been arrested in Kabul. What with difficulties in obtaining foreign currency and the impossibility of travelling to India, the only place holiday-minded Pakistanis go to is Afghanistan. Mr Haq thought the boy had been arrested for having hashish, and he had been asked whether he would go to
Kabul to see if he could get the boy released. He wasn’t sure he wanted to go.
‘You tell me. You make the decision.’
I told him he should put the matter in the hands of the Pakistani embassy in Kabul.
‘Officially we have diplomatic relations, but everyone knows we have no diplomatic relations. I cannot do.’
‘Then you have to go.’
‘What if they arrest me?’
‘Why would they do that?’
‘They might think I’m a spy,’ said Mr Haq. ‘We are almost at war with Afghanistan over the Pakhtoonistan issue.’
The Pakhtoonistan issue was a few villages of armed Pathan tribesmen, supported by Russia and Afghanistan, who were threatening to secede from Pakistan, declare a new state, and, deriving their income from dried fruit, become a sovereign power; the liberated warriors would then compete in the world market of raisins and prunes.
‘My advice is don’t go,’ I said.
‘How can you say that! What about the boy? He is a relative – his family is very worried. I wish,’ said Mr Haq, ‘to ask you one further question. Do you know Kabul’s jail?’
I said I didn’t, but I had seen Kabul’s insane asylum and did not find it encouraging.
‘Kabul’s jail. Listen, I will tell you. It was built in the year 1626 by King Babar. Well, they call it a jail, but it is a number of holes in the ground, like deep wells. They put the prisoners in. At night they cover them up with lids. That is the truth. They do not give food. The boy might be dead. I don’t know what I should do.’
He fretted in Urdu with Mr Hassan, while I snapped pictures of the ravines. We ducked into tunnels, emerging through spurs to reversing stations; above us were fortified towers and stone emplacements, bright in the mid-afternoon sun. It seems an impossible journey for a train. The 132-Down teeters on the cliff sides, breathing heavily, and when there is nothing ahead but air and a vertical rock face the train swerves into the mountain. Plunging through a cave, it dislodges bats from the ceiling, which the tribesmen at the windows swat with their sticks. Then into the sunlight again, past the fort at Ali Masjid, balancing on a high peak, and an hour later, after twenty sharp reverses, moves on a gentler slope in the neighbourhood of Jamrud. Above Jamrud is its bulky fort, with walls ten feet thick and its hornworks facing Afghanistan.
Some tribesmen got out at Jamrud, moving Mr Haq to the observation: ‘We do what we can with them, and they are coming right up.’
He fell silent again and did not speak until we were travelling through the outskirts of Peshawar, beside a road of clopping tongas and beeping jalopies. Here, it was flat and green, the palms were high; it was probably hotter than Kabul had been, but so much green shade made it seem cool. Behind us the sun had dropped low, and the peaks of the Khyber Pass were mauve in a lilac haze so lovely it looked scented. Mr Haq said he had business here – ‘I have to solve my great worry.’
‘But let us meet later,’ he said at Peshawar Cantonment Station. ‘I will not trouble you with my problems. We will have tea and talk about matters of world interest.’
Peshawar is a pretty town. I would gladly move there, settle down on a verandah, and grow old watching sunsets in the Khyber Pass. Peshawar’s widely spaced mansions, all excellent examples of Anglo-Muslim Gothic, are spread along broad sleepy roads under cool trees: just the place to recover from the hideous experience of Kabul. You hail a tonga at the station and ride to the hotel, where on the verandah the chairs have swing-out extensions for you to prop up your legs and get the blood circulating. A nimble waiter brings a large bottle of Murree Export Lager. The hotel is empty; the other guests have risked a punishing journey to Swat in hopes of being received by His Highness the Wali. You sleep soundly under a tent of mosquito net and are awakened by the fluting of birds for an English breakfast that begins with porridge and ends with a kidney. Afterwards a tonga to the museum.
How was Buddha conceived, you m
ay wonder. There is a Graeco-Buddhist frieze in the Peshawar Museum showing Buddha’s mother lying on her side and being impregnated through her ribs by what looks like the nozzle of a hot-air balloon suspended over her. In another panel the infant Buddha is leaping from a slit in her side – a birth with all the energy of a broad jump. Farther on is a nativity scene, Buddha lying at the centre of attending figures, who kneel at prayer: the usual Christmas card arrangement done delicately in stone with classical faces. The most striking piece is a three-foot stone sculpture of an old man in a lotus posture. The man is fasting: his eyes are sunken, his rib cage is prominent, his knees are knobbly, his belly hollow. He looks near death, but his expression is beatific. It is the most accurate representation in granite of an emaciated body that I’ve ever seen, and again and again, throughout India and Pakistan, I was to see that same body, in doorways and outside huts and leaning against the pillars of railway stations, starvation lending a special quality of saintliness to the bony face.
A little distance from the museum, when I was buying some matches at a shop, I was offered morphine. I wondered if I heard right and asked to see it. The man took out a matchbox (perhaps ‘matches’ was a code word?) and slipped it open. Inside was a small phial marked Morphine Sulphate, ten white tablets. The man said they were to be taken in the arm and told me that I could have the whole lot for twenty dollars. I offered him five dollars and laughed, but he saw he was being mocked. He turned surly and told me to go away.
I would have liked to stay longer in Peshawar. I liked lazing on the verandah, shaking out my newspaper, and watching the tongas go by, and I enjoyed hearing Pakistanis discussing the coming war with Afghanistan. They were worried and aggrieved, but I gave them encouragement and said they would find an enthusiastic well-wisher in me if they ever cared to invade that barbarous country. My prompt reassurance surprised them, but they saw I was sincere. ‘I hope you will help us,’ one said. I explained that I was not a very able soldier. He said, ‘Not you in person, but America in general.’ I said I couldn’t promise national support, but that I would be glad to put a word in for them.
Everything is easy in Peshawar except buying a train ticket. This is a morning’s work and leaves you exhausted. First you consult the timetable, Pakistan Western Railways, and find that the Khyber Mail leaves at four o’clock. Then you go to the Information window and are told it leaves at 9.50 p.m. The Information man sends you to Reservations. The man in Reservations is not there, but a sweeper says he’ll be right back. He returns in an hour and helps you decide on a class. He writes your name in a book and gives you a chit. You take the chit to Bookings, where, for 108 rupees (about ten dollars), you are handed two tickets and an initialled chit. You go back to Reservations, and wait for the man to return once again. He returns, initials the tickets, examines the chit, and writes the details in a ledger about six feet square.
Nor was this the only difficulty. The man in Reservations told me no bedding was available on the Khyber Mail. I suspected he was angling for baksheesh and gave him six rupees to find bedding. After twenty minutes he said it had all been booked. He was very sorry. I asked for my bribe back. He said, ‘As you wish.’
Later in the day I worked out the perfect solution. I was staying in Dean’s Hotel, one in a chain of hotels that includes Faletti’s in Lahore. I had to pester the clerk a good deal, but he finally agreed to give me what bedding I needed. I would give him sixty rupees and he would give me a chit. In Lahore I would give the bedding and chit to Faletti’s and get my sixty rupees back. This was the chit:
Please refund this man Rs 60/ – (RS. SIXTY ONLY) if he produce you this receipt and One Blanket and One Sheet One Pillow and Credit it in Dean’s Hotel Peshawar Account.
7. The Khyber Mail to Lahore Junction
RASHID, the conductor on the sleeping car, helped me find my compartment, and after a moment’s hesitation he asked me to have a look at his tooth. It was giving him aches, he said. The request was not impertinent. I had told him I was a dentist. I was getting tired of the Asiatic inquistion: Where do you come from? What do you do? Married or single? Any children? This nagging made me evasive, secretive, foolish, an inventor of cock-and-bull stories. Rashid made the bed and then opened up, tugging his lip down to show me a canine gnawed with decay.
‘You’d better see a dentist in Karachi,’ I said. ‘In the meantime chew your food on the other side.’
Satisfied with my advice (and I also gave him two aspirins), he said, ‘You will be very comfortable here. German carriage, about fifteen years old. Heavy, you see, so no shaking.’
It had not taken long to find my compartment. Only three were occupied – the other two by army officers – and my name was on the door, printed large on a label. Now I could tell on entering a train what sort of a journey it would be. The feeling I had on the Khyber Mail was slight disappointment that the trip would be so short – only twelve hours to Lahore. I wished it were longer: I had everything I needed. The compartment was large, well lighted, and comfortable, with a toilet and sink in an adjoining room; I had a drop-leaf table, well-upholstered seat, mirror, ashtray, chrome gin-bottle holder, the works. I was alone. But if I wished to have company I could stroll to the dining car or idle in the passage with the army officers. Nothing is expected of the train passenger. In planes the traveller is condemned to hours in a tight seat; ships require high spirits and sociability; cars and buses are unspeakable. The sleeping car is the most painless form of travel. In Ordered South, Robert Louis Stevenson writes,
Herein, I think, is the chief attraction of railway travel. The speed is so easy, and the train disturbs so little the scenes through which it takes us, that our heart becomes full of the placidity and stillness of the country; and while the body is being borne forward in the flying chain of carriages, the thoughts alight, as the humour moves them, at unfrequented stations …
The romance associated with the sleeping car derives from its extreme privacy, combining the best features of a cupboard with forward movement. Whatever drama is being enacted in this moving bedroom is heightened by the landscape passing the window: a swell of hills, the surprise of mountains, the loud metal bridge, or the melancholy sight of people standing under yellow lamps. And the notion of travel as a continuous vision, a grand tour’s succession of memorable images across a curved earth – with none of the distorting emptiness of air or sea – is possible only on a train. A train is a vehicle that allows residence: dinner in the diner, nothing could be finer.
‘What time does the Khyber Mail get to Karachi?’
‘Timetable says seven-fifteen in the night,’ said Rashid. ‘But we will be five and a half hours late.’
‘Why?’ I asked.
‘We are always five and a half hours late. It is the case.’
I slept well on my Dean’s Hotel bedding and was awakened at six the following morning by a Sikh with a steel badge pinned to his turban that read Pakistan Western Railways. His right eye was milky with trachoma.
‘You wanting breakfast?’
I said yes.
‘I coming seven o’clock.’
He brought an omelette, tea, and toast, and for the next half-hour I sprawled, reading Chekhov’s wonderful story ‘Ariadne’ and finishing my tea. Then I snapped up the shade and flooded the compartment with light. In brilliant sunshine we were passing rice fields and stagnant pools full of white lotuses and standing herons. Farther on, at a small tree, we startled a pair of pistachio-green parrots; they flew up, getting greener as they rose. Looking out a train window in Asia is like watching an unedited travelogue without the obnoxious soundtrack: I had to guess at the purpose of activities – people patting pie-shaped turds and slapping them on to the side of a mud hut to dry; men with bullocks and submerged ploughs, preparing a rice field for planting; and at Badami Bagh, just outside Lahore, a town of grass huts, cardboard shelters, pup tents, and hovels of papers, twigs, and cloth, everyone was in motion – sorting fruit, folding clothes, fanning the fire
, shooing a dog away, mending a roof. It is the industry of the poor in the morning, so busy they look hopeful, but it is deceptive. The position of their settlement gives them away; this is the extreme of poverty, the shantytown by the railway tracks.
The shantytown had another witness: a tall thin Indian of about twenty, with long hair, stood at the corridor window. He asked me the time; his London accent was unmistakable. I asked him where he was headed.
‘India. I was born in Bombay, but I left when I was three or four. Still, I’m an Indian right the way through.’
‘But you were brought up in England.’
‘Yeah. I’ve got a British passport too. I didn’t want to get one, after all they did to me. But an Indian passport is too much trouble. See, I want to go to Germany eventually – they’re in the Common Market. It’s easy with a British passport.’
‘Why not stay in London?’
‘You can stay in London if you like. They’re all racialists. It starts when you’re about ten years old, and that’s all you hear – wog, nigger, blackie. There’s nothing you can do about it. At school it’s really terrible – ever hear about Paid-bashing? And I’m not even a Pakistani. They don’t know the difference. But they’re cowards. When I’m with me mate no one comes up and says nothing, but lots of times about ten blokes would start trouble with me. I hate them. I’m glad to be here.’
‘This is Pakistan.’
‘Same thing. Everyone’s the same colour.’
‘Not really,’ I said.
‘More or less,’ he said. ‘I can relax here – I’m free.’
‘Won’t you feel rather anonymous?’
