Among the Believers

by V. S. Naipaul

  The poet didn’t agree. The Muslim polity should have arisen naturally out of the faith. The feeling that Pakistan was God should have taken the country to the heights.

  What had gone wrong, then?

  Men were bad, he said. They didn’t live up to the faith.

  In Pakistan that was nearly always where you ended.

  Late one afternoon, in a dusty village in the interior of Sind, more than a hundred miles to the east of Karachi, I met the maulana or teacher of a theological school. It was a famous school, but for reasons I couldn’t follow it had fallen into disrepair during Mr. Bhutto’s time.

  The crumbling buildings, of sun-dried brick, were like village buildings, peasant buildings—nothing here of the grandeur of Qom, no steel desks or modernistic telephones or carpeted floors. The guest house was a little one-roomed hut with a walled courtyard, everything of sun-dried brick and uneven, everything returning to dust. The room had a ceiling fan, three string beds with rolled-up bedding, an arched niche in the wall with three shelves; and that was all. The brick floor was bare. Roughly cut windows and doors, front and back, were open to dust. We were near the Indus River, and subsurface water, seeping through from the river, fed fields and caused trees to grow, but everything seemed to grow out of dust.

  The maulana’s room was more enclosed than the guest house, but not less bare. He had been lying down on his string bed; he sat up to talk to me. He was turbanned and bearded, an old man, but still vigorous, and not gentle. In the late-afternoon gloom, soon made gloomier by a very weak electric bulb, in the dust and bareness of his peasant setting, he was alive with a religious passion that was like malevolence: the passion for the true faith running, as it can easily run, into the idea of Islam in danger, the need for the holy war, the idea of the enemy.

  He asked me about myself and my travels. I told him I had been to Iran.

  He said, “Khomeini is a good man. He is Islamic.”

  “Why do you say that?” I had expected him, so orthodox and fierce, to disapprove of Khomeini’s Shia Islam as a deviation.

  He said, “He has banned women from appearing on television.”

  This was all that he knew of Iran since the revolution.

  He said, “We don’t have an Islamic government here.”

  How could he say that? The government had ordered civil servants to break off every day and say their prayers. It had legislated for Koranic punishments like whipping and stoning to death. It was talking of levying a Koranic tax, to be paid out to the poor as alms. The president had just made the pilgrimage to Mecca. What more did the maulana want?

  He said, “They haven’t abolished interest in the banks.” The Prophet had outlawed usury; a banking system that depended on interest was not Islamic.

  What kind of banking system did he want? How did he want the financial affairs of the country to be managed?

  He didn’t know. He hadn’t thought about it. But he didn’t care. He said, “If Pakistan makes money in an Islamic way, everything will follow.” He was pleased with that thought—logic was one of the subjects taught at his school—and he repeated it slowly.

  He was half a politician, a man of local influence; and in his criticism of the government there was no doubt some local or personal grudge. But he was not being disingenuous; he lived by his rules. His world had shrunk to a hut in a crumbling village. He was prepared for even that to crumble away further, once the faith was served.

  Some miles away, in the fading light, peasants were baiting a bear with dogs in a ploughed field. The yelping dogs were cradled by their handlers. The chained bear sniffed the upturned earth and salivated. The dogs were released, four of them. They leapt and bit hard and threw the bear; the crowd shouted. But everything that got in the way of the bear’s paws was damaged. The bear righted itself, and the crowd shouted again; and thereafter at every roll the bear did the crowd shouted. Then the bear, using its flexible spine, sitting on the ground and slumping forward, began to crush the two dogs it had dislodged and trapped, sitting on one, squeezing another to death with its forward slump; and the dog being killed looked out with a sudden blank mildness from the brown-black fur of the bear. The back of the dog being sat on was broken. The dog handlers then went in to rescue the two dogs that survived, still holding on where they had bitten.

  The fight lasted three minutes. It was a village entertainment and, like the faith, part of the complete, old life of the desert.

  THE British came late to Sind, in 1843, and after a small battle at a place not far from the bear-baiting field, ruled for just about a hundred years. The native towns of Sind were inland, on the Indus River. Karachi in 1843 was a fishing village on the coast. In 1947, when the British left, it was a modern port and the main city of the western half of the new Muslim state of Pakistan. It had a population then of three hundred thousand. One-third were Hindus or non-Muslims and had to leave; but there were millions of Indian Muslims waiting to come. Now, more than thirty years later, after the great Indian Muslim migration and the continuing migration from within Pakistan, the population of Karachi was five or six million—no one knew the true figure.

  I had seen Karachi before, in 1962, but briefly, and my memories of it were phantasmagoric. I was going to India, my ancestral land, for the first time—and going there in easy stages. I was travelling on a freighter from Alexandria to Bombay, and Karachi was a port of call.

  There were Africans on the docks of Karachi, and they were a surprise: descendants of slaves set free after the British annexation in 1843, turned out into the streets, where they had more or less stayed. There were camel carts, the first I had seen, with high, sloping shafts. There was a hotel with two dwarfs in white uniforms and green turbans at the entrance.

  Africans, camel carts, dwarfs in green turbans: they were not memories that could be trusted. They were more like ideas suggested by nerves, my nerves at being in the subcontinent for the first time, my confused unhappiness at the reminders (in buildings, in names) of British rule, nerves and unhappiness given a physical edge by the humid salt heat, from which, after only a couple of hours, I preferred to hide in the ship.

  Now the floating memories focussed, and turned out to be true. There were Africans in Karachi, dock workers. Away from the motor traffic of main roads there were camel carts. The camels trotted with their long heads held high. Their flapping mouths and big round cleft feet, picked up clean, gave each camel a triumphant air, as of a smiling athlete perpetually breasting a tape.

  And more than camels. There were the donkeys, which I had forgotten, though they must have been the smallest donkeys I had ever seen, brisk, amiable, and so small that in a playful imagination they became smaller, with the size and character of Irish setters—almost. Their hindquarters, scored black with the harness strap, had a doglike slenderness; their legs were delicate. When they were idle they stood still, in couples, in grassless ground; and, after their amiability on the trot, they looked sad, and sadder because of that forlorn companionship.

  And the Metropole Hotel did have two dwarf doormen. They were no longer apparent, but nothing bad had happened to them. They had (I was told) only been taken inside. Club Road, where the Metropole was, was more hectic than in 1962; and the dwarfs were not as young as they had been. Time had told on the Metropole, too. It had ceased to be the first hotel of Karachi. It had been overtaken by the Intercontinental. And other hotels of the new age were coming up—the Sheraton, the Hyatt Regency (pressing on Islamically, even after Iran), the Holiday Inn.

  IT was the city of the five million that I wanted to see. But the boy or young man the taxi service gave me had other ideas. He wanted to take me to the Chaukandi tombs, seventeen miles outside Karachi; it was necessary to say no.

  He was short and moon-faced, the driver, spoilt and thuggish. He wore an outfit in slate blue, loose cotton trousers and a full, long-tailed shirt. He gave me a feeling of danger: the dropout, the rustic with urban vanities. But he had undeniable style.

 
I said, “I think you are a student?”

  He liked that. He said, “My story is sad. Because it is sad I will not tell you about it. I will show you the sights of Karachi.” And he sighed.

  He stopped not far away, in one of the grand residential streets of the older, British-built town. The long wall of the house opposite which we had stopped was lined at the top with barbed wire.

  The driver hugged the steering wheel, like a man suddenly weary, and said, “Mr. Bhutto’s house.”

  I would have preferred not to see it, the house of the man hanged four months before, the house where his wife and daughter still were. But it was hard in Pakistan, as I had already found, to stay away from the passion of Mr. Bhutto, the degradations of his long months in prison, the manner of his death. That event was already more than political. It was like the legend of a saint or martyr, and it was a Muslim legend, with its mixture of piety and anger and its intimations of revenge.

  In the jail in Lahore—I had been told—they had put him in a cell where the cruel summer sun fell for much of the day. He asked for his drinking water to be boiled; they brought him a vacuum flask of boiling water; it was evening before the water was cool enough for him to drink. He lived simply, eating one round of unleavened bread a day; but he spent two thousand rupees, two hundred dollars, every day on his fellow prisoners. He washed his own clothes, the man who had been a dandy. At every stage of his legal degradation the quality of his food declined.

  In the jail at Rawalpindi—where he was to be hanged—his warders were constantly changed because they became too sympathetic. But then a warder was found who taunted the condemned man. “Why do you want to read Time and Newsweek, when in a few days you will be dead?” At the time of his death he weighed eighty pounds. When they came to put the hanged-man’s clothes on him he said, “I will wear my own clothes. If any of you want to put that on me, let him try.” In one story he walked to the scaffold. When his hands were tied he asked for them to be untied. He said, “It hurts.” In another story he was carried to the gallows on a stretcher. In a third story he was killed in his cell: a prisoner, roused early one morning and told to go and wash a hanged man, went to a cell and saw Mr. Bhutto dead, but so cold and stiff that the clothes had to be torn off. All this, just four months before.

  The driver, ceasing to hug the steering wheel, said, “I will show you the sights.”

  We went to the sea front: breakers, breeze, the shining flat beach of a muddy bay and, at the far end of the bay, the concrete frames of new apartment buildings: money in the midst of economic stringency, a property boom in Karachi. The driver said, “Apartments is the fashion now. No more bungalows.”

  On the sand there were stalls selling toys and souvenirs. I thought of food. I said, “Are you fasting?”

  “No. I am angry with God. You are Muslim?”

  “No.”

  “Muslim people are bad. They lie too much. Too much lies from Muslim people. It is a sad story. I will not tell you about it.”

  We drove farther along the front. He showed me a big, marble-clad building at the end of the road. “Guess what that is. You guess and tell me.”

  I said, “It is a hotel.”

  “Casino. Mr. Bhutto’s time.”

  It was unfinished. A smaller concrete frame beside it was also unfinished.

  “Staff quarters. Mr. Bhutto’s time. No casino now. No gambling. No horse racing. This government is bad. It is against everything.”

  We drove on to a residential area: big plots, gardens, big concrete houses. “Rich people live here. Foreigners, Arabs. Some Pakistanis, too. That house is the house of the king of Abu Dhabi.” It was a big house in a big plot, and it had a high wall all around. “Five hundred servants. That whole house is just for one month in the year. The king of Abu Dhabi comes for one month here just to shoot. In Pakistan there are too many of these birds. Now I will show you my house.”

  “You live here?”

  “I will show you. I tell you, it is a sad story.”

  Some streets away—the plots here were smaller—we stopped in front of a house. Only the upper storey could be seen above the wall. The driver sounded his horn. No one answered. He asked to be excused, got out of the car, and shouted. He pushed open the gate and I saw a fussy concrete house that was smaller than it pretended. No one came out of the house. But above the wall of the house opposite a servant’s head appeared, amid the greenery of the garden. The servant and the driver spoke familiarly in Urdu.

  The driver, getting back into the car, said, “Nobody is there. It is all taken away now. All.”

  “Who took it away?”

  “This government. Who else? My father was with the last government.”

  Was it true? One of the charges against Mr. Bhutto was that during his time in office he had destroyed the social balance in Pakistan, had brought up riff-raff and given them authority. Was the driver’s father one of the people Mr. Bhutto had brought up? The house was in a rich area but wasn’t grand, was certainly less grand than it might have seemed to the man who had built it. The driver seemed to know the house well; he knew the servant of the house opposite. What had happened to the father? The driver said it was he alone who now had to look after his mother, his two sisters, and a brother. He had given up his studies to drive the taxi. He didn’t own the taxi. He got 350 rupees a month from the manager of the taxi company, and that was all.

  Yet, having told his story, having shown me proof of his former wealth, he didn’t seem too unhappy. He took me to a modern mosque with a big concrete dome (“No pillars,” he said proudly) and with a minaret like a church spire. He showed me the tomb of Mr. Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, and he told me the sad story (another sad story) of this leader who died just three months after the state had been established. If Mr. Jinnah had lived, the driver said, it would have been different in Pakistan.

  A sad story, but the tomb was impressive; the driver liked it. He liked the big new buildings of Karachi; he liked the modern style. He told me that Pakistani architects were the best in the world. The Arabs always wanted them to build mosques.

  “We are Muslims in Pakistan. Muslim people like God. I like God.”

  “But you told me you were angry with God.”

  “Angry, yes. But God is God. God is not like people. Now I will show you before Pakistan.”

  We drove in thick traffic into old, commercial Karachi. Scooters squalled and racketed. The hot air was grey and brown with smoke.

  I said, “What did your father do?”

  He pretended not to understand.

  “Was he a civil servant?”

  “I told you, he was with the government.”

  He made it sound like a job. But he was unwilling to say more, and I wasn’t sure whether he was telling me that his father was a politician or someone who had somehow prospered under Mr. Bhutto.

  He stopped at a perfume shop to buy perfume and henna for his sisters for the festival at the end of Ramadan. Henna to redden the girls’ palms, a gift for the festival—the family side of the elder son, spoilt by sisters and mother. He told me it was the only shop in Karachi where such things could be bought. He was a long time in the shop; he seemed to know the people.

  Africans in workaday Sindhi clothes gave a touch of the Arabian Nights to the street, which was architecturally extravagant, Oriental. They were simple concrete structures, the bazaar buildings of Karachi “before Pakistan,” but they were fantastically decorated: iron balconies, Saracenic arches, Corinthian or Doric columns, Gothic or mock-Gothic windows. All the available styles of the late British period were jumbled together in pure delight, as at some once-a-year feast where no delicacy could be left out. The inspiration for the Gothic—at first puzzling—was easy to spot later. It was the British-built Victorian Gothic memorial called the Mereweather Tower, in the middle of commercial Karachi. What was the point of that tower?

  The driver said, “It is a tower. Like the one in Paris.”

  And then h
e took me to see the Mecca-bound pilgrims, in the reception centre the government ran for them near the docks. It was like an army camp, with the neatness; and walking up and down the well-swept lanes, like well-groomed stage figures in an artificial setting, were elderly men from all the provinces of Pakistan in their provincial dress: Punjabis, Baluchis (with a difference in the turban), Sindhis (with their flat caps), Pathans from the Afghan frontier. The faces were calm, contented. They were men for whom—whatever was happening outside, whoever ruled—heaven was at last within reach.

  The driver said, “It’s only because we look like Pakistanis we can come here. If you were an American I wouldn’t bring you here.”

  Like the pilgrims, my driver had moved from passion to calm. And his religious emotions had risen on a contrary curve, after the mosques, Mr. Jinnah’s impressive white tomb, and the pilgrim centre. From being angry with God and an indifferent Muslim, he had become at the end as passionate and secure a Muslim as any.

  There remained his sad story. I had my doubts about it. But truth can be crude, and later I believed that in its outline the story was true. I believed that his father had risen fast in Mr. Bhutto’s time, had risen to being the near neighbour of an Arabian king, but had lost everything with Mr. Bhutto’s fall and had in some manner been put away: a peasant drama, the small change of Mr. Bhutto’s tragedy, part of the thuggish public life of the Muslim polity, where in practice the only morality (and also the eternal balm) was the possession of the faith.

  “NOW I will show you before Pakistan”: it was one way of getting around the awkwardness of history. Before 1947 there was no Pakistan here; there was only the Indian province of Sind and the British-built city of Karachi. That past survived in buildings, and in names: Club Road, Bleak House Road, Clifton, McNeil Road, Jutland Lines, Jacob Lines, Abyssinia Lines, Clayton Quarters, Napier Barracks, Soldier Bazaar. There were even purely Indian survivals: Tamil Colony, Ranswamy, Dadabhoy Nouroji Road. There was no longer a Motilal Nehru Road, but there was still a Gandhi Garden.