Ahmed’s son went and looked.
He said almost at once, “It wasn’t cancerous. It was a benign tumour. See—he has another on his head, here.”
The scar was there; the act of courage remained. But the embarrassment—together with the placid giant, who continued to sit at the table but couldn’t follow English—was set aside in renewed talk of Pakistan.
Ahmed said, “Everybody fools everybody else here. Politicians, civil servants, everybody.”
And Ahmed and his other visitor (who had so far said little) agreed that people were turning to Islam because everything else had failed. Even at the universities the Islamic wave was swamping academic life.
But wasn’t that, I asked, the special trap of a place like Pakistan? Couldn’t people now accept that they were Muslims in a Muslim country, and that Pakistan was what the faith had made of it? Did it make sense—after the centuries of Islamic history—to say that Islam hadn’t been tried?
Ahmed became grave. He said, “No, it has never been tried.”
3
The Little Arab
Forty miles east of Karachi was the little town of Banbhore, an ancient port site dating back to the first century B.C. Banbhore had become important because excavations there had uncovered the remains of what was thought to be the first mosque in the subcontinent, a mosque built in the first century of Islam, shortly after the conquest of Sind by the Arabs in 712 A.D. Ahmed took me there on the last Friday of Ramadan, which was also the last day of Ramadan.
The Ramadan month ends, and the Id festival is proclaimed, when the new moon is sighted. Ramadan was expected to end on the Thursday; but the government moon-sighting committee hadn’t sighted the moon. So Ramadan in Pakistan lasted an extra day, and Mr. Salahuddin, the newspaper editor, had to hold back his festival supplement and hurry through a non-festival editorial. If it had been Id on the Friday, Ahmed would have been busy receiving and paying visits and wouldn’t have been able to take me to Banbhore.
We didn’t go there right away. We went first to a mosque to find some people Ahmed thought I should meet. They weren’t there. We drove around the sprawl of Karachi for a little. Then the time drew near for the noon prayers, and Ahmed became restless and decided to drive back to his neighbourhood mosque.
I asked him whether he believed literally in the afterlife.
He said, “Oh, yes.” He widened his eyes and nodded, just as he had widened his eyes and nodded when he had said that Islam hadn’t been tried. “Oh, yes. I am curious about it. You see, I’m like a child in some ways.” Then he sought to explain his belief. “People die. But they exist in my mind while I remember them. I cannot say they have vanished while I remember them.” It was in some such way that he expected to be remembered—but in the spirit—until the remembering agent disappeared. Simpler people had their own ideas: they believed in a paradise that duplicated this world, but with everything put right, and—with the women. But in fact, Ahmed said (or so I understood him to say), the women in paradise were to be without periods: they were to be pure.
I would have liked to hear more of this idea of purity, but I felt that Ahmed, with his sensitivity about women and sex, would have thought the interest prurient. So I didn’t press; I thought I would save it for later.
The mosque, in a hot, dusty street, was new, of concrete, and undistinguished, its walls ochre and chocolate. The street outside was spread with rugs for the overflow crowd. It was time for the main Friday prayers; the mullah had finished his Koran reading. Ahmed took his prayer mat from the car and knelt with the crowd in the street, in the sun. I waited in the car.
Later, as we were driving through Karachi, I saw printed posters: We Sacrificed for Pakistan Not Bangladesh.
Ahmed didn’t tell me what group was responsible. But the posters—with their hint of further divisions and animosities in his country—made him irritable. He said, “They sacrificed nothing. If there was no Pakistan I would have been a third-class clerk. Big jobs came to people like me when we got Pakistan.” Later he said, “In two hundred years it will be the same here.” And still later, the irritation continuing to work on him, turning to a kind of gloom, he said, “When I was a young man I was told that my country was Hindustan and that it was the finest country in the world. The poet Mohammed Iqbal told me that. Then one day in the 1930s I was told that my country was no longer Hindustan and the people I had thought of as my brothers were my enemies. Then I was told that my country was Pakistan. Then I found that that country had shrunk. Now I can feel it shrinking again.”
For seven years, until the creation of Pakistan in 1947, Ahmed had served in the Royal Indian Navy, the navy of undivided, British-ruled India. He had taken part in the Bombay naval mutiny of 1946. But, thirty years later, his naval memories were not heroic or political; they were memories of sin. He drank. “Whisky was three rupees a bottle. Beer was free.” And there were the women. “My friends and I used to form cooperatives. And we would buy a woman for the evening and make love to her in turn.”
I wanted to hear more of those cooperatives—I liked the word, apart from everything else. But it was the sabbath; Ahmed was in a penitential mood, scourging himself for his past and also, it seemed, scourging himself for the state of his country.
I said, “Age takes care of the passions.”
“You think so, you think so?”
I liked him for that.
He drove fast; he always did; there was in his driving something of the release and excitability of his speech. Karachi was enormous. The city had spread over the flat desert; there were many housing developments, and some of them looked grand; the remittance economy could suggest a rich country. At last we were out in the desert: the early-afternoon heat, the openness, the flat scrub of useless trees. Without the Indus River and the lake-reservoirs there could have been no Karachi.
I said, “What were you saying about the cooperatives?”
He said irritably, at once explaining and punishing himself, “We did it more for the wickedness than for the pleasure.”
It was clear he was going to say no more. I couldn’t ask again, and I wished I had followed my first instinct and saved the matter for another day.
Desert. But the land of Sind was old: seventeen miles from Karachi we came to a necropolis of many acres on an eminence in the wide wasteland: tombs two to four centuries old, of decorated soft stone, block set on block, unmortared, to form little stepped pyramids: a dead tradition, perhaps enshrining older mysteries, but now, in modern Pakistan, just there, in the desert.
Modern Pakistan. The road led past the enormous area reserved for Pakistan Steel, the country’s first major industrial project—a steel plant and a new port—a controversial project (as I discovered later), costing millions a day, and possibly in the end uneconomical, since everything would have to be imported. The Russians were building it. On the other side of the road, at some distance, were the apartment blocks for the Russians. But the port was named Bin Qasim, after the Arab commander who had conquered Sind and brought Islam to the land.
After this, still on the road to the ruins of Banbhore, a lesser oddity: a large model village, line upon line of two-roomed huts with concrete walls and red roofs, but absolutely empty, empty since it had been built six years before, and now beginning to crumble. Had the village been built too far from where people were? Hadn’t people wanted to live in that bureaucratic fantasy of straight lines and red roofs? Ahmed wasn’t precise and didn’t want to say too much. He said only the houses hadn’t been “allocated.”
They had been built six years before. That would have been in Mr. Bhutto’s time; and Ahmed was one of those who hadn’t got on with Mr. Bhutto. He had in fact left the government service when Mr. Bhutto came to power in 1971. Mr. Bhutto “carried grudges,” and Mr. Bhutto felt he had a score to settle with Ahmed’s family. So Ahmed resigned; he would have been sacked by Mr. Bhutto anyway; his name was on the list of two thousand people Mr. Bhutto wanted to sack. Ahmed said he h
ad only a few rupees when he resigned. He was building his house, and that had taken up most of what he had. He borrowed and lived on borrowed money for a year, doing a variety of little jobs, until he got a job as adviser to an industrialist.
He advised the industrialist on the procedures of government departments. Previous advisers had claimed to be spending large sums on bribes. Ahmed bribed no one. He used his authority and knowledge of the rules to get the industrialist’s work done; and the industrialist was amazed and grateful. Ahmed was soon getting a prodigious salary. He finished building his house; he paid off all his debts. And then, feeling himself near the end of his active life, he thought the time had come for him to think of others. That was why (after Mr. Bhutto’s fall) he had gone back to government service, where he earned a quarter of what he had been getting from the industrialist. Ahmed loved and admired the industrialist still. He was a truly religious man, Ahmed said, a devout Muslim who followed the Koranic injunction and set aside a percentage of his wealth for charity.
A sandy track off the main road led to Banbhore. It was a short run, but the track looped and forked through beach vegetation; and Ahmed had to ask the way of a barebacked peasant who was dragging freshly cut branches. To come upon the excavated mound of a walled town with semicircular bastions was suddenly to feel far away: a rough outpost at the eastern limit of the Arab empire, a place of exile.
The town stood on a creek, but was now some little way from the water. The creek opened out, in the distance, into the sea. In the middle of the creek were salt flats; on a whitish spit of land, which looked intolerably hot, were the contemporary houses of the salt workers; on one flat far away were little white pyramids of salt.
It could never have been a rich town. The museum displayed one gold coin; the other coins were shoddy bronze things, cast in honeycomb moulds of hard-baked ashy clay. But there was the mosque, or the floor plan of the mosque, modelled on the mosque of Kufa in Iraq: that was the treasure of Banbhore.
Kufa was associated with the rightly guided Muslims at the very beginning of Islam; it was one of the earliest military towns the Arabs established among the conquered peoples north of Arabia; it was from Kufa that Ali, the cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet, ruled as the fourth caliph, from 656 to 661 A.D. Conquest first, Islam later: it was the pattern of Arab expansion. So Banbhore, repeating Kufa, and in the first century of Islam, linked Sind and Pakistan to the great days. The Banbhore mosque, if it was what it was said to be, was fabulous. The remains had been made neat; the floor had been retiled around the few old tiles that had survived.
Fragments of decorated pottery lay all over the excavated town site. And everywhere, too, mixed with the earth, and commoner than pottery, were crushed bones, white and clean and sharp. Ahmed said they were human bones. But such a quantity! The bones weren’t only on the surface; the excavation trenches showed the mixture of bones and earth all the way down, the bones like a kind of building material. Had the town been built on a cemetery? But why were the bones so crushed? If Ahmed was right, and the bones were human bones, Banbhore held another mystery.
I was keeping the Ramadan fast with Ahmed, and that disturbed him. He said again and again that he should have brought something for me to drink. He said that, but when we left Banbhore he seemed in no hurry to get back to Karachi. He, who normally drove fast, now drove slowly. I thought he might himself have been tired out by the long fasting day, and the sun and salt of Banbhore. Abruptly, after we passed the Pakistan Steel area, now called Bin Qasim after the Arab conqueror, Ahmed drove off the road and stopped the car in low bush. I thought he wished to rest. But no: he had only been looking for a place where he could get off the road and pray. He said, “You can’t stop on the road. Those fellows in the buses and cars take pleasure in bouncing you.”
I passed him his prayer mat. He walked briskly to the edge of the road, erect, military-looking in his grey-blue Pakistani costume, the long shirt and the slack trousers; and, oblivious of the passing traffic, he offered up his prayers for a long time. He said, when he came back, that if he missed a prayer during the day he grew restless in his sleep; his wife would wake him up and he would do the prayer he had missed.
We drove back fast to Karachi after that, not to his house, but to the house of the industrialist for whom he had worked. It was in one of the richer housing “societies.” There was a wide concrete drive at one side of the big plot. Royal palms lined the front of the lawn, which went back to a terrace that ran the width of the house.
On this terrace, on an easy chair, lay an elderly man in brown; he was paralyzed. He was the grandfather, the head of the family, and once the head of the firm. Two young boys, his grandsons, were dressed like little Arabs, with the cream-coloured gown and the headgear with the black bands. They had just been to Mecca with their father, and it was clear they had done the pilgrimage in style. The father was a tall man, dressed in white, the pilgrim’s colour, and with a white skullcap. He was soft-featured, soft-voiced. He was as Ahmed had described him: in his pilgrim clothes he seemed as much a man of religion as of business.
He, Ahmed, and I sat out on the lawn. For my sake Ahmed asked for some drinks to be brought out. The servant brought out three tumblers of a red liquid. I was nervous of the colour, let my tongue touch without tasting, and—not wishing to appear to be spurning their hospitality—I asked whether I could have a Coca-Cola instead.
Ahmed was shocked. He said, with distinct irritation, that the red liquid was a delicacy; it was used to ease people off their fast; it was made from special herbs and was very expensive, twenty-three rupees for a small bottle. I would have liked to try it; but I felt, after Ahmed had mentioned the price, that I would have compounded my vulgarity by going back on my choice. So the astonished servant brought out a Coca-Cola. And through all this pother on the lawn about my drink—which I didn’t really need—the man in the white skullcap smiled sweetly.
I complimented him on his house. He said it looked much better after Mecca, because of the green. I asked about the hotels of Mecca. I was hoping to hear something about the effects of the new Arab and Muslim money; but he said only that the hotels nearer the Great Mosque and the Kaaba were more expensive, the ones farther out less expensive.
The family had migrated from Bombay, and a branch was still in business in that city. But Muslims in India were “not encouraged to come up.” Some had “come up”; but generally there was no “encouragement.” It was easier in Pakistan. Everything was new, just starting; and there were more opportunities; but there was as yet no “infrastructure.”
I asked what difference there was for him between being in Bombay and being in Pakistan. He said that for him, as a businessman, there was no difference; business was business. But when you were in India or some other foreign country you were never sure whether the meat had been slaughtered in the correct way; you had to ask and you couldn’t always get answers; you had sometimes to go without. In Pakistan there was no such problem. Sometimes when you were abroad you felt like going to a mosque. But mosques weren’t always easy to find; you had to ask. Here, at prayer time, he said, gesturing to one end of the lawn and then to the other, here at prayer time a muezzin called from this side and a muezzin called from that side. There was no problem about finding a mosque in Pakistan.
I had expected someone less serene, more complicated. But Ahmed had spoken of the industrialist less as an industrialist than as a pious man, a good Muslim, someone who followed the rules in deed and heart. The rules made a man free: Mr. Salahuddin the newspaper editor had told me that.
And Mr. Salahuddin had also told me that it was possible in Islam for perfection to come to a child: as it seemed to have come to the elder and plumper of the industrialist’s sons. The boy, his father said, had already been twice on the pilgrimage to Mecca; during this month of Ramadan, now about to end, he had kept the rest of them up to the mark by his extraordinary strictness. He, the dimpled boy in Arab clothes, pretended not to know that he was
being talked about. Standing on the edge of the terrace, bending a length of black rubber tubing in childish sport, he went grave and withdrawn, frowning slightly, just minding his own business, being a little Arab.
It was nearly seven. Other members of the family, women, began to come out of the house onto the terrace, gathering around the paralyzed grandfather on the easy chair. It was fast-breaking time, and time for us to leave.
AND yet it was strange, the Arab tilt of Pakistan: the little boy in Arab clothes, the Pakistan Steel project given the name of the Arab conqueror. The poet Iqbal, putting forward his plan for an Indian Muslim state in 1930, had said that the Islam of India was special, “a people-building force … at its best.” “I therefore demand the formation of a consolidated Muslim state in the best interests of India and Islam,” Iqbal had said. “For India, it means security and peace …; for Islam, an opportunity to rid itself of the stamp that Arabian imperialism was forced to give it.”
But the world had changed since 1930; Arabia had some say in the world again. Pakistan had changed since 1947. Seeking more than Iqbal’s Muslim polity now, seeking in failure an impossibly pure faith, it called up its Arabian origins, mystical but at the same time real. At Banbhore, a remote outpost of the earliest Arab empires, you walked on human bones.
4
Killing History
In the imagination, the Arabs of the seventh century, inflamed by the message of the Prophet, pour out of Arabia and spread east and west, overthrowing decayed kingdoms and imposing the new faith. They move fast. In the west, they invade Visigothic Spain in 710; in the east, in the same year, they move beyond Persia to invade the great Hindu-Buddhist kingdom of Sind. The symmetry of the expansion reinforces the idea of elemental energy, a lava flow of the faith. But the Arab account of the conquest of Sind—contained in the book called the Chachnama, which I read in Pakistan in a paperback reprint of the English translation first published in 1900 in Karachi—tells a less apocalyptic story.
Among the Believers Page 16
