“Not until now. But you have to think, Jasir, it’s right on the border and there’s a war on. A fight to the death between the freedom lovers and the God lovers.”
“Bloody Americans.”
The colonel lifted an eyebrow.
“Who’s side are you on?” asked Jaz in response.
The colonel laughed: “Whose side? Pakistan’s, of course, defending its land. If it still is. And then the Afghans too, defending theirs. And the Baluch tribes, fighting for their honour. And the Taliban building heaven on earth. And the suicide bombers martyring themselves for Allah and the Americans bringing democracy to us primitives. They are all good guys Jasir. And no one can tell them otherwise. That’s the problem.”
“Well the fucker who killed Mahmud wasn’t a good guy. That’s sure.”
Jaz looked out of the window. The sun was shining on parched wheat fields, women picking their way between the crops balancing stacks of firewood on their heads. They drove past a family with the father perched high on his camel’s hump, all his earthly possessions packed around him; his family following on foot, eyes scanning the horizon for anything green the camel could eat. The camel’s seemingly desiccated bottom lip flapped as the beast looked ahead. The mother in a heavy ruby-coloured dress that dragged on the sand trudged behind. The backs of her hands were decorated with henna.
Keen to press on, the colonel blew his horn as he overtook trucks decorated with crude, bright paintings and laden with goods destined for markets in Iran, Afghanistan and beyond, their tyres worn smooth and shiny with years of use. A motorcyclist with his head wrapped in a keffiyeh and a Kalashnikov slung over his shoulder overtook them blowing his horn so that they would know he was there.
“You need to sleep now,” advised the colonel.
As he slipped in and out of consciousness Jaz dreamt of Mahmud. His little brother, at 8 or 9 years old, was dressed in a dirty off-white shalwar kameez hiding behind one of the date trees by their home. He rushed out, brandishing a stick for a gun. “Tak, tak, tak” Mahmud screamed. Jaz, playing along, fell grasping his sides and emitting blood-curdling cries and then rolled on the ground laughing. His eyes were just an inch from the soil and for some reason Mahmud was crying for help. Jaz tried to stand up but his whole body felt as heavy as lead and he was stuck, powerless to lift himself from the earth.
*****
The whole village had turned out to clean up Mahmud’s compound but, with so much charred metal and wood, it still wasn’t fit for a funeral. A neighbour offered his place instead. And since Mahmud had no relatives in the village, the mullah had taken charge. A short, middle-aged man he had the fleshy appearance of one not used to physical labour. His beard, encasing chubby cheeks, was oily black, dyed, it seemed, because there was a thin line of grey by his cheek at the roots. A white turban flecked with a green motif was wrapped around his head. On his shoulders he wore a shawl of the same design.
There was no point trying to match the Uzbeks’ body parts, he told the villagers, and anyway their martyrdom already assured them of a rapid passage to heaven. “Just try to make it two legs, two arms and one head to each shroud,” he instructed. The remains of the old woman would have barely filled a bucket. The mullah asked someone to produce a burqa so they could bulk out her shroud and make it look more like it contained a body.
Only Mahmud’s corpse was in a fit state to be properly prepared for burial. The mullah asked Mahmud’s school friends to fetch warm water. For most it was the first time. He showed them how to wash and then cover the genitals. Next, they cleaned the inside of the mouth and nostrils with small bits of cotton. The boys, refusing to weep in front of each other, worked their way down the body wiping the sand and dust off Mahmud’s skin. The mullah then told them to lift the body as he placed a cotton sheet underneath it. Together they wrapped Mahmud up and the mullah, with thick twine, sewed the shroud around him. Then reaching inside the folds of his clothing, the mullah produced a grimy bottle of sandalwood perfume that he sprinkled on the cotton so it would smell sweet on the ascent to paradise.
The colonel and his nephew arrived in Chamak just as the sun, a fiery-red disc, slipped down towards the sheer black mountains of Afghanistan. Over there right now, thought the colonel, there are young men from all over the world fighting to survive. He didn’t envy them. A gust of dust temporarily obscured the view, putting the sun into a hazy focus. Jaz coughed and closed his window.
A bright-eyed village boy, maybe 8 years old, realised who they were and pointed the way to the compound where the bodies were waiting. As the colonel’s car bumped along the village’s empty streets, plastic bags and other rubbish swirling in his slip stream, the boy ran ahead, beckoning them to follow. He took them to a gate.
“I better leave the car out here,” the colonel said unbuckling his seat belt.
As they entered the neighbour’s compound, Jaz was overwhelmed by what he saw. Over a hundred people stood looking at him, heads bowed. They were people he had known since childhood. Friends from school who now had glossy black hair down to their shoulders, and yellowing teeth. And older people with no teeth, friends of his father; the people who had looked out for him and Mahmud: boys with just a housekeeper to look after them. He saw the baker who had always given them a piece of bread as they walked to school. Jaz felt awkward and out of place in his Western clothes, but then the villagers started murmuring their condolences: their faces, their outstretched arms and the women’s wailing all expressed acceptance. He was overwhelmed by a sensation of comfort and a feeling that, without even trying, he fitted in. He had a place in the world. It was a long way from the dingy room the minicab drivers sat in waiting for fares.
The seven bodies were in a row on low string beds, their heads pointing towards Mecca. And one, in the centre, was placed a bit ahead of the others. Jaz assumed it was his brother’s and moved towards it falling to his knees in prayer.
But the light was fading now and ritual demanded that the bodies be interred before the sun went down. The colonel took a front corner of the bier and tapped Jaz on the shoulder indicating he should take the other. Two of Mahmud’s school friends stepped forward to help.
Other villagers performed the same service for the Uzbeks and the old woman, but it was Mahmud’s body that led the procession.
Seven graves had already been dug but for now everyone gathered at Mahmud’s. The mullah stood besides Jaz: “Allahu Akbar” he chanted, as the farmers, traders, teachers, shopkeepers, mechanics, the children and the elderly, lifted their hands in unison, cupping them around their ears in supplication.
“Glory to thee, O Allah, and thine is the praise, and blessed is thy name ...”
Jaz shook his head. Had he been in London just over 24 hours ago?
“Praise be to Allah, the Lord of the worlds ...”
He looked at the shroud and gasped for air between his sobs as he thought of Mahmud.
“O Allah! Grant protection to our living and to our dead ...”
With Jaz paralysed by grief, a young man slipped into his place and, together with the colonel and the two other pall-bearers, picked up the corpse using two sheets folded into long cotton bands. The villagers edged back to give them room and the four manoeuvred themselves around the grave. And then, letting the material slip inch by inch through their hands, they lowered Mahmud into the ground.
As he watched his little brother disappear, Jaz wept. Then he ripped off his leather jacket. “I will do this!” he stared at the mullah, defiant.
He moved towards the pile of soft earth that had been left by the gravediggers, lowered his chest into the mound and thrust his body against it. The earth shifted away from him and started falling onto the grave below. “I will bury my brother,” he sobbed.
The villagers recoiled. But one man stood steady. In his grief Jaz had not noticed him but he was standing tall at the foot of the grave in a crimson robe edged in gold. The eyes under his flowing locks of thick, white hair focused on Jaz. And th
en moving as languidly as a cat in the hot sun, he raised his right arm in a gesture of command signalling the colonel to draw close. He whispered something in his ear. Then, lifting his robe so that it would not drag on the ground, he turned and walked away with a retinue of servants following in his wake.
*****
Jaz had never met Sheikh Akbar Shabaz Mehrab Akbar Khan Chamak. But, of course, he knew of him. Everybody in Chamak did. In fact, so did everybody in Baluchistan. The British colonialists had courted his forebears and even put his grandfather on a ship to London so that he could attend the King’s tea party at Buckingham Palace. It was said to have been the only occasion in the man’s whole life when his desire had not been granted. He asked for green tea and was told none was available. The under-secretary of state for foreign affairs had witnessed the stand-off between tribal leader and royal butler and declared with delight, at countless subsequent dinner parties, that the butler emerged the victor.
When the British went back home, the sheikh’s family was courted again, this time by the new Pakistani government. From the point of view of most Chamaki tribesmen the only thing that had changed was the colour of the skin of those wanting to rule them. And so it was until one day in 2001 when a couple of big buildings in America were destroyed. Suddenly everybody wanted the Chamakis on their side. The Pakistanis still. The British again, the Americans, the Afghans, the Taliban, the Central Asians and even, most recently, the Chinese asking for help to secure the release of a kidnapped telecoms engineer.
As a young man the sheikh used to enjoy receiving emissaries in his remote desert fort, but in later life his view had changed. He no longer met outsiders, especially westerners. What was the point? He had watched the steady advance of globalisation through his satellite TV. He had witnessed Chamaki tribal traditions wither away. He had failed to resist the diluting influences of education, trade, and mobility. “I have been a Pakistani for 60 years and I have been a Muslim for 1,400,” he once declared, “but I have been a Chamaki since the start of time itself.” And then with a wave of the hand: “These other things will pass. The Christians, the Buddhists, the Hindus and God knows who else have all been here. And they have all left as well. But the Chamakis will remain.”
And with age, the sheikh believed, he had come to understand his role more clearly. When he had promised his ailing father that he would protect Chamaki honour the sheikh had not fully appreciated the undertaking he had given - both in terms of its scope and its limitations. Now he realised the task was impossibly daunting because the Chamaki way of life, Chamaki independence, was unacceptable to so many powerful forces.
In his quest to keep his people strong and intact he had to fight off the Islamists who wanted the Chamakis to reject their tribal and Baluch loyalties and embrace Allah instead. He had to counter the arguments of the Western-educated Pakistani liberals who complained the Chamaki tribesmen were little more than medieval vassals living under a feudal lord. More dangerous still – and more numerous - were the Pakistani nationalists, the army officers and civil servants who, having picked up the nationalist creed from the departing British colonialists, insisted that the idea of Pakistan trumped the Chamakis’ tribe and loyalty to Baluchistan. He had to cope with Americans pretending they wanted to advance Baluch democracy when, in fact, all they desired was the natural gas that lay in the ground. And then there was Iran just a few miles away across the border. The shah in the old days and the mullahs after him had perhaps only one thing in common: the desire to crush Baluch identity for fear Baluch nationalists would demand more autonomy.
Having taken over the leadership of the tribe at just 12 years old the sheikh initially had no idea of the strength of his enemies. But over time he had also come to appreciate the limited nature of the task he had been allotted in life. His responsibility could only last for his own lifetime. It was for him to pass on, at the time of his death, the Chamaki tribe in the condition he had inherited it from his father. And after that it would fall to his heirs to carry on the Chamaki struggle as they saw fit. It would be their turn.
And he could see now the bigger picture, the broader canvas on which his tribe’s future would be painted for the next decade or two. The sheikh was benefiting from the chaos. Chaos in Afghanistan and chaos in Pakistan. And hopefully chaos in Iran too if the Americans invaded. Chaos was all he needed. It left the Chamakis on the sidelines, independent and free. As long as the big powers were distracted by fighting each other, that left room for the Chamakis to live their lives as they saw fit. It may not be a long-term strategy he sometimes conceded to himself, but what more could he do? He could only preserve the Chamaki way of life for as long as he lived. And attack was the best form of defence. Always had been. Osama bin Laden might have been as mad as a pregnant snake, the sheikh increasingly thought, but he may just have had the right idea.
Chapter Four
“You only need to lose one relative to be an extremist.” -- 18-year-old Bosnian fighter, Sarajevo, 1994
09:00, 3rd October, Dera Chamak, Baluchistan
“The sheikh wants to see you,” the colonel announced after a breakfast of tea and a slightly gritty omelette.
It was the day after the funeral. The colonel and Jaz were sitting on chairs with torn red plastic seats which were lined up against the wall of a neighbour’s reception room. Above them there was a faded poster of a Swiss chalet on a flower-bedecked deep green mountainside complete with a picturesque alpine ravine. Next to it was a much shinier one of Osama bin Laden, a Kalashnikov at his side. Just outside the window they could see a cow chewing a pile of grass that had been put at its feet.
“What do you mean?”
Even his years in London had not entirely worn off Jaz’s belief that of all men on earth the sheikh was one of the most powerful. If his fellow minicab drivers didn’t realise who he was, Jaz thought, the sheikh could hardly be blamed for their ignorance. The sheikh had more experience of fighting, of ruling, of killing, of surviving than most of the people in Waterloo put together.
“He was at the funeral.”
“Didn’t see him.” Jaz reached for a bowl of pistachio nuts that lay on the cushion beside him.
“You didn’t see anything.”
“What should I do?”
“You will see him, of course. I’ll send a message that we will go tonight.”
“You know him?”
The colonel closed his eyes travelling back in time. “We fought together.”
“Where?”
“It’s a long story, Jaz. Put it like this: he has every reason to trust me.”
Jaz shelled a nut contemplating what had just been said.
“Who did you fight?”
“We had a common enemy.”
“How do you mean?”
“When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan the Baluch and Pakistan both needed to oppose them,” the colonel said. “So we made common cause. I was given the job of liaising with the Chamakis.”
“Yeah?”
“The sheikh took his men into Afghanistan. Before you were born Jaz.”
Jaz nodded.
“But,” said the colonel, “once the Soviets were as good as beaten, some bright spark in GHQ suggested that we take the chance to deal the Chamakis a blow so that they would cause less trouble in Pakistan.”
Jaz looked confused.
“Well my boy, they asked me to organise throwing the sheikh out of a helicopter.”
“Fuck me! Why?”
“Because they knew that the sheikh, once he had finished fighting the Soviets, would probably turn his attention to a new enemy: Pakistan.”
“Because they want the gas you mean?”
“Mainly. And because they want control too. For its own sake.”
“So what did you do? About the helicopter?”
“Taking the view that you don’t murder people with whom you have fought on the battlefield I made sure he never got on board. Needless to say Jaz, that is something that you must
never tell anyone. But there is a time in every officer’s career when he is faced with the choice of obeying orders or behaving like a man. Of doing the right thing.”
“Right enough. Got it.” The two men fell silent as Jaz contemplated what he had been told. And then his mind turned to the dinner he would have to go to.
“I’d better find a shalwar kameez,” he said, “He won’t like jeans”.
The colonel smiled: “Good idea. And Jasir, he is a man of few words. Has to be in his position. Don’t be put off. Just wait for him to speak.” Then unexpectedly the colonel laughed. “God I could do with a drink,” he said to himself then turning to Jaz. “It is probably no exaggeration to say there is not a drop of Scotch within a hundred miles. Clean living types, these Chamakis. More’s the pity.”
As the two men sat in silence Jaz took out his phone and texted Aysha. “Had to go away. Hope to see you soon.” He looked at the message, added ‘xx’, deleted it, added a single ‘X’ in upper case, deleted that and settled on a single ’x’ and pressed send. And then he felt guilty that he was thinking of himself rather than Mahmud. The grief returned, pressing down on his shoulders and in on his chest.
*****
The sheikh’s fort stood inside two concentric rings of baked mud walls each 20 feet high. The outer barrier - the first line of defence – enclosed an area of over 10,000 square yards. It had watchtowers on each corner overlooking a stretch of about 10 yards of stony ground that led to the second wall – also equipped with watchtowers. Deep inside that second ring there was a smaller wall not so much for defence but privacy. Because behind it lay the sheikh’s home, his four wives and his sumptuous gardens.
As they were led into the sheikh’s private quarters Jaz saw a woven carpet on the grass. There were 20 or more dishes of food laid out upon it. On its edge, forming a rectangle, the sheikh and his closest advisers sat cross-legged, talking. Nearby a couple of boys picked at the strings of instruments with rounded sound chambers like elongated watermelons. The moonlight cast a faint light on bowls filled with goats’ ears and cows’ livers; slabs of wood with mutton legs and whole chickens cooked on a nearby glowing fire. The smell of grilled meat floated through the air
TARGET BRITAIN: a political thriller Page 5
