Where the Indus is Young

by Dervla Murphy

  I remember cycling past Islamabad while it was being built and thinking how frightful it would soon look – another Chandigarh. But in fact Pakistan’s new capital is an agreeable place of wide, bright boulevards, many trees, brilliant gardens, no high-risery and much attractive domestic architecture that is original without being ‘way-out’. Despite its official status it feels like an elegant, cosmopolitan suburb of Pindi – some fifteen miles away, but very close in spirit – and one hopes it will remain so. When Ayub Khan planned it he specified ‘no industrial development nearby’ but his successors may have cruder ideas.

  A more immediate threat than industry is basic Asian squalor; it does not take the Orient very long to impress itself on the latest in Occidental architecture and town planning. Islamabad is disfigured by too many areas from which builders’ rubble was never cleared and where men squat around relieving themselves in the shadow of imposing banks, embassies and shopping arcades. Even amidst the diplomatic residences some corners are piled with rubbish and occasional houses already show symptoms of jerry-building, while throughout the less affluent quarters squalor is gaining fast. In ancient Asian cities this sort of thing seems tolerable – even picturesque – but there is something peculiarly unprepossessing about disintegrating new buildings. And inevitably Islamabad has its beggars, though far fewer than any Indian city I know. These piteous bundles lie on the ground, hidden by a thin sheet of filthy cotton or a ragged burkah, and one would never suspect their humanity but for a stick-like arm and motionless begging palm outstretched on the pavement beside the fine new buildings of a new country with very old problems.

  Tourist Wagons constantly ply between Islamabad and Pindi; passengers get on and off anywhere they like at either end, or in between, and pay a fixed rate of one rupee per ride. One rarely has to wait more than a few minutes before being picked up, but if a bus is almost empty its driver may cruise around the streets for half an hour, filling enough seats to justify a journey. Even when one starts out from the most swinging quarter of Islamabad, most women come aboard wearing burkahs. To discover what sort of person is sitting beside you it is necessary to study the hand that will soon appear to grip the dashboard bar as the driver swings recklessly around corners. From that hand and its adornments quite a lot may be deduced about the age, physique, social status and approximate ethnic origins of the shapeless figure lurking silently within those folds of (usually black) cotton or nylon.

  Despite their looking so spick and span, these buses, like most Asian vehicles, will accommodate on the roof virtually anything that is capable of somehow being hauled up there. Enormous bales of hay and bundles of firewood, pyramids of stainless steel cooking-pots, trussed-up, frantically bleating goats, a plastic kitchen table, a day-old buffalo calf, a sack of wheat, two geese in a wooden crate – up they all go, and are deftly secured to the roof-rack by the driver’s mate, who is usually a good-natured adolescent anxious to help everybody. Rachel’s favourite Islamabad anecdote concerns a goat belonging to one woman passenger who got at a bale of hay belonging to another woman passenger. When the goat’s perfidy was revealed, on our arrival at Pindi, the two women exposed their faces, the better to tear each other’s eyes out, and order was not restored until a passing mullah, outraged by this display of nudity, belaboured both with his walking-stick.

  Around Islamabad, the daily life of the peasants remains unchanged by the proximity of their sophisticated new capital. I spent a day walking alone over the nearby hillsides and the villagers’ astonishment on seeing me indicated that Islamabad’s foreign colony does not often take to its feet. A still, grey day it was, reminiscent of late autumn in Ireland, and I reflected gloomily that in such weather there would certainly be no flights to the Northern Areas.

  During the afternoon two young women shyly invited me into a stone hut – the first Aryan invader of the subcontinent would have found it familiar – and insisted on refreshing me with green tea, which took almost an hour to brew. Only a few villagers have acquired a little newfangled cement to mix with the mud normally used to pack crevices in stone walls.

  From one hilltop I watched a line of ten women slowly ascending the path below me, each balancing two ochre pitchers of water on her head whilst helping to drive a communal herd of goats and kids – the goats wearing ‘bras’, to conserve their milk. Then I looked from the low, oblong huts nearby, over a furlong of level grazing land, to a wide, smooth ring-road along which sleek CD cars were swiftly purring past ingeniously-designed villas incorporating every conceivable mod con. Between these villas, lining the distant streets of Islamabad, stood hundreds of slender poplars, their branches retaining enough orange-yellow leaves to make them seem like rows of giant candles glowing through the late afternoon greyness. I returned home across an expanse of thinly-wooded land where the sound of axes rang out from every side as branches were lopped off for evening fires. By five o’clock a long band of crimson was flaring above the western horizon – a startling sight, after the uniform dullness of the sky all day – and moments later it was dark.

  From Islamabad we went up to Murree for two days. Murree is the only one of British India’s hill-stations to have gone to Pakistan; it is 7,500 feet above sea-level and we found it thickly covered in snow. We stayed in a ramshackle hotel which charged Rs.5 a night for what might be hyperbolically described as ‘a double room’, and on our return to Islamabad one of my young Pathan friends, who takes an unusual interest in the world beyond her own circle, asked me wistfully what it felt like to stay in a doss-house. The undertones of envy in her voice made me consciously value, as nothing else had ever done, my own freedom of movement. We European women take this completely for granted. Yet no Pakistani woman, however independent-minded or strong-willed, could possibly travel alone through her own country sharing the life of the poor. Granted, not many Pakistani women would ever want to do such a thing. But suddenly I found the fact that they could not strangely disturbing. Antipathetic as I am to Women’s Lib, its indirect influence may yet do some good in Asia.

  Early on 15 December we got back to Islamabad from Taxila, where we had spent five days exploring what was once the centre of Gandhara civilisation. During the previous night the longed-for rains had at last come and we were reminded of the worst sort of cold, wet, dark, Irish winter’s day, with the added disadvantage of mud hock-deep throughout the city. Obviously we were not going to get to Gilgit on 16 December. This time we were staying with the Aurangzebs and on the seventeenth I set off alone – in brilliant sunshine – for a day’s scrambling through the foothills.

  I followed an ancient, precipitous path not much used in this motorised age, when peasants go forty miles around by bus instead of ten miles over on foot. Until one has crossed the first ridge urban noises ascend through the still, clear air in an almost uncanny way: the blaring of horns, the high-pitched cries of street vendors, the preaching of some modified Trade Union gospel from a van with a loudspeaker. Then suddenly the city becomes invisible and inaudible. All day I saw only two people – carrying huge loads of firewood on their heads – and this rare degree of silence and solitude gave me a chance to try to sort out the impressions I had received since landing at Karachi three weeks earlier.

  The previous evening I had met an elderly gentleman who, on hearing that I had recently visited India, asked eagerly for news of Delhi. An hour and two whiskeys later he was confessing that the older he gets the more he longs to see once more the Moghul capital. For over five centuries his family had lived in Delhi and on one level he spoke of the city with nostalgia and love: but on another level it was the enemy capital. Tangled are the roots of Pakistani nationalism.

  He declared that to his children’s generation, too, Pakistan must always be to some extent a place of exile; and I was reminded of my West Punjabi friends in Delhi, who still speak of Lahore as ‘home’. But there is one significant difference. ‘Pakistani’ Indians tend to regard Pakistan’s creation as a massive robbery, organised by the British a
nd the Muslims and condoned by the world. ‘Indian’ Pakistanis, on the other hand, tend to regard partition not angrily but sadly. They have no wish to see it undone, but some of them still deplore that spectacular deterioration in communal relations which made it essential. As Ian Stephens has more than once stressed, in his thoughtful books on Pakistan, ‘something describable as a joint Hindu–Muslim or Indian culture did exist, both under the British régime, and more genuinely perhaps in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries … The point needs emphasising, to keep a correct balance. Over long periods, the two religious systems have functioned alongside one another without overt antagonism, and sometimes with mutual sympathy.’

  Sitting on a level ledge of ground under a clump of pines, I found myself wondering, ‘Should Pakistan exist?’ A silly question, in the 1970s. Yet it continues to occur to foreigners more often than they could tactfully admit to their Pakistani friends. Does this indicate that the ‘joint Hindu–Muslim or Indian culture’ is stronger than anything an exclusively Muslim state can create on its own in the godless twentieth century? Or does it simply mean that no hastily improvised new nation can give a convincing impression of nationhood after less than thirty years in existence?

  It is easy to forget just how hastily Pakistan was improvised: for years Jinnah was as opposed to the idea of Partition as any Hindu. In 1916 he became known as the ‘Ambassador of Hindu–Muslim unity’; twenty years later he was being commended by the Governor of the Punjab for having successfully reconciled warring factions of Sikhs and Muslims, and not until 1940 did he accept the inevitability of Pakistan. So there was no long historical gestation, no era of frustration during which the Muslims of the subcontinent dreamed impatiently of their own Islamic state. And this must be why one senses so little genuine regret, in present-day Pakistan, about the loss of Bangladesh. The ordinary man in the bazaar naturally resents the humiliation implicit in that loss and spits fire when he thinks of the part played by India. But his emotions seem not to have been seriously involved – as they are on the Kashmir issue – when half his nation was amputated. There was never much mutual sympathy, interest or wish for understanding between the ordinary peoples of East and West Pakistan. They were of different ethnic stock, they wore different clothes, ate different foods, spoke different languages, built different houses, grew different crops, kept different animals and lived against utterly different cultural and geographical backgrounds. Only religion united them, and even their interpretations of Islam – the results of quite different historical experiences – were not identical.

  Many Pakistanis said outright to me – and there was no tang of sour grapes in their voices – that they feel their country is better off without Bangladesh, that now they can get down to making something worthwhile of what remains. I was surprised by this widespread willingness to admit that Pakistan, as originally conceived, had been a mistake. One young army officer said to me, ‘You can’t found a nation just on a great big ugly negative – the inability of Muslims, Sikhs and Hindus to live peaceably together. There has to be something more positively unifying, even if it’s just geographical.’

  However, the change in Pakistan’s mood that struck me most on this return visit was not very positive. It has come about through the growing-up of a generation with no lingering shred of affection for the rest of the subcontinent, nor any awareness of being linked to it by countless bonds forged throughout centuries of shared history. I met many members of this first-born generation of Pakistanis – doctors, farmers, laywers, merchants, teachers, bank-clerks, journalists, civil servants – and the majority seemed to feel for India only a contemptuous, uncomprehending hostility. Unlike their parents, they have no memories of growing up with Hindu neighbours, taking part in Hindu festivals, seeing pictures of Hindu gods and goddesses in the bazaar. I found them disquieting, for they represent a considerable increase in the world’s sum of hate. They were enormously disconcerted when told that we had spent the previous winter in India and met there with nothing but kindness. They did not really want to know that beyond the border were other ordinary men and women, as generous and helpful as themselves.

  One might expect embittered prejudices from those who have personal memories of murderous clashes with Hindus or Sikhs, but in fact the older generations show much less animosity towards India. They knew the Indians as human beings, capable of ferocity and compassion. Nor have they forgotten that when the chips were down there was little to choose between the ungovernable savagery of Muslim and Hindu mobs. Their children, however, know Indians only at second hand, through prejudiced media, and so merely see them as dehumanised symbols of greed, cunning, injustice and cruelty. It was this development which occasionally tempted me to wish that Pakistan had never been created, that some other way had been found out of the 1947 impasse. But of course that was over-reacting. It is understandable that while the Kashmir dispute continues Pakistani chauvinism will flourish. And perhaps the flowering of that noxious weed is an inevitable stage in Pakistan’s cultivation of a national identity.

  At noon, as I was walking along the crest of a ridge, the Gilgit plane passed directly overhead. Looking up, I could see its propellers revolving in whirrs of whiteness against the deep blue sky. It was the third plane to have taken off that morning for the Northern Areas, so I began to feel hopeful about our chances of getting away on the nineteenth.

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  Gilgit in the Jeep Epoch

  All travelling becomes dull in exact proportion to its rapidity.

  JOHN RUSKIN

  Gilgit – 19 December 1974

  I can hardly believe that at last we have arrived. And it is good to be back, despite the many changes that have overtaken Gilgit town since 1963.

  The fifty-minute flight from Pindi is complicated by a rule forbidding planes to take off unless they can be sure of returning at once: otherwise they might be lying idle here for weeks. So two hours of clear weather are needed, allowing twenty minutes for unloading; and on every ‘possible’ day one has to wait at Pindi airport because there is rarely time to telephone would-be passengers when Gilgit signals ‘Take-off!’

  This morning we sat for five suspenseful hours in the newly-built Northern Areas Waiting Room. It is a desolate, dusty hall, permeated by the stench of its own neglected latrine, and just outside a concrete-mixer was mixing and a pneumatic drill was drilling. Cascades of electric wires poured from holes in the walls and flowed across the floor, restricting Rachel’s movements. Occasionally two worried-looking young men dashed in, fiddled vaguely with these cascades, abused each other vehemently and dashed out again. Soon our mouths seemed full of concrete dust but as there was no loudspeaker system we hesitated to go to the far-away restaurant. When at last we risked it the worst would have happened but for a young Hunzawal who pursued us across acres of builders’ chaos and dragged us on to the plane seconds before the door shut. All our fellow passengers were male: soldiers, government officials, merchants and several schoolboys starting their long winter holiday.

  This flight is said to be the second most dangerous in the world – after Skardu – but PIA has a proud record of only two crashes in twenty years. Today, in clear winter light, I found it both more beautiful and more comfortable than on my very bumpy midsummer trip eleven years ago. But my feelings have not changed since I wrote – also here in Gilgit town, on 4 June 1963 – ‘this was the wrong approach to a noble range. One should win the privilege of looking down on such a scene, and because I had done nothing to earn a glimpse of these remote beauties I felt that I was cheating …’

  We picked out Murree and Abbottabad as we droned at 16,000 feet and 300 m.p.h. over a crumple of brown foothills. Then quickly the hills became higher, sharper, whiter and nearer – much nearer – until we were not over but among the mountains. Soon Nanga Parbat appeared, another 10,000 feet above us, half-hidden by her personal veil – the only cloud in the sky. And along the horizon stretched the almost unbearable beauty of the Karakoram-Himalaya, the gr
eatest concentration of high peaks in the world.

  I pointed out to Rachel the Babusar Pass, scarcely 3,000 feet below us and already snowbound. ‘You must have been dotty to cross that on a bicycle!’ said she scornfully. Then we were over the barren Indus Valley – a fearsome sight from the air – and I gazed down at that threadlike track along which I had bicycled to Chilas, where I collapsed with heatstroke and was tended by the locals with never-forgotten kindness. Minutes later we were descending towards a width of flat, cinnamon fields only varied by dark clumps of leafless trees and by the olive-green Gilgit River, which we had just seen joining the Indus.

  About fifty men – plus countless children – were awaiting the plane and everybody stared curiously at us. The first change I noticed was a severe airport building of grey stone which seemed to have grown out of the sheer mountain behind it. As we stood on the sandy edge of the airstrip Rachel surveyed the giant surrounding rock-walls and said, ‘This place is like a cage!’ She was a little disappointed not to find herself at once waist-deep in snow. It rarely snows here and only a few white summits are visible above the walls of the cage. But one splendid, sharp, triangular peak shone to the north-east like a silver torch against the cold blue sky. It was catching the sunlight that already, when we landed at 2.25, had been cut off from the valley.

  Most people wait to watch the plane’s departure. Flying out of Gilgit is even more difficult than flying in and from the airstrip one fancies the little machine is heading straight for a towering mountain. Then suddenly it climbs, seeming to be on the precipice like an insect on a wall, and moments later it has turned sharply and disappeared into a narrow cleft between two other towering mountains.