Where the Indus is Young

by Dervla Murphy

  A PIA minibus took us into the bazaar, past a neat new signpost saying: ‘Islamabad 400 miles: Chilas 90 miles.’ Then we saw two petrol pumps, a gaily painted Peshawar trader’s truck, a motor-van, several tractors and many jeeps being driven at criminal speeds. What a transformation! Yet the changes are not so drastic as I had feared. To travel on the embryonic Indus Highway is still precarious and so something survives – at least in winter – of Gilgit’s traditional remoteness. Moreover, the many additions to the bazaar and its environs are of well-cut local stone and perfectly acceptable. For the foreseeable future transport costs seem likely to preserve this region from multi-storeyed monstrosities.

  On the outskirts of the bazaar we found a ‘Tourist Hotel’ built in dak-bungalow style around a dusty quadrangle. At first Rs.60 were demanded by the smooth young manager who speaks passable English and is obviously dedicated to fleecing tourists. As every room was vacant he soon climbed down and for Rs. 30 we have a cell with dirty bedding, no table or chair, a fifteen-watt bulb, no water for the reeking Western loo and no heating. (A few moments ago I had to stop writing to sit on my hands for long enough to thaw them.) The PTDC unwisely encourages this sort of overcharging. In their Tourist Bungalow near the airstrip a basic room with no mod cons costs Rs. 75 a night.

  On the plane we had met a doctor who knew a man who might have a pony for sale. So our first concern was to find Abdul Khan, who lives in one of Gilgit’s agricultural suburbs. But alas! the pony was bartered last week for 300 litres of Punial water (a strong local wine). To console myself for this near miss I bought one litre – good value at Rs.10. Abdul, using his adolescent son as an uncertain interpreter, said that few non-polo ponies remain in the Gilgit area. Oil and petrol are government subsidised so it is cheaper to hire jeeps than to feed ponies. How quickly men abandon what has served them so well for so long!

  Abdul’s home was one of a group of small but substantial dwellings built of mud and stone and surrounded by seven-foot-high compound walls. Near the crudely-made wooden door in each wall stood a tall, gnarled, leafless tree packed with golden maize straw for winter feed. Not even the most enterprising animal can pilfer these ‘storage trees’ and no more elaborate ‘barn’ is needed where rain so rarely falls.

  Walking along narrow alleyways, with quick-flowing irrigation channels at one side, we attracted a delighted mob of children – laughing, curious, ragged and unwashed. They were wildly excited to see Rachel and eager to touch her silky hair and examine her fur-lined boots and feel her fat rosy cheeks – so unlike their own pinched, pale little faces. She found their boisterous attentions a bit much. Clearly she is not going to mix as well with her contemporaries here as she did in south India. South Indians make gentler playmates and in any case six-year-olds are less spontaneous than five-year-olds.

  As we returned to our hotel the sun was close to setting and that magnificent triangular peak swiftly changed from pale to deep gold – and then to a faint rose-pink.

  We abortively discussed pony sources in the hotel manager’s cramped and kerosene-impregnated office and then emerged to look for a tea-house. In an otherwise empty dusk-blue sky the crescent moon was shining above the western mountain-wall, beside a brilliant Venus. ‘Look!’ exclaimed Rachel. ‘The Pakistani flag!’ And I relished this symbolic celestial coincidence. Eleven years ago Pakistan had not quite made its mark on this region but now it most certainly has – for better or worse.

  The few bazaar stalls not yet shuttered and padlocked were lit by dim kerosene lamps which cast no light on to the uneven street. At the far end of the town we found a filthy tea-house where lukewarm tea cost fifty paise a cup, as compared to thirty-five down-country. The smoke-blackened ceiling of this big, twilit room was supported by six tree-trunks and the floor was of beaten earth. Several men, wearing Chitrali caps and wrapped in blankets, were noisily using thick chapattis to mop up meagre helpings of stewed goat in chilli-hot gravy. They spat pieces of gristle on to the floor and viewed us with amused contempt. My memories of Gilgit town’s particular brand of passive unfriendliness were immediately revived.

  We walked back here by bright starlight through a deserted bazaar. The snow-mountains glimmered like live things above the black bulk of the valley walls and occasionally, in yard or compound, we saw a little huddle of figures around a tiny fire. All afternoon it had been no colder than a normal December day at home but once the sun sets the temperature drops dramatically and the Gilgitis get ready for bed. Fuel is a major problem in these unforested areas. Gilgit when last I saw it in midsummer seemed Paradise-on-earth. Now it is no less beautiful in quite a different way, but without our luxury clothing it would seem Hell-on-earth tonight. Yet most of the locals go about barefooted, or sockless in open leather sandals, wearing only cotton shirts and loose pantaloons under their blankets – if they are lucky enough to possess blankets. And judging by appearances the majority are also inadequately fed. No wonder the death-rate soars during winter.

  I am writing this from within my astronaut’s blanket, a weird object six feet square yet weighing only fourteen ounces. When first it was drawn to my attention it aroused considerable sales-resistance (the name was enough) but now I see its invention as ample justification for all that lunar lunacy. Allah only knows how it is made. Certainly its colour and texture are all wrong, psychologically, for one side is ice-blue and the other silver and it feels and sounds like tinfoil. You wrap yourself up – a joint for the oven, as it were – and Hey Presto! within moments you are oven-warm. Very odd … But this evening I bless the salesman who overcame my resistance.

  Gilgit – 20 December

  A happy day, though I must confess I would not now come here in summer, when by my toffee-nosed standards the place swarms with tourists: at least a dozen a week, according to the PTDC. Actually I do feel that travel-snobs, of which I am such a shameless example, are much less blameworthy than most other kinds of snob. If one of the objects of a journey is to observe how the other half lives, then it is essential to travel in areas where the other half remains uncontaminated by one’s own half – if you follow me. (You may well not follow me very far this evening, as I am now three-quarters through my bottle of innocent-sounding Punial ‘water’.)

  We were up with the sun, craving bed-tea, but none was available. So we wrapped ourselves to the noses and went forth along an icy road – bustling with people at 7.10 a.m. – to find a chi-khana.

  Instead we found the Jubilee Hotel, scarcely two furlongs away, and I soon realised that this is Gilgit’s most respectable non-tourist doss-house. Its grubby restaurant is some forty feet long and the half-glazed door has a smashed pane and a broken handle which deters all but the initiated or the very hungry. Leaning against the outside wall is a large board inscribed ‘Jubilee Hotel’ in faded lettering. It was evidently meant to be above the door but one feels nobody will ever actually erect it and this little touch made me feel quite homesick. Around my own house are several objects in just such a state of suspended efficacy. Behind the restaurant eighteen small rooms enclose a yard on three sides, looking not unlike stables. In fact they are better furnished than the Tourist Hotel’s and are heated by smelly little kerosene stoves. Moreover, they have no stinking loos attached – there is a communal latrine at the end of the yard – and the charge is only Rs.20 a night, heating included.

  After a delicious breakfast of crisp paratas and fried eggs we moved our gear, despite awful flea-warnings from the smooth young Nagarwal. Here the owner-manager is a burly, unshaven Hunzawal who spends most of his time sitting at an improvised cash-desk just inside the door wearing a threadbare English-tailored tweed overcoat, two scarves, one glove and a leather cap with earmuffs.

  At ten o’clock we called on the Resident: an old friend who, as Political Agent, welcomed me to Gilgit in 1963. Tea and biscuits were served in his office – a museum of Imperial days – and he recalled Roz (my bicycle) leaning against the giant mulberry-tree on the Residency lawn while I devoured fresh a
pricots as fast as they could be provided. He thinks we have very little chance of buying a pony here and advises us to go by jeep to Skardu, where horseflesh is more plentiful.

  On our way downhill from the Residency we were joined by two nineteen-year-old schoolboys, sporting fine moustaches. They had several more years to do at school because they had to help herd sheep until they were ten; then younger siblings took over. One boy, Behram Khan, spoke enough English to give me this information and invited us to lunch with his married sister in a hamlet near the airstrip. His face lit up with joyous pride when I accepted.

  We arrived at noon and sat on an untidy child-filled verandah basking in hot sunshine. At this season the Gilgitis tend simply to relax, enjoying free warmth, during the midday hours – and who can blame them? Today was so hot that I had to take off my heavy ex-German Army parka, yet within moments of the sun’s disappearance we needed gloves.

  Lunch consisted of hot chapattis, pickled green chillies and a big enamel bowl filled with lumps of tasty braised beef. It was served only to us: lavish helpings of meat do not form part of the normal diet of the locals. Behram informed us that he had eight brothers and six sisters, all of the same mother and all living. The eldest, our hostess, is twenty-two and already has a son and two daughters, the youngest of whom is three. Through Behram, his good-looking but already worn sister enquired if it was true that people in the West had medicine to stop babies coming. I confirmed this rumour, half-expecting to be asked to send some by post, but our hostess looked pitying and puzzled rather than envious. Behram said she couldn’t understand how or why the rich people of the West were unable to afford all the children they wanted.

  I find the insect population of this room peculiarly nauseating, though I’m not an anti-insect person, apart from spiders. These horrors come scuttling across the table, apparently attracted by the light of two tiny candles provided by the management. (Gilgit’s electricity supply rarely functions for more than thirty consecutive minutes.) About an inch long, excluding a lot of antennae, they are yellowish-brown and seem, as they move, to be of a rubbery consistency. They look not unlike a cross between mini-frogs and maxi-spiders and if I hadn’t observed them before opening my Punial water I might have mistaken them for a symptom of Central Asian DTs.

  Gilgit – 21 December

  I had just turned in last night when Behram called, with two younger classmates, to offer me hash or opium – or both, if I felt like mixing smokes. It depressed me to learn that during this past summer a number of hippies had made their way here. What with Chinese-built motorways, and PTDC tuition in fleecing tourists, and opium-hunting hippies, the stage really is set for the degeneration and despoliation of this whole region. I certainly would not wish to return after another eleven years. And inevitably the knowledge of what is about to happen tinges with sadness one’s present pleasure.

  We went for a memorable four-hour walk this morning, up the left bank of the river. Rachel was thrilled to find herself on the longest suspension bridge in Asia, which can take only one jeep at a time and swayed perceptibly even when we crossed on foot. Halfway over we paused to watch three magnificent yaks being driven down to a butcher’s slaughtering area by the edge of the water. The Muslim feast of Id, during which much meat is eaten, coincides this year with Christmas. Normally yaks are not seen here because the altitude – 4,500 feet – is far too low for them.

  As though to celebrate its winter solstice the sun never once shone today and beneath a pewter sky the Gilgit Valley looked grim indeed; but it was the sort of grimness I love. Snow-powdered rock peaks rose above the jade-green river as it swirled between wide beaches of fine brown sand, from which Rachel delightedly collected a pocketful of many-coloured, water-smoothed stones. Near the path were rounded boulders, the size of cottages, sculptured into Henry Moore shapes by aeons of sandstorms and summer floods. And on our right vast slopes of grey shale – the very epitome of aridity – swept up and up to merge at last with the greyness of the sky. By the time we got back to the Jubilee it was penetratingly cold and we could see snow falling on the surrounding mountains.

  Our immediate plans have acquired a fine patina of uncertainty. We may or may not set off for Skardu on the 23rd, depending on such a variety of factors involving the private lives of so many jeep-owners that I have long since given up trying to grasp the situation. But in Gilgit this vagueness about future movements worries me not at all. One can’t help liking this odd little town, though today it was at its least attractive with sheets of ice, mud and diesel oil on its street, and a piercing, gusty wind raising clouds of fine dust, and the stony mountains frowning down on its barren valley.

  We spotted some nice legends in the bazaar this afternoon: ‘THE HAZARA BEAKER AND CANFECSHNER’ and ‘RE-PEARS FOR AUTO MUBOILS DONE HAST’. After some thought I concluded that ‘hast’ must be the illegitimate offspring of ‘hastily’ and ‘fast’. But is it prudent to re-pear auto muboils hastily? Would it not be more effective to promise careful work? Obviously not, in a town where most drivers have a death-wish. Nowhere else have I seen such appalling driving; the avoidance of jeeps, trucks and tractors has had to become a new popular sport. The Military Police jeeps are among the worst offenders; tractors go at speeds I never conceived possible and all rules of the road are ignored.

  Gilgit’s is very much the bazaar of an area where no one is rich, not even the hereditary Rajas. The only shop offering what might be called ‘luxury goods’ is owned by a handsome young smuggler who gets all his stock from the notorious Landikotal intercontinental market. Today he was displaying several brand new Marks and Spencer sweaters for the equivalent of £1.40; and also an astonishing array of transistors, tape-recorders, cameras, watches, bottles of scent, glassware, china and Irish linen table-napkins. Fascinated, I asked who in Gilgit was likely to crave these last items. He laughed and explained that they were left over from the summer trade. It seems the more astute American tourists bypass the Irish House in Bond Street and go to Gilgit bazaar for their table linen. Everything in that shop was being sold for about one-third the normal price in its country of origin.

  At the government depot I bought two gallons of subsidised kerosene for Rs.3.50 a gallon, the down-country price, and no one can deny that such concessions are needed here. Today we saw a small boy carefully mopping up some oil that had leaked on to the road from a parked truck; his oily rag, when burned in an old tin this evening, will slightly shorten the cold hours. It amazes me that the locals can remain so cheerful in winter; and because their tough, squalid, impoverished existence doesn’t seem to demoralise them, it doesn’t affect the observer as Indian slums do. Yet the Gilgitis are without the Pathan’s vigour, charm and intelligence; I suspect their average IQ is rather below normal.

  I was honoured just now by a visit from a locally famous Ismaili ‘saint and scholar’, Haji Nasir, who comes from Hunza. He is an impressive character, in the mid-fifties with fine features, very fair skin and an aura of goodness, calm and strength. He it was who devised a script for Brusheski, the hitherto unwritten language of Hunza, and he has published several books in Urdu and Persian.

  Haji Nasir was introduced by the man whom Rachel describes as ‘our best friend in Gilgit’. This is – I quote from his green-printed, gold-edged visiting-card – ‘Ghulam Mohammad Beg Hunzaie, Honorary Secretary, His Highness the Aga Khan Ismailia Supreme Council’. Ghulam is a tall well-built man who always wears a Karakul cap and dark spectacles. He lives in the Jubilee for months on end (the owner is his brother-in-law) and has done a lot to help us.

  Gilgit – 22 December

  We woke to a crisp, sunny morning, with powdery snow – which soon vanished – softening the harshness of the nearby mountains.

  Haji Nasir had invited us to call on him after breakfast ‘For more talk of religion and insignificant refreshments’ – an irresistible invitation! As it is difficult to find individual houses in Gilgit I asked a youth in the bazaar where Haji Nasir lived and he prompt
ly replied, ‘Follow me! I am his son!’ We were led up a narrow, winding passage, between the smooth grey mud walls of many compounds, until we came to a double-door of weathered and warped wood, leading into a neat little compound with rooms opening off a verandah on two sides. Our guide took us straight to his father’s study-cum-prayer-room, where Haji Nasir was sitting on the floor, on a red velvet quilt spread over cushions, reading a superbly illustrated and illuminated seventeenth-century Persian manuscript. We sat on the edge of a charpoy and Rachel drew pictures while the Haji and I talked about Buddhism. Then I was shown his latest Karachi publication, a slim volume of religious poetry written in Persian to commemorate a double family tragedy – the death of his eldest son in an air-crash between Pindi and Gilgit, and the death of his favourite nephew, a few months later, in a jeep crash between Gilgit and Skardu.

  The moment we arrived our host had produced plates of dried apricots and apricot kernels from under the charpoy. After about an hour we were joined by two quiet, serious young men, who seemed to be disciples or pupils of the Haji, and then tea and biscuits were served. Our host went to the door to take the trays from his womenfolk; very strict purdah is observed in Gilgit town, which no doubt explains the covert hostility I sometimes arouse in the bazaar.

  As we sipped our tea Haji Nasir asked, ‘Where in America is Ireland? Is it near New York? Is it a big city?’ I found this refreshing in 1974, from a scholar so genuinely learned in his own sphere. It seemed a faint and pleasing echo of Marco Polo days, when other continents were so remote that nobody could reasonably be expected to know the first thing about them.

  It is very noticeable here that even those who speak English (of sorts) are quite ignorant about the outside world, including Pakistan. Most seem grateful to Mr Bhutto’s government for its subsidies, but they habitually refer to ‘Pakistan’ as though it were a friendly neighbouring state rather than their own country. And some people – usually articulate and educated above the average – openly resent Gilgit’s recent amalgamation in that new entity, the Northern Areas. This faction points out that since the link with down-country has been strengthened Gilgit’s crime rate has increased alarmingly. Previously, various petty rajas administered justice within their own tiny territories and there were no police hereabouts; nor, it seems, was there any great need for them, outside of the notorious Chilas district. But now a police force is being built up by Pakistan and in many villages is taking over the old British Rest Houses, for lack of any other accommodation. And some down-country officers are said to be introducing bribery, as an escape from punishment, into areas where rough justice was traditionally meted out swiftly and surely according to Islamic law. Luckily not many down-country officers have been imported; most of the senior police are being recruited from the ex-rajas’ families – a clever move on Pakistan’s part.