Stranger to History

by Aatish Taseer

  I had wanted to see what Butt and Abdullah’s vision of Islamic completeness looked like when it was implemented in a modern society. In Iran it had been, and its small, irrelevant rules were turned on the people to serve the faith’s political vision. For the faith to remain in power in a complex society, it had to beat down the bright and rebellious members of that society with its simplicities. In the end the big unpurified world won anyway, but terrible hypocrisies took shape: short marriages were condoned to allow prostitution; lashes were bought from the municipality as if they were no more than gas bills; and little girls were sexually taunted because Islam forbade West Highland terriers.

  We drove through a velvety, smoke-filled night and passed a great white arch that looked as if its base was caught in a wind, causing it to fan out on all sides like a frock. The driver said it was the Azadi Monument. ‘Azadi ’ – ‘freedom’; one of the many words that Farsi had in common with Urdu.

  Imam Khomeini airport at that hour was deserted. The imam would have liked it the way I saw it: its sparseness, white lights and purple seats, its porters in red waistcoats gliding across the sparkling floors, or dozing against a trolley, gave it a heavenly aspect. To me, it was menacing. It stood for all that I had learnt about the Islamic Republic in the last twelve hours: brutality wrapped in godliness.

  The airport was not real; it was a showpiece. The real airport was down the road and handled most of the air traffic in and out of Tehran. It was there that the noise, grime, long queues and commotion of other airports collected. None of that was permitted in the tube-lit serenity of the imam’s airport. It was a symbol, more shrine than airport. It was big and modern, ablaze with fluorescent light; every surface spoke of newness. It didn’t matter that the world had to be kept out for it to look as it did. The ideal was achieved – the simplicity, the quiet, the decorum – and that was all. It didn’t matter that the ideal served, the Islamic perfection, had played no part in its construction. It was like the Islamic Republic in miniature: a violent imposition of religious perfection on the modern world, driven to illogic.

  I bristled when I presented my passport and visa to Immigration, with its rude notation in red, stating that I had two days to leave the country. But the young woman inspecting it was unfazed and put a red-domed exit stamp over the blue one that had allowed me entry into Shiraz twenty-five days before. As the announcement for the Emirates flight came, and a small group of passengers walked on to the jet-way, I noticed some young female Tehran–Dubai regulars. The scarves were already slipping.

  Continuities

  It was July in Delhi, 2002, when I made up my mind to visit Pakistan for the first time. The rains had broken, and for a short spell the air was hot and gassy; earthworms were flooded out of their holes and the fruit from neem trees, the same fat berries of my childhood, lay mashed in the wet earth. I was twenty-one.

  All summer Indian and Pakistani troops had brooded on the border in huge numbers, and though foreign diplomats had been evacuated, and news bulletins flashed with talk of nuclear conflict, the joy and lethargy of the rainy season felt too deep that year to be interrupted by the sound of war. I’d wanted to go many times since the abortive phone conversation with my father, but was prevented by being at college in America and by worsening relations between India and Pakistan. This time, seeing a lull in hostilities, I decided I’d catch the cycle at its trough in case the next one was deeper still.

  Getting to Pakistan from India in those months posed so many practical problems that meeting my father for the first time became more of a logistical challenge than an emotional one. There were no flights, trains or buses between the two countries, and it looked as though I would have to fly to Dubai, and from there to Lahore. This seemed complicated and expensive so I went to see the acting Pakistani high commissioner in Delhi to ask his advice. The High Commission, a blue-domed mausoleum of a building, enveloped in afternoon gloom, was deserted, like some embassy of a former ally after a revolution. I found the acting high commissioner surprisingly receptive to my problem. ‘Why don’t you drive?’ he suggested.

  ‘Isn’t the border closed?’

  ‘Only to Indian and Pakistani nationals. You have a British passport. I can give you a visa and you can cross by land at Wagah.’

  By land! I thought. That moody frontier! It seemed impossible. I grew up thinking of the physical border as a land fault, a crevasse in the earth spitting fire. I would cross that border in a car?

  ‘No, not in a car,’ the acting high commissioner said. ‘On foot.’ Apparently, I could drive up to the border, but then would have to walk across it and someone else would have to meet me on the other side. With that, the high commissioner had a little blue and purple rectangle stuck in my passport that read: ‘Islamic Republic of Pakistan, 28 days, Multiple Entry’.

  ‘Do say hello to your abbu for me. I know him,’ he said slyly, handing back my passport. ‘They have a very nice farm near Lahore.’

  My mother was not in Delhi at the time, but offered her full support for the trip. She called a friend of hers in Pakistan, also a friend of my father, to ask if I could stay with her. The friend said she would be happy to have me and would send her son to the border to pick me up.

  I thought my mother must have suffered at my going, both out of concern for my well-being and for her own makeshift peace with that time. ‘Just remember, my darling,’ she said, ‘you’ll find him charming, interesting, very funny, but he’ll always let you down.’

  That morning, my flat in Delhi was dark and quiet, except for the dull hum of the air-conditioner. The marks of the morning were apparent. A crack of light came from the kitchen where Sati, the servant, moved around before anyone else; a Thermos of coffee had been left for me on the dining-table; newspapers lay unopened on the floor.

  Sati came out of the kitchen when he heard my footsteps. I had been at university for many months and he still beamed at seeing me after so long. He handed me a blue polythene bag with my breakfast in it.

  ‘Is Keval up?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes, he’s in the car.’

  Downstairs, it was a beautiful, clear dawn. The rain had come and gone, and though the night faded from one pale patch in the sky, no direct light had crept in yet. The brightening of the day could not be separated from the adjusting of the eyes.

  Keval sat in the car, smoking a cigarette. When he saw me come out, he brought the car up, with no more fuss than if he were taking me to school.

  ‘Chalo Pakistan,’ I said, as if we were refugees in 1947.

  ‘Chalo Pakistan!’ he chortled.

  We drove through the Delhi of roundabouts, long avenues and white colonial bungalows. Long stretches of dark, empty road, with off-duty traffic-lights, gave way to a headlight parade of trucks. Keval would accelerate until he was just inches behind one, and its bright, painted colours were visible, then he’d sidle over to the right to see if it was safe to overtake. Sometimes he’d overtake with oncoming headlights close in the distance, slipping between yellow lights and coloured trucks. We passed factories and warehouses, agriculture marooned in every corner of free space, until we were only among fields. I remember falling asleep just after we drove through the city’s red stone gates.

  When I woke up, a heavy pink sun was blanching fast. Salmon, gold and saffron light seeped into the hot haze, lifting from green, waterlogged fields. The town we drove into was Ludhiana. It was a town of cloth mills, and the evidence of this was everywhere. The industry invaded the inner streets. Rough mountains of fabric were heaped precariously outside every shop so that only wholesale purchases seemed possible. Trucks, with sack-cloth posteriors, bursting with cotton, clogged the town’s narrow arteries. The bypass was under repair so highway traffic, impatient from recently moving at a steady pace, now inched behind the cotton trucks. Bicycles, two- and three-wheeler scooters completed the chaos, driving one little wheel into any opening. But for the porous fortification of open drains, the only indication of municipality, the s
treet caved in on itself. Ludhiana itself was a town inside out, in which factories and highways sprung up in its centre and the people lived outside.

  It was the first large Punjabi town we passed through. In my own complicated situation, Punjab was a way through the confusions of nationality and religion. My father was from Punjab across the border, but so was my mother’s Sikh family. There was Punjab in India and Punjab in Pakistan. It was like a network of cultural familiarity that stretched over the two enemy countries. It was made up of language, song, poetry, clan affiliation, and a funereal obsession with certain tragic romances. Decades after Partition, it clung on, like the rods in a crumbling building, bent, mangled, but somehow, still fierce. More than India, it was Punjab that was divided to make Pakistan, and the pain of it was felt acutely on both sides.

  There was a time when my entire journey from the moment we left Delhi would have been through Punjab. But what was left of the state in India after Partition was further divided into three smaller states. So, of the state that once stretched from Delhi to Kabul, only a patch remained in India, carrying the name Punjab. And when my father first saw Indian Punjab, all those years ago, he said, with characteristic delicacy to my mother, ‘We got Punjab, you got the foreskin.’

  There had been a substantial monsoon, and in this river country, every little stream and canal ran unsteadily, like an overfull glass, to drop-off points in the fields. The villages we drove past were single-storey brick constructions containing a surprising number of auto mechanics and chemists. The rains did the job of the municipality, producing a large patch of wet black mud, which served as a town square. Vegetable sellers, tea stalls and outdoor eating places fought for space. The idleness of cows and buffaloes seemed to rub off on the people, who lazed on rope beds.

  Stout yellow and white milestones now read ‘Jalandhar’. A functioning bypass swept away the town, and a cement bridge took us across a wide, muddy river. The Beas. One of the five rivers of Punjab, two of which remained in India, and from which the state derived its purely Persian name: punj, five, and ab, water; five waters.

  Then, abruptly, in this landscape of fields, tractors, canals and red-brick houses, a road sign read: ‘Lahore 43km.’

  ‘Forty-three kilometres!’ Keval cried. ‘I could drive there in less than an hour!’ Until now there had been no indication of the closeness of the border, and I hadn’t expected to see any before Amritsar.

  Keval was still shaking his head, his crooked protruding teeth frozen in a grimace, when the road took on a new aspect. It was no longer the busy run-down highway leading to Amritsar, but a leafy dual-carriageway with little traffic. Its construction and maintenance bore the unmistakable mark of military efficiency. The first signs of an army presence were soon visible: cadets and young recruits peered inquisitively out of the back of their camouflaged trucks; the Border Security Force’s bases appeared, and some of the army vehicles turned into them. Their high walls, with bright bougainvillaea hanging over them, suggested army schools and peacetime routines. The occasional armoured car appeared, but there was nothing threatening in its heavy tread. The entire place possessed an old-fashioned cantonment atmosphere of good food and officers’ evenings.

  The only unnatural element was the fields: the massive, unending expanse of agriculture, which threatened to engulf the neat academies and bases that had been set up so incongruously on its stretch. These fields, heavy with rice and water, so removed from everything, seemed strange things to defend. Keval and I pushed on along this unexpected road, eaten up by fertile land, until we came at last to the moody frontier.

  It appeared like a roadblock, at best a scenic stop, to interrupt the land’s flat expanse. Hawkers and agents fell upon the car, selling soft drinks and postcards of the border-closing ceremony. It was a difficult moment for Keval and me. I felt bad at having to leave him behind. I also felt a degree of fear because I couldn’t see into Pakistan and wasn’t sure if my mother’s friend’s son would have come to pick me up. Keval registered my nervousness and said, ‘No reason to worry. I’ll wait for you for an hour until I know you’ve crossed.’

  Shooing off hawkers, he led the way past the car park and refreshment stalls and through a small black gate. Here, an attendant asked for our passports. Keval gave me a tight hug and sent me off.

  Through the gate, I could see the lavish excesses of the governments’ imagination. A pink amphitheatre had been constructed where spectators at the daily border-closing ceremony could sit. It consisted of an exchange of huffs and salutes performed in symmetry by the Indian and Pakistani sides. Then two gates, painted to look like iron flags, were slammed shut before a hooting crowd. It was a choreographed piece of officialdom, a military extravaganza for the bureaucrat. Two concrete arches stood at equidistance from the open gates. In their shade, two men from the respective sides sat with ledgers in their laps. Someone had gone to a lot of trouble to finesse these symmetries in concrete.

  I was ushered into a cool, dark office on the Indian side where a man inspected my passport. Then a coolie in a blue shirt and white pyjamas pushed my bag through an X-ray that wasn’t switched on. I picked it up at the other end and was directed out of the office on to a bleak stretch of road leading up to the arches. The great trees of the sub-continent lined the road: dark green mango, frangipani, pale eucalyptus, dour, drooping ashok and the patriarchal and sacred peepal. Among them, appearing intermittently, were rusty billboards advertising Pepsi. Following the coolie, I saw the fields again. A great black two-faced fence, with a stooped back and tense barbed wire, ran for miles through them. On the other side, past the barbed wire, the fields continued. The morose screech of a koel broke the quiet.

  When we reached the Indian arch, I saw in the ledger that the last person to cross had been a Nigerian some weeks before.

  The coolie walked a few yards further, past the short shadow cast by the arch, to where another coolie in identical white pyjamas, but with a green shirt, took my bag from him. The exchange was made with so little ceremony that its meaning was nearly lost on me. The coolies’ faces, tired and lined in the same way, next to the detail of their ragged shirts in different colours, seemed to mock the place. After the pomp before, that was all: I was in Pakistan.

  The gate on the other side was of rust-coloured brick, with cream crenellations and turrets. In gold Urdu letters a sign read: ‘Gate of Freedom.’ Above it, the green – the darkest of all greens, a black forest green – and white of the Pakistani flag raced in the wind.

  In the old-fashioned colonial offices on the other side, the reception was warm. They read the name in my passport and asked, unprompted, ‘This is the People’s Party Salmaan Taseer?’

  ‘Yes,’ I answered.

  ‘You’re not carrying alcohol, I hope?’

  ‘No.’

  I knew that my father was well-known in Pakistan for his political role, and later his businesses, but not the extent of it. Sitting in those shaded offices, heat and heavy trees outside, I knew that I had set in motion one of the biggest decisions of my life.

  Then an unsettling exchange occurred. One of the men, effusive and warm at first, asked in Urdu, ‘So, what brings you back this time?’

  Urdu and Hindi were hardly different so I replied easily, ‘Not much, boss. Just my friend’s birthday.’

  The hospitality evaporated and they stared at me in silence.

  One of the men repeated the word I used for ‘birthday’, and suggested another. Then, he said, ‘Oh, you’ve come from India?’ The differences between the two languages were very slight and, growing up in Delhi, my language was heavily influenced by Urdu, but I had used the one word that only someone who grew up in India could have used.

  And so it was that I took my first steps into Pakistan aware of my unique patrimony, knowing at once familiarity and unfamiliarity.

  Renaissance Now

  Karachi, Pakistan, four years later. My arrival in Pakistan was sudden and unplanned. Two weeks ahead of schedule,
I was on an Emirates flight, covering the short distance from Dubai to Karachi. We flew like a small plane, close to the land, sometimes over bright blue water, sometimes over desert, before dropping toward the Indus’s saline mouth and the hard yellow land of Sind.

  I chose Karachi, rather than Lahore, because I wasn’t ready yet to see my father. I was also thinking of his letter and wanted to travel in his country before making my way north to him.

  It was my first time in Karachi. The highway that brought me into town didn’t bring me far enough for me to have a feel of the city. I expected a noisier, more congested city, more like Bombay or Tehran, but the city we entered was spread out, with empty residential streets. Long, unshaded main roads connected little markets and offices to colonies of golden-brown, California-style bungalows, with green, reflective-glass windows. There was in the hot breeze, the listless neighbourhoods, the bungalows, with large balconies, and the bleak, grid-like streets, here and there with the cowering shadow of a palm on them, seeming to rise to a distant point, and then dropping, a hint of the sea. There was also, in the high walls of houses, armed guards standing outside, white cars with tinted windows, through which it was possible to make out the silhouettes of bodyguards, a hint of crime.

  There was some talk of my staying at my father’s guesthouse in Karachi, but my elder half-brother, whom I hardly knew, insisted I stay with him. He lived in one of Karachi’s newer bungalows. It was a small, well-proportioned house, sparse and functional, with a large balcony. Most of the day it was quiet, except for the hum of an air-conditioner. Large Indian blinds kept the sun’s blaze out and gave the little house a permanent feeling of afternoon. My brother ran it like a bachelor’s home, with a single servant who brought up beers, lime water and meals on TV trays. I had a basic room, with a narrow bed, next to my brother’s, which, after all these years of being an only child, gave me a taste of living with siblings.