Laxman was waiting for us near a canal on the outskirts of Hyderabad. He was a stocky man, with thick, greasy hair and shiny black skin. He had a bristly moustache over a set of pearly, capped teeth. He greeted me in a furtive, hurried manner, and within minutes was organising me, making phone calls and giving the driver orders. He suggested we go first to a shrine just outside Hyderabad, where Sind’s Muslims and few remaining Hindus prayed together. Sind’s countryside was covered with the Sufi shrines of saints who were often honoured by Muslims and Hindus alike. They were part of a local form of Islam that served a once diverse society. It was this kind of worship that gave me the protective string on my wrist that the men in Mecca had minded so much.
An armed guard, who provided security to the newspaper’s people when they travelled in the countryside, accompanied us. Laxman said the road was often struck at night by dacoits. Their ploy was to throw a stone or a bale of straw into the middle of the road, and to surround the car as soon as it slowed down. He said a man from the newspaper had been robbed recently. The dacoits had thrown a briefcase in front of the car. I didn’t think that this was a particularly obstructive object so I asked him about it.
‘He got greedy.’ Laxman chuckled. ‘He thought there was money inside it so he stopped.’
In the open land outside Hyderabad, a still, hot afternoon came to an end, solitude and isolation giving way to a more social hour. Children came out to play, truckers stopped for tea, and a wrestling match began in a clearing at the side of the road. Dozens of people gathered round a sandy ring, children watched from the branches of trees, and loudspeakers energised the crowd. The wrestlers, bare-chested and in tied-up salwars, prowled around the edges of the ring, awaiting their fights. They were of varied ages and physiques, some young with slim, hard bodies, and others with heavy shoulders and barrel stomachs. It was clear from the dark brown welts on some of the younger men’s backs that they were Shia and had flagellated themselves during the period of mourning.
The wrestlers had thick ropes tied round their waists. When their match was called, they approached each other as if about to give one another a low embrace. Then they grabbed their opponent’s rope and began to pull. Sometimes one wrestler would do a kind of dance round the other, hoping to tire him out before leaping on him with all his weight and pushing him to the ground. At others, the heavier wrestler would engage the lighter one as soon as possible, entwining his more powerful legs round his opponent, causing him to lose his balance.
We drove past men on rope beds drinking tea, and boys playing in the hollow of a haystack, until the white shrine appeared among flat fields, dotted with large trees.
‘It’s proof of the Sufi time in Sind when Muslims and Hindus prayed together,’ the driver said, as we approached. ‘I think there’s even a mention of it in the Indian movies.’
The story of the white shrine, with its turrets and little crenellations, was typical of what made the religious commingling of Sufi India possible. An oppressive, fanatical king ill-treated his people, Hindu and Muslim alike, until the saint Oderolal, a white-bearded miracle man, arrived out of the water, preaching love and oneness, and used his powers to end the cruel king’s abuse. He came to be loved by both Muslims and Hindus and, honouring his memory and message of unity, they prayed next to each other, though not actually together. ‘Here the azan is about to be called,’ a white-bearded man, in sunglasses and a red cap, explained, ‘and there you can see Hindus are praying. That is the miracle.’
‘Is it still like that today?’
‘Like brothers. There is a lot of love.’ He pointed me in the direction of a tree, which the saint had put down in the dry earth. ‘That’s the miracle,’ the man said gaily. ‘It needs no water.
Look!’ The leaves at the top are green.’ The tree was in bad shape and I wasn’t too surprised that it grew from a little patch of dry earth. Most of Sind was dry and only a few days before I’d seen a much bigger tree growing out of a building and a drain. The bearded fakir yanked down my head and said, ‘Aatish, may you become cool,’ then demanded money.
Laxman let out an evangelical cry and said, ‘Ask! This is the time. Ask, if you ever meant to ask! Open your heart and ask!’ The call to prayer sounded and a few Muslims on the other side of the white courtyard congregated. ‘This was once the world!’ Laxman said dramatically.
It was easy to see how the true relevance of a shrine like this would have grown from the society’s former diversity. Unlike the idea on which the state was founded, here, the commonality of culture, language and local faith trumped doctrinal differences. One could imagine how it would have made the heart leap to put aside religious differences, Hindu caste notions or the Muslim horror of idols and images, in favour of a larger cultural unity.
In the white courtyard, under the shade of a neem tree, a group of farmers and their families discussed something in low, serious tones. Laxman and I went up to them and sat down to listen. They spoke in Sindi and Laxman translated. They seemed upset. One man was saying, ‘Conditions are so bad, these days, we don’t know how we can continue.’ Having just been with a landlord, I was keen to hear what else they would say, but Laxman was in a hurry: it was evening and he was worried about dacoits. After some persuasion, I managed to get the farmer’s problem out of him. Three young men from the community, sitting solemnly together on one side, had struck a deal with the landlord in the hope of improving their lot. They had his land from him at a fixed price, with an eye to cultivating it and keeping whatever profit they made from the crop. But that year everyone’s crops had failed. The three enterprising farmers found that not only had they made no profit, they hadn’t even made enough to pay the landlord his rent. They approached him and begged him to excuse part of their debt. The landlord agreed and said he would excuse them 40,000 rupees (some £490), leaving them still to pay 50,000 (£600). They managed to collect this amount, pooling together all that they had and borrowing the rest. But when they appeared at the landlord’s with the money, he denied any recollection of their first meeting and demanded the entire sum.
Sitting in the shrine’s courtyard, as they might always have done, the community elders, with leathery faces and white stubble, considered the dilemma. Children climbed over colourfully dressed mothers and the three young farmers listened in gloomy silence. They had just reached some kind of solution when Laxman insisted we leave immediately, promising to explain the meeting’s conclusion to me later.
In the car, he murmured something in his alarmist fashion about dacoits. It was hard to sense the danger in the sociable, rural scene, but Laxman was convinced that just after we had left the shrine a group of men had taken a picture of the car on a camera phone, with the intention of marking us for robbery.
I hadn’t seen them, but the driver said he had and accelerated down the country road. We passed police posts on the way, which I pointed out to Laxman, but he said it made no difference: the police were in collaboration with the dacoits. The driver agreed and said we were running just as much from the police as from the dacoits. Then, looking at our bodyguard, he added tenderly, ‘Don’t worry, we don’t think you’re police.’
‘It’s always an inside job,’ Laxman explained. ‘First, the dacoits gave the police ten per cent, then the police started demanding more, twenty, thirty, forty. Finally it was phipty-phipty. Then the police said, “Why let them do it when we can do it ourselves?” So now the off-duty policemen are the dacoits.’
When we were safely on the main road to Hyderabad, Laxman relaxed and I was able to extract from him the meeting’s conclusion. I understood now why I had missed it the first few times: its innocence was like a failing of logic. The elders had decided, since the landlord could not remember excusing the debt, to approach two of the landlord’s friends who were present at the time the debt was excused. Surely they would remind the man of his promise. If not, the community would pay off the young men’s debt. In any event, it was clear that they were ruined.
Did they really not know that the landlord lied when he said he didn’t remember excusing their debt? Had it not occurred to them that the landlord’s friends would lie too? Or that they would be beaten for trying to get round the landlord in this way? I tried to put the scenes of disappointment or, worse, open flailing out of mind. It was an affecting final image of feudal life before the city.
Hyderabad was older than Karachi. Stray images from lithographs of a great fort and the Indus ran through my mind as we entered it. The Indus still unseen! Almost a lost river for Indians as only a shred of it remained in India. There was something especially evocative for me in thinking of my longer journey as ending near the Indus.
The traffic into Hyderabad showed signs of a city whose organisation had broken. Hundreds of small industries gathered close to the road. Trucks, carrying anything from cattle to black electrical meters, clogged the main road.
‘Why electrical meters?’ I asked Laxman.
‘They’ve been confiscated because they’ve been tampered with,’ Laxman replied. Lost in his own thoughts, he suddenly said, ‘Because of the problem in Karachi, I don’t know if it’ll be all right for me to take you into a Sunni shrine or madrassa. Even though they say,’ he added nervously, ‘that the MQM did it.’
The ‘problem in Karachi’ was the bombing that had occurred a few weeks before my arrival. Hyderabad was once a Muslim town, with a highly successful Hindu merchant community. It was a perfect example of the society, complete with its Hindu middle class, whose loss the Mango King had mourned. After 1947, much of that middle class left and made good in places as far away as West Africa. Muhajjirs took their place, and a great urban tension existed between Sindi and muhajjir. The MQM Laxman spoke of was the muhajjir party.
I tried to unpack the varied currents in Laxman’s comment. ‘Why would it be a problem for me to go to Sunni madrassa?’ I asked.
Laxman, with an evasiveness that I was beginning to recognise in him, said, ‘Well, don’t tell them you come from Iran.’
‘I don’t. I was just travelling through Iran.’
‘Oh, that’s fine,’ he said quickly, seeming to adjust his judgement of me.
The communal landscape was hard to make sense of. Difference of denomination, region and political affiliation were on everyone’s mind.
Laxman had booked a room for me at the Indus Hotel. It was a modern place, on a bleak stretch of road, full of fake flowers and scenic pictures of places cooler than Hyderabad. He told me he would give me some time to ‘get fresh’, but almost as soon as we arrived, he was keen to get going. He wanted me to meet his bureau chief at the newspaper’s offices. He even followed me upstairs, extolling the man’s merits and usefulness to me. My room was reached by a transparent lift that was out of order, and overlooked the driveway and main road. The hotel’s designers must not have envisaged it breaking down because the only staircase provided was a grubby service entrance.
The room had a large white plywood bed, with a satiny bedcover and thin, dirt-encrusted carpeting. As we entered, Laxman asked, unprompted, if I’d like some beer.
‘No, thanks,’ I said, finding the question strange, given the hour and that alcohol was illegal in Pakistan.
But he seemed to be trying to tell me something else. A moment later, he came out with it. ‘There’s no problem for me,’ he said. ‘I am a minority. I am allowed a permit.’
‘What minority?’ I asked, then felt like an idiot. Of course I knew that Laxman was Hindu, but outwardly the similarity between India and Pakistan was so great that my awareness of being in Pakistan had faded momentarily. I had stopped thinking of him as a Hindu in a state for Indian Muslims; I had forgotten about the transfers of population. But he, a member of a tiny minority, a remainder of the city’s once great diversity, never forgot he was that rarest of rare things: a Pakistani Hindu. It made him want to know where everyone else stood and I saw now that the offer of beer, had, perhaps been a way to find out whether I was Muslim and, if so, how Muslim.
‘What’s happening underground will definitely burst,’ he said mysteriously, as he loitered in the doorway.
‘What’s underground?’ I asked, unpacking my bags, and truly confused by all this intrigue.
‘Hatred,’ he replied.
‘Between whom?’
He looked at me, a suspicious eye-darting look, at once worried about who was listening and whether I was playing with him. ‘Sindi and muhajjir.’
The road on which the Indus Hotel stood was called Cool Street. It formed, I discovered from Laxman as he bundled me out of my room, an enemy line between the Urdu-speaking muhajjir section of town and the Sindi-speaking Sindi section. On the way to the newspaper’s offices, it was possible to see from the systematic organisation of the streets, and the occasional fine row of whitewashed buildings, with Hindu names and motifs, that Hyderabad was once an attractive town. And the black wires, starved animals, paper and polythene that grew over the scene only made its past harmony more apparent.
The newspaper’s offices were in an old building, up a darkened flight of stone steps. Its wood and glass partitions, old furniture, typewriters and yellowing files seemed to have been unchanged for decades. The bureau chief was at his desk, a tall, elderly man, with thick glasses, deep lines on his face and neatly combed grey hair.
He was full of gloom. Minutes after we met, he launched into talk of religious and regional divisions, corruption, water shortages, feudalism and crime. ‘The MQM is trying to start a problem between Sunni and Shia to have in-fighting while they keep their vote bank.’ The religious parties, which came up under General Zia, have come of age, and are instilling in the minds of youth that death is imminent, and that they must fight the enemies of Islam. Crime is rampant: you can’t go ten kilometres outside Hyderabad without someone throwing a stone in front of your car and taking your money at gunpoint.
The Indus, which used to roar like a lion through Sind, is running dry.
‘The Indus dry?’ I said, hoping to stop the torrent.
‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘There’s dust flowing in it now.’
He was in a panic because some nights ago he had had to hold back the paper’s printing to include the speech of the MQM leader. ‘The district news must be finished up by ten,’ he cried, ‘because the page is laid out. But the story of the leader’s speech was filed at a quarter to one in the morning and a paper like ours had to wait for it. We don’t even wait for the president, but we had to wait for this story because they have Kalashnikovs in their hands so we are helpless. Just imagine one thing. Their leader had only a 50cc Honda and a small house, but he’s living in London now. You know how costly that is, and with secretaries? Where is the money coming from? That is the question nobody in Pakistan dares to ask.’
I didn’t know the answer. ‘This is the worst time I’ve seen!’ he cried. ‘We’ve lived through difficult times, but this is the worst.’
‘Why?’ I asked, thinking of the Zia years.
‘Because there’s no faith in anyone. Someone becomes your friend and the next minute they stab you in the back. There are suicides because people are so short of money. The frustration is terrible.’
I spoke to him for nearly an hour, told him something of my travels so far, and he offered to help me meet some people over the next few days. I didn’t have a fixed plan. I was happy to be in other hands; happy to be shown what people thought I should see. We arranged to meet the following morning at the newspaper offices.
When Laxman and I walked down the dark flight of stairs, a sandstorm had begun on the once beautiful street. It cleared the crowds and traffic of a few hours before, and brown swirls of smoke and dust now pounced on little scraps of paper, and raced down the empty street. A purplish-brown haze made it seem later than it was. We drove over a truss bridge. Below there was a vast bed of white sand, reeds and a ribbon of green water. Laxman, looking down at it, shook his head. ‘There were times when they would warn the residents on the shore to
leave their houses because a flood was coming,’ he said. ‘And now, look, in the same river children are playing.’
His words didn’t sink in immediately. Then, with the special horror reserved for something close to death, I turned again to look through the lattice of iron beams at the remains of one of the world’s great rivers. ‘That’s the Indus?’
Laxman nodded. I told the driver to pull over. The car took a left and stopped near a large peepal tree, under which a man sold balloons and green-bottled soft drinks lay about on plastic tables. Steep black steps led down to the Indus. From just the height and gradient of the bank I could imagine what the river had once been. Halfway down the stairs, the strip of greenish water was lost in the white dunes and reeds. I walked for some minutes across the riverbed, over sinking sand, before I came upon it again. It was possible at this dusk hour to see the clear outline of the moon and this, along with the darkened sky and the wind blowing the green water in the opposite direction from the one in which it flowed so frailly, gave the scene a final, twilight aspect. A line of roaring traffic went by on the bridge many metres above. A small blue boat bobbed in the narrow strip of water, spanning half its breadth, and the river seemed, at once and ever, like a scene of beginnings and of endings.
Laxman crept up behind me. ‘It’s an amazing thing. We are standing in the Indus, not in a boat or anything, but in the Indus. People pray to this river. The Sindhu river! But where is the water? It’s just sand.’
Laxman, the Hindu, thought of the river with the special, religious regard much of the sub-continent gave its rivers. In Sind, the story was that Punjab was stealing the water. Some wanted Punjab to be divided again, not because that would make a large state easier to govern, but so that it would not dominate the other states. There was an irony to these regional differences coming up on account of the Indus because it was the closest thing Pakistan had to a national river. It was almost like a symbol of national unity, a coronary artery flowing through the middle of the country, for which the scattered rivers of Punjab came together to feed its once great expanse. Sindi nationalist parties had taken up the issue and the splintering, faction within faction, difference within difference, that I had seen since I arrived in Pakistan, and was hardly able to follow, was spreading through the political arena.
Stranger to History Page 25
