Stranger to History

by Aatish Taseer

  ‘What else?’

  ‘A sense of destiny, collective self-confidence. Our political framework was dismembered. But with Muslims, geography is not very important. If even after 1971 our ruling élite had bounced back, we would have bounced back because we’ve never been fascinated with geography. We are fascinated with ideas. If even then an idea could have come . . .’

  The ideologue grew up talking about the idea of Pakistan. ‘Discussing Pakistan,’ he said, ‘was like discussing Islam. Pakistan was made in the name of Islam. It had to be a role model for the rest of the Islamic world. We identified characters who were responsible for its failure: Mujibur Rahman [the founder of Bangladesh], Bhutto, India, Mrs Gandhi. We thought one day we’d become one again. It was a very simplistic world-view. We were closely associated with the notion of Pakistan. It was more like a being than a country. It was all-living. It wasn’t geography or politics. It was more than that. It was a collective consciousness. This was the idea of many.’

  And now, put this way, I felt the ideologue’s description wasn’t of a real place but of a religious Utopia. This man who could be so clear and down-to-earth had an almost magical side to him.

  ‘But this is such a country,’ he said, with new softness in his voice, ‘that has never let it be decided where it was headed. That’s why you see the situation of today. Look at the India of 1946. It was fractured, but then one idea came and the whole sub-continent was united and held together by this idea. Even if we had decided to become a secular state or a nation state, we would be in a good position now. But we did not follow a liberal model or an Islamic one. Nor did we achieve material success or build a bond. We have a lot of diversity, rare diversity, of language, of culture, of religion. This could have been a great force, but it was turned into contradiction by our political élite.’

  ‘Why was it so bad here?’

  ‘Our ruling élite was such that it never thought of anything but its own vested interest. It never thought of Pakistan as a nation, only as a private limited company.’ It was the first time in months that I had heard a Pakistani blame Pakistanis, not the foreign hand, for the country’s failures. Hearing him speak, I felt as I had when I met the young politician in Hyderabad: the faith was getting all the good people.

  ‘And the idea now?’

  ‘It’s still alive and kicking,’ he said sadly.

  ‘Of a state that embodies Islamic principles?’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘Have you thought more about a model?’

  ‘Islam doesn’t depend on form,’ he said. ‘Form is not important. Essence is the main thing. If the essence is there, you can derive from it any kind of model.’

  It was the most untrue thing I had heard. This dependence on sacred essence, and disregard of form, political models and institutions, had been the undoing of Pakistan, and Iran.

  ‘Do you think that if Pakistan had been a successful secular country, you would be writing about political Islam today?’

  ‘There is no such thing as political Islam. There is just Islam, which has a political component. That is a Western phrase designed to distort the totality of Islam.

  ‘The problem with us,’ he said, ‘is that somewhere along the way we stopped being a country guided by an idea and just became a place where people lived.’

  That remark stopped the ideologue’s torrent; he seemed to sense that he’d said a painful but amazing thing. So many places were just places where people lived, but Pakistan, which was made for an idea, and which had broken with history for that idea – which, if not for that idea, was just a handful of Indian Muslim states, with linguistic and cultural differences – depended on it for its survival.

  ‘There are two kinds of history,’ he said, of the connection to India, ‘dead history and living. Dead history is something on a shelf or in a museum and living history is part of your consciousness, something in your blood that inspires you.’

  ‘But why is the pre-Islamic history of Iran living?’

  ‘There is a reason for this,’ he replied. ‘If all India became Muslim, we might have been able to identify with the Hindu past. We would have modified something. But since it didn’t happen that way, we can’t choose something that goes against our taste. You won’t wear a T-shirt you don’t like.

  ‘It’s very unusual,’ he continued, ‘in the case of Europe, that the Christian world should have abandoned its roots and looked to Hellenistic civilisation. It ran away from the Christian golden period, when Constantine accepted Christianity and it spread through Europe. They abandoned it and ran towards Greece. It shows that they did not have a law, and that for the law, they had to run to Rome. They didn’t have shariat. We have spirituality and we have a law.’ The ideologue knew that those histories had flowed from each other, but couldn’t accept an origin other than in faith. It was interesting that he didn’t choose Jesus as a starting-point, but Constantine and Christianity’s political triumph.

  ‘Who’s “we”?’

  ‘The Muslims.’

  ‘You say it as though you were Arab.’

  ‘This doesn’t arise in the case of Muslims – Arab, non-Arab. It’s a civilisation of faith. We are Muslims.’

  A ‘Civilisation of Faith’. This was also the civilisation to which my father belonged. It was the thousand-year culture, of which Abdullah had spoken. It was what all Muslims had in common, believing or non-believing, moderate or extremist. For me, there was something miraculous in this transfiguration of one’s culture and history, by either a profession of faith, or an inherited profession of faith. There was something miraculous in the idea that if Even, my Norwegian friend, converted to Islam that this would also become his history. The poet Iqbal’s family, after all, were only recent converts to Islam. And how had I fallen through the cracks? What would it take to believe in a history like that? A profession of faith? My father had made none, but believed in the history. My mother gave me no religion, so how was it that my father and I had ended up being from two different nations having been once from the same country, and even, the same region? Perhaps it was like retaining certain moralities without believing in God, or religion. Perhaps it was kept in place by everyone around you believing.

  It was time for me to make the final part of my journey north to see my father.

  Articles of Faith

  I made my way to Lahore by train. My father hadn’t called me once during my time in Pakistan and I feared an unfriendly reception.

  In Karachi railway station, beyond a line of peach-coloured arches, listless railwaymen sat with their feet on desks in dark offices, with open doors and brown mesh windows. One picked at his feet as he spoke to his colleague. An old-fashioned red metal roof came down over the arches, protecting the platform from the late-afternoon blaze. Among the hurried movements of porters in orange, men sat on their haunches next to swollen plastic sacks and women, on the floor in groups, fanned themselves. A great brass bell, a blue phone booth, a Pizza Hut and a black-tiled water fountain were arranged in a line down the platform. Sunken polythene bags and candy wrappers hung in the few inches of grey water that lay between the tracks. The large families and skullcapped men waiting for a train under droning fans seemed like characters in a Partition scene.

  Talk of the train began. The crowd on the platform compressed, then broke loose, all moving at once with the arrival of the Tezgam, an elegant pool-table-green train with beige and red stripes. My brother’s driver, who waited quietly with me, now said, ‘Wherever you look, there’s public. People I’ve spoken to say the condition of India is better than Pakistan.’

  I didn’t answer, wishing to avoid the conversation of differences. What I did know was that discovering Pakistan, its closeness to India and the trap I felt it had fallen into where religion was concerned, filled me with an affection for the country that I hadn’t expected.

  ‘Yes, on our side, things have yet to be established,’ the driver said. He spoke in Urdu, but said ‘establish’ in
English.

  We found the sleeper by the numbers written in white chalk on the side of the carriage; a crest said ‘Islamabad Carriage Factory’. The cabin was air-conditioned with its own bathroom and the most spacious since Istanbul. The dark green seats were wide and springy, the walls were of plywood, and the windows darkened. A smart, painted sign with yellow letters and black outlines, reminiscent of another time, read: ‘To seat 3 sleep 2;’ I had it to myself. My brother’s driver put the white box of Sind Club sandwiches that the publisher sent for me on the table. His large, mascaraed eyes scanned the carriage and he said, ‘If there’s been any error on my part, please pardon it.’ Then he went off and stood on the platform until the train left.

  The sign for the Inward Parcel Office, a mountain of packages, men sleeping on plastic sacks, and a policeman lying on a bench, drifted by as the Tezgam left Karachi. We passed heaps of burning garbage, smoke rising against cement walls, with black writing on them. I thought of the bureau chief ’s words, ‘In Hyderabad, garbage is disposed of by burning.’ The train climbed past the top of the city, and a final film reel played out through tinted windows: the coloured roofs of buses, the upper storeys of small apartment buildings, corrugated-iron roofs held down by bricks, mango-tree canopies, bougainvillaea from terraces, barbers’ shops, the green and white domes of mosques modelled on Medina’s, the span of a flyover, water tanks and green satiny flags, with gold trimmings, fluttering in the black smoke from burning garbage. A village of cloth and sticks appeared near the tracks amid the devastation of blue plastic bags. Thorny bushes reached out to touch the train. The cement city, with men sitting on rooftops, families of buffaloes in manure and the watermarked walls of warehouses, passed just before sunset.

  At dusk, the eternal Sind scene: flat, dry land throwing up magnificent, double-storey cacti, with fleshy depressions and sparse giant thorns.

  The next morning we were in Punjab. At Multan station, the carriage attendant looked into my cabin and smiled. I asked for some tea.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ he said. ‘Everything is available. I’ll send the boy.’

  A few minutes later an old man in a green uniform arrived to take my order. ‘Just tea?’ he said, with surprise.

  ‘What else is there?’

  ‘Eggs, double roti and butter.’

  ‘OK. Bring them all.’

  He came back with bread, marmalade, teabags, real milk and sugar, and an omelette on a white napkin and a steel plate. One station later, a young man with long, greased-back hair and a silver wire in his ear came into my cabin with a red brush to sweep the place while I sat on my haunches. The station, though smaller than Karachi’s, had the same colonial elements: sloping metal roofs with a carved skirting; a whitewashed platform, blackboards and blue and white signs that said ‘Battery Room’; ‘Unity – Discipline – Faith’, the motto that Pakistan’s founder gave the country hung on a wall. There was a pink marble mosque and people washing for prayer outside.

  Soon afterwards, a boy with a pointed face and crooked teeth knocked on my door. He was looking for a plug point to charge his phone. I said I hadn’t seen one, but that he was free to look. He went away, then came back and sat down. His name was Rizwan and he was an electrical-engineering student in Karachi. ‘Where are you from?’ he asked.

  ‘Karachi.’

  ‘But in reality where are you from?’

  ‘London.’

  ‘I could tell from your accent.’

  ‘Is it apparent?’

  ‘Slightly. Are you Muslim?’

  ‘Yes,’ I replied, not wishing to enter into a long explanation.

  ‘Nationality is British?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I can tell.’ He smiled. ‘If you have any need in Pindi, I’m there. For a hotel, car, whatever.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  He said he had two more years left before he got his BSc in electrical engineering.

  ‘Then?’

  ‘Middle East. There’s a lot of demand there. Maybe UK too.’

  ‘Aren’t visas tough, these days?’

  ‘Yes, very. Don’t even ask how tough, but Allah will help and when it happens I won’t even know how it happened.’

  ‘Where in the Middle East?’

  ‘Dubai and Saudi. Both have a lot of demand, but Dubai is like ours.’

  Just then, the carriage attendant and a man in a white uniform, with shiny silver buttons, knocked on the door, came in and asked to see my ticket.

  ‘Who’s he?’ he asked, seeing that my ticket was for one person.

  ‘We were just talking.’

  The man turned to Rizwan and said sternly, ‘Please go back to your seat.’

  ‘No, no, we were just—’

  ‘Please go back to your seat! You’re lucky it was just me. Another conductor would have fined you.’

  Rizwan rose, I made one last plea on his behalf, but the conductor reminded me that I was lucky it was just him.

  Outside, a few boys in salwar kameez played in a canal. Another defecated near the tracks while a friend kept him company, running to get him water when he needed it. Under a cloth roof held up by four poles, a few women lazed next to a buffalo in a patch of mud. In Punjab, the houses were firmer and the majority in red brick. White domes and rust red minarets rose out of the low townscapes. There were big-leafed papaya trees in the fields and a golden layer of ripening corn. There was also much more water: in the fields, in the tube wells and in the wide network of canals. At the stations, men used old-fashioned hand pumps outside signs that said ‘Lamp Room’.

  Being in Punjab made me think ahead to my arrival at my father’s house. My doubts had faded; the travelling made me optimistic. I felt that it would appeal to my father’s sense of adventure that I was showing up on his doorstep after eight months of journeying from Europe to Pakistan. I also thought that if we were to move forward from our recent problems, we might set a new tone in our relationship. Fighting with someone, whatever its other effects, was at least a sign of emotion and openness. I thought that it might help make our relationship more instinctive.

  At sunset, not far from Lahore, Adil, a Kashmiri boy, knocked on my door. The train had stopped and he felt like a chat. He had pale skin, light brown hair, amber eyes and prominent, very pink gums. He was a marine-biology student in Karachi and there was something intense and restless about him, even about the way in which he’d barged into my cabin for a friendly chat. He was off to Kashmir for a memorial service to his uncle who died in the October earthquake, which happened a few weeks before my trip began.

  Adil had a brother in Abu Dhabi, but he was reluctant to go abroad. ‘You can say you’re a Muslim abroad,’ he said, ‘but you can’t say you’re a Pakistani because immediately people will say, “He’s a terrorist.” You tell me, how can you go to a foreign country and not even be able to say what your nationality is?’

  ‘Do you think Pakistan’s reputation has become that bad?’

  ‘It didn’t become bad. It was broken.’

  ‘Who broke it?’

  ‘Indians. They really maligned us abroad.’

  I started to become nervous as the conversation grew more sub-continental.

  ‘Are you Muslim?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then why do you wear that string?’

  ‘It’s from a shrine in Sind,’ I lied.

  ‘OK, then why do you wear this bangle?’

  ‘My grandmother gave it to me. She’s a Sikh.’

  ‘But you?’

  ‘Muslim. My father’s Muslim.’

  ‘And your mother?’

  ‘She was Sikh,’ I lied further, ‘but she became a Muslim.’

  ‘What does your father do?’

  ‘Business.’

  ‘What kind?’

  At last I got him off the topic by asking how Karachi was. He said it was great, and that it was fun to tease the girls there.

  ‘How do you tease them?’

  ‘We go up to
them, a few friends and I, and we sing songs to them.’

  ‘Like what?’

  He laughed and began to sing: ‘Come, come, my little queen, tonight I have the emperor’s right on you. Who will free you from my grip? Tonight, you’ve been caught, caught, caught . . .’

  He laughed again and stayed talking until the silver-buttoned conductor appeared to eject him and announce the train’s destination.

  And so, with the ease and inevitability of a train pulling into a station, I found myself, one hot evening in Lahore, almost at the point where I had begun a journey to find my father four years before. But for the short flights in and out of Iran, I had travelled by land and it amazed me now that the journey which had begun in Europe, by train from Venice to Istanbul to Damascus, and by road through Arabia, had yielded the sub-continent, Lahore and, even more miraculously, my father. I had travelled eight months for this meeting, but the confluence of time, distance and expectation made it feel even longer.

  I arrived to a house full of people. My younger sister was graduating from Lahore’s American School and brothers, sisters, their spouses, uncles and grandparents had all flown down for the ceremony. My stepmother was involved in organising the graduation. There was to be a party at the house, and a few days later, it was my father’s birthday. The level of activity was close to that of a wedding. Tents went up in the lawn as I drove in and a steady stream of tailors, caterers and hairdressers passed in and out of the house.

  The mistake I made with my father was to be ready for anything other than indifference. That evening, standing on his doorstep after a year of silence, I thought we’d do something we’d never done before: have a meal together, a drink, a conversation about what had happened since we’d last met.

  The trip had not left me unchanged. My relationship with Islam was no longer a negative space. I had learnt about the faith in the early part of my journey. Then, from my conversations with men like Abdullah, I discovered it wasn’t faith in an obvious way that I needed to understand, but the political and historical demands it made and how it reshaped countries like Iran and Pakistan. This aspect of the religion, which could make my half-brother feel ‘civilisational defeat’ without being a believer, and which my father could possess without the faith, was not open to me. The way into that kind of faith was closed. It would once have been part of a whole system of belief, complete with ideas of politics, law and behaviour. In Pakistan and Iran, I had been shocked by the violence of reviving the faith in the form of Islamic republics and religious homelands. But all this seemed very far away now that I was at my father’s doorstep. At that moment I thought only of our relationship. I couldn’t see how these amorphous things, politics and history, could bring up real differences between two people. I had never lost a relationship over such differences and I couldn’t believe that they might encumber my relationship with the father I had found after so many years.