The Road East to India

by Devika A. Rosamund

  I bought a bus ticket for Kabul and set my alarm for five o’clock the next morning. The bus was going to leave at six o’clock.

  After I had locked my door in my room for the night, I took myself in hand saying to myself sternly: “This is Afghanistan, not Spain – you had better act a little less stupidly!”

  Certainly I blamed myself for what happened because I had been so naive in believing that the owner of the hotel was being so genuinely nice, and because I was really only using him for what I could get out of him – free lodgings – which I didn’t get in the end! However, in the morning he said good-bye to me and was respectful again.

  In one way, or perhaps more ways than one, it is a nuisance being a woman here. Mostly if men are nice to me, there is another motive, and yet the Afghanis are very naturally hospitable to strangers. They are helpful and generous to men travelling alone (as I’ve heard from other travellers) and to couples, though often they offer money for the girl, but they just can’t believe that a woman can travel alone – though I am not the first woman who has ever done it, I am sure. They think it is strange, and also amusing.

  When they ask if I am alone, I always say, “No, I am with friends,” or “meeting friends in the next town.” Always there are English-speaking westerners where I stay anyway – so I am not really alone. Because we are in the minority and all are about my age – my generation – we stick together a lot. I spend much time chatting to other travellers, especially in the evenings.

  Kabul

  Wednesday, March 31st 1976

  I caught the bus to Kabul with some other Westerners – two couples – and all five of us got a taxi together to the Hotel Mustafa in Kabul where I am now staying. I have got to know quite a few others here – men. I could so easily find someone else to travel with but I don’t want to now. I want to be free and meet new people everywhere I go – I meet far more people when I am alone. Today an Australian guy from the hotel took me out for a meal. It was really nice and I spent all afternoon with him walking around the bazaar.

  There is another guy here in this hotel who was also with me in Herat. He wanted me to go to Benari with him on an excursion to a very old town in Afghanistan but I decided against it. For one thing it cost six pounds sterling in English money, and for another, I would have to stay in Kabul another day and night and I don’t like it here very much. Kabul is more westernised than the rest of Afghanistan, and not very pretty. There are a few high modern brick buildings but most are very low, white shack-like buildings. The roads are concreted, unlike those in other Afghani towns, which are more like mud tracks, but it is so unlike a city. I think Delhi will be more modern.

  The bus trip here yesterday took sixteen hours. It was so long, but interesting. On the way again we saw many nomadic tents, camels and goats, and sheep with their shepherds. The land was rugged and often desert, but in some places, though few and far between, it seemed quite well cultivated. There were some villages in the desert, though I would rather call them mud settlements than villages – they are so, so primitive. Houses are square and sand-coloured, with slightly rounded roofs and often joined together so that there is no distinction between one house and the next. Much of the desert country is very dry and barren. The road curved down to Kandahar and up again to Kabul. It was quite warm in Kandahar unlike the rest of Afghanistan though the days are getting quite sunny now.

  Kandahar looked a beautiful and fascinating old town – like Herat. I nearly got off the bus there to stay for a night but decided against this, although I regretted the decision afterwards. Some of the other western people got off there. I saw no other tourists in the town. There were about eight of us on the bus. The rest were Afghani men in their Afghani costumes and turbans. They looked at me with fascination as I was alone, and asked me if I was with anyone (by means of sign language) so I pretended I didn’t understand. Every time I touched my bag to get anything out, drank some tea from my flask, or put cream on my face, they all watched me and it was quite amusing – I felt as though I was entertaining them.

  About four times during the trip, and once at sunset, the bus stopped and three quarters of the passengers – all men – got out to pray along the desert road. They laid down mats and bowed towards Mecca.

  Until Kandahar, I had sat with an Italian boy who spoke some English. He told me such interesting things, both about travelling and about his life, and about gemstones, which I must relate later if I remember, but right now I must take a shower and go to bed as I have to get up and get the bus to Peshewar in Pakistan tomorrow morning early. We will be travelling through some wild country along the Khyber Pass.

  Today I bought myself a long, blue Afghani dress – navy blue silk with red and orange embroidery on the chest. It has long sleeves. I had to bargain for it in the bazaar, of course. I traded it for my denim skirt and I paid one hundred afghanis – one English pound – which I think was reasonable. I wanted a cool long dress to wear in Pakistan and India.

  Chapter Four

  Travelling through Pakistan

  Saturday, 3rd April 1976

  Here I am, sitting in the ‘Retiring Room’ of Rawalpindi station in Pakistan, in the middle of the night! I am wearing the long silk dress I bought in Afghanistan and I have my long wrap-around skirt draped over my head because the waiting room is full of staring men! I am the only woman here, and I am feeling unwell with a dreadful cold.

  The men here are all staring at me writing, but nobody has bothered me. I am covered up from head to foot except for my face! I am waiting here to get the train to Lahore which leaves very early tomorrow morning. I can’t rest because I want so much to catch up with my news and carry on with the story of my adventures so far!

  I have seen a lot in Pakistan.

  The Khyber Pass was a long, steep, winding road through rugged, dramatic, mountainous country. It stretches for about forty-eight kilometres from Afghanistan into Pakistan.

  As soon as we went over the border, I felt as if I was in a different world from Afghanistan. The weather was hot, and the scenery much greener. The buildings at the border seemed much more westernised than those on the Afghani side. In the customs office, I was the only passenger on the bus to be given tea! The customs officers kept saying what beautiful eyes I have got (just because they are blue!) On the bus also were some Americans and Australians who had stayed in the hostel in Kabul with me. I went to a hotel in Peshewar with them. Green Hotel it was called, and cost five Pakistani rupees a night (25 pence in English money).

  When I first entered Pakistan I didn’t like it and decided I wanted to get through it as quickly as possible. The countryside here is green and beautiful in these northern parts but everything touched by man appears so dirty. It is primitive, so very primitive here in the country villages, and yet so was Afghanistan but I loved it there. Here, in rural Pakistan, the houses are like wooden shacks and the poor people look as though they never wash, nor ever wash their clothes. The houses and shops are mostly made of tree branches, mud and sometimes also stones. Some people even live in caves.

  When I first crossed the border, as the weather was so warm, I wore my long wrap-around skirt (in the normal way) and a sleeveless, tight fitting T-shirt. Then, when I went to change money in the bank in the town of Peshewar, the bank clerk behind the counter grabbed at my breast. After doing that, he offered me a cup of tea which I refused! I also got jostled in the street by men. It was then that I realised that I had better cover myself up like the Pakistani women! I have heard stories from other western women who have had trouble from men here.

  These people, especially in the countryside here, are so isolated, and so confined to their little villages and often so illiterate, that they know nothing about the west. It is only natural then, I feel, that when we are visiting their country, we need to try to understand them, to see through their eyes and to see them without prejudice. I love the Taoist philosop
hy that I read about in Amsterdam – to live in harmony with existence and with everything around us. This is what I want to do.

  I think this is one of the secrets of life. When I wrote about my stay in Herat, I expressed that I was afraid and overwhelmed there. That was because I felt like an outsider. I wrote that I felt that I and the women there could never hope to ‘reach’ each other because we come from different universes. That is not true. I can ‘reach’ others if I step into their world for a while and become one with what is around me. This is empathy. Wherever I am, I want to live at peace with the people, in harmony with their world – and then my experiences will be much richer; then I will learn, as I am coming to learn very slowly, what it is like to feel with their hearts. I don’t want to observe the life here as if I am just a spectator, an outsider watching a film. I want to understand more than that.

  Every area of the world has its own conditioning. I think a Pakistani woman without her ‘veil’ would feel as a western woman would feel walking the streets bare from the waist upwards. Everybody gets used to the conditioning of their society. In Afghanistan though, the people did not seem to mind that I was not wearing a burkha like the women there – they accepted me as I was. However, my legs and arms were covered with my trousers and jacket, as the weather was much colder.

  Men here in Pakistan appear to be more sexually obsessed than anywhere else I have visited. They are repressed and deprived of the company of women. I am sure that makes them worse. I believe that if men and women meet on an equal basis, then men will not see women as sexual objects, but respect them as human beings.

  The food in the markets here does not look clean at all, but the local people eat it. Their bodies are obviously used to it. They have grown up in this environment and they are probably more immune to the bacteria here than westerners are.

  I have to be careful what I eat, but I have a trust that if I am positive and not afraid, then perhaps there is more chance that life will protect me and I will stay well and safe. That’s what I feel anyway. For this reason I would never carry weapons with me. I have met western women that do. I met one woman travelling, who carried a box which, if opened, would explode and possibly kill someone. She showed it to me. It horrified me! I trust to life and I do not invite danger, nor expect it.

  Now to get back to my story. I have diverted from it too much!

  Green Hotel was very clean and I slept in the same large dormitory as the other travellers. There was a girl and her boyfriend waiting for friends to come. We went out to dinner together that evening. Afterwards I got talking to some other English people in the same dormitory – two guys. They actually live in Pakistan now, in a village called Madyan in the Swat Valley, and they raved on about how beautiful it is – urging me to go and see it. They had just come up to Peshewar for a holiday they said. They told me they had originally (a year ago) been on their way to India in a van, but had never arrived because they liked Pakistan, and especially this valley in the mountains, so much. I noticed also that local men were smoking marijuana there quite freely in that area and were buying it over the counter in pharmacist shops as a herb!

  The Swat Valley in the Mountains

  I decided that I would like to see this beautiful mountainous place, the Swat Valley of Pakistan, and discovered that an Australian guy was going there the next day on the bus, so I asked if I could go with him. One of the English guys called Len gave me his address in the village. He told me that his girlfriend and her friend were there and would make me welcome in their little house if I would like to stay there.

  Next day I set out with Ray. He was good company. I was glad to travel with him in the local bus and I thought I could never have travelled there alone, but the next day I came back alone and felt quite differently. I wore my long Afghani dress with my wrap-around skirt which is one piece of material over my head, as I am now, and I had no problems whatsoever. I felt perfectly safe, and no one stared at me at all. I met a Western woman wearing jeans and T-shirt on the bus who told me she had been raped in Pakistan, but she was still wearing jeans and a tight T-shirt! In my long, loose dress with long sleeves, and with my head covered, everyone treated me with great respect, and in the village where we stopped I was politely helped off the bus.

  The journey there was terrifying! The bus driver bumped and raced at about seventy miles an hour along narrow mountain passes – overtaking everything in sight. I did not dare look out of the window. Every few seconds the air-horn blared out. I was quite frightened. Coming back I had a much more pleasant and slower ride.

  The scenery was spectacular – mountainous and green with streams and waterfalls, wild flowers and blossom. When we stopped in the little villages on the way – we had to change buses twice – children rushed up to us trying to sell us bags of sliced sugar-cane. Everywhere we see that. It is quite good to eat and very juicy, but after you have chewed for a while, you have to spit out the wood. Up in the village of Madyan they sold delicious brown raw sugar balls that taste like fudge. I wondered what it could be at first. They keep it in sacks.

  At last we arrived in the village. Ray went to stay in a very cheap ‘hotel’ – two rupees a night, and I went to find this little house where I had been invited to stay. It was a one-roomed stone dwelling, with a roof of thatched branches, mud and stone like all the others in the village.

  There was a high stone wall around it and wooden gates. The women there observe strict purdah. I knocked on the door and when Sandy opened it, I showed her the note from Len and said that if it was not convenient I could easily stay in the little hotel. However, she invited me to stay there and I slept on the floor on sleeping bags that night and they chatted about the life in that tiny isolated Pakistani village.

  When I first saw the English girls I got rather a shock. They wore very old, tatty, baggy clothes, looked very unkempt, and were squatting on the floor. They looked like hippies, but first impressions did not do them justice. Possibly they were just as put off by the sight of me, as my clothes (my bright blue long silk embroidered Afghani dress) were very clean and rather showy, as I realised afterwards, in comparison to people they see every day in the village, and have done for a year since they first came there.

  One of the girls was my age, 22, and the other, Sandy, a few years older. They offered me some rice and then I went out for a walk along the valley with Ray. When I came back I chatted with the girls. Len’s girlfriend, Sandy, who rented the house, had been a nurse for seven years in England.

  Next morning I learned an incredible thing – the people in the village had discovered that she had medical knowledge (because one day she had dressed somebody’s wounds) and they came to her every day with their ailments. She had a regular surgery and even supplied them with medicines and pills which she bought herself from the chemist.

  She told me that the village people did not understand that dirt could cause infections and sometimes she had to give pills first, as well as emphasising that they must wash wounds. She had learned a little of the language and it was obvious that the people respected her very much. She dressed like the women and covered her hair when she went to the shops. There was a doctor, she told me, but the women were shy of visiting him and would not go, so they came to her instead. She would not see the men, only women and children. Some of the women brought her a few nuts or herbs in return for ‘treatment’. She told me that for a long time she had tried to keep her nursing skills quiet but that it was impossible to keep anything quiet in that village.

  The other girl, a friend, was staying there for a while. She had been very sick and was recovering from hepatitis and pneumonia together! The weather had been very cold but now was getting hot.

  I wished that I had stayed longer in that village to learn more about the people, but as always I am restless to move on. Sandy showed me some of the beautiful embroidery done by the women in the village. In the morning one of the women li
ving next door brought us a pot of tea and some round flat bread fried in a kind of butter – ghee, I think. Sandy told me she had brought it to us because I was there. She told me how very, very happy, friendly and giving the people were – so very poor – and yet always wanting to share the little that they have. Average wages she said, are about ten to thirteen rupees a week. (One rupee is less than five pence). She told me how she loved living in the valley like these poor people, eating the foods that are in season. She said to me, “Never have I had so little but never have I been so happy.”

  I said I will perhaps visit them again on my way back from India.

  Tuesday, 6th April 1976

  I managed to sleep a little on a wooden bench in the ‘Retiring Room’ in Rawalpindi, but I woke up next morning with half a voice once more and am still unwell now! Actually I had travelled by mini bus with Gus – an American guy I first met in the hostel in Kabul, who was also in the hostel in Peshewar while I went up north. Then we travelled together as far as Rawalpindi, where he had to pick up some mail, but he was sick and decided to stay in Rawalpindi to rest and look for a doctor. I was anxious to move on in spite of the fact that my cold was worse – in fact, especially because of that. I didn’t want to be ill in Pakistan. I wanted to reach India before I was too ill to go at all, so I waited in that waiting room and in the morning I caught the train to Lahore alone.

  It was an experience to ride on a Pakistani steam train in the women’s carriage and see the women’s faces! They took off their head dresses once they were inside. I had no seat and had to sit on my rucksack in the corridor. It got very crowded – women sitting on boxes and bags, and standing. There was a great family or community spirit among them. For the first time since I have been in Pakistan I met the wealthier people. They were clean, and wore fresh, clean clothes – the usual pantaloons and tunics. They draped their long head scarves over the back of their heads and shoulders while in the train. Nearly all the women had young children and babies in arms.