Empires of the Indus

by Alice Albinia

  I wake in the afternoon to an argument between Khaliq and Aslam. Aslam wishes to walk on towards Pirsar today. This is tribal land outside the writ of Pakistani law; further upstream and we will reach the ‘settled’ areas again. But Khaliq is insistent: it will be a dishonour to his tribe if we leave today, we will never reach Kabulgram before nightfall (he is making this up), the Nazim will be angry…We relent. After all, I am intrigued to see how these infamous tribes-people really live.

  Khaliq’s friend brings in a huge opium cake with tea: an oozing melon-sized lump wrapped in poppy leaves. It was a good crop this year. They make 5,000 rupees per kilo for opium; better than onions and tomatoes. The villagers are rich, but nobody in Khaliq’s family reads or writes. A few years ago the government built a school on the banks of the Indus. ‘Who wants to have their children educated?’ Khaliq asks me. I see the school the next morning–now first-class accommodation for the village buffaloes. (In a grim irony, it is the emptiness of the schools in Kaladaka that later saves children during the Kashmir earthquake; many died in less education-averse areas.)

  That evening I am led round the village by Khaliq, followed Pied Piper-style by fifty children. Khaliq takes me to the gun shop. He tells me how he dynamites fish out of the Indus. He shows me his hand-grenade collection and his rocket-launcher. The houses in this village are several storeys high, with arches and pillars and paintwork in at least three clashing colours. I sleep that night next to Khaliq’s auntie, on the roof of her green-painted, beige-windowed, pink-arched, poppy-funded mansion, to the sound of the Indus rushing past.

  Early the next morning we walk upstream for an hour, looking for a suitable crossing-place. I walk warily behind Khaliq, who has insisted on carrying his AK47. We find a boatman to take us across the water; and the boat tosses and turns fretfully on the blue-grey waves.

  It is an uphill walk from Kabulgram, on the other side, to Martung, at the top of the hill. Khaliq bids us goodbye regretfully. ‘You’ll be there in half an hour,’ he guesses.

  But he has no idea. It is a long hard walk, up along a stream bed for two hours, through a tangle of forest, and then the worst part: climbing steeply along another dusty, half-built jeep road. At last we reach the ridge at the top, eat some stale biscuits from a tiny shop, and drink greedily from a spring on the ridge above Martung.

  Now that we have left the tribal areas, there is no more poppy in the fields, no more decrepit wedding-cake houses. Water has been carefully channelled into glistening rice paddies, there are modest dwellings solidly built from stone. There are also holm oaks along the road–another reason why Alexander felt at home here, perhaps. Every slope is green, well watered and conscientiously terraced.

  We turn a corner in the road, and suddenly we can see the Chakesar valley spread out below us. ‘There it is,’ says Aslam, pointing to the hills that rise above the village. ‘That must be Pirsar.’ We walk down through the fields, past a village cricket game, into town. An old woman leans over her hedge as we pass, and hands us some apricots from her garden.

  In Chakesar town a shopkeeper points out the rose-decorated hujra belonging to a friend of Khaliq. I experience that inevitable moment of apprehension–will they let us stay? The owners, summoned from their houses, arrive looking wary. Aslam explains about our journey; and as always, the frowns of incomprehension give way to warm Pashtun smiles and the offer of hospitality.

  The family in Chakesar have four large houses. I am sent to the one containing Uzma, who grew up in Karachi and did an MA in English. She recently made a love marriage with the son of the house, and has just given birth. She is holding court in her bedroom, enthroned on a red-velvet-covered bed, surrounded by at least thirty female cousins. Her husband sits meekly by, holding the baby.

  At dinnertime Uzma takes me next door, where the women sit around a huge plastic sheet on the floor. It is an exuberant, noisy meal. Children hover on the edges, pulling naan and chicken legs off our plates. There are several sets of co-wives: ‘But generally no more than two wives at once,’ says Uzma.

  The next morning it is raining as we leave Chakesar. ‘Do you have a raincoat?’ I ask Aslam, and he shakes his head. ‘Do you?’ I have often thought, while walking through the hills, of the naked Brahmin philosophers who mocked the Greek soldiers for their leather boots, cloaks and hats. Now I feel that a Greek toga, or cheap London anorak, would have been useful. But Aslam has a solution: ‘We can buy some plastic sheeting from the grocer’s store,’ he says. Swathed in green plastic, we walk out of town, following the local children up to the school just below the ‘girls’ maidaan’, which the men in Chakesar have told us marks the upper limit of the permanent settlements.

  From here, through the pine trees, we can now see the snow-topped mountains of Swat to the north-west. ‘I live over there,’ says Aslam, pointing. He tells me about his family as we walk, about the difficulty of educating his six daughters: ‘In Pakistan girls can only walk to school if they are accompanied by their brothers,’ he says. Up here, the Gujars, nomadic shepherds, are only just returning to their summer pastures, and many of the houses still stand empty. We sit on a bank beside a house where some Gujars are repairing the roof and pick thyme to eat with the roti we have packed. A shepherd walks past carrying a gun. ‘Just follow that path to Pirsar,’ he says confidently.

  But there is no obvious path. The wood changes complexion, grows more dappled, and as the settlements dwindle, it metamorphoses from a lush Asian marijuana and pine forest, into a temperate deciduous wood. There are stinging nettles and dock leaves underfoot now, and the air is cold and moist. We stumble on, up hills and down ravines. Suddenly, I realize that infallible Aslam is lost. I walk along behind him, tripping on roots, and thinking dreamily, hungrily, of English forests. In Comus, Milton’s masque, did they get out of the tangled wood alive? Wasn’t Comus like Dionysus? Wasn’t the lost lady called Alice?

  We climb another hill, and Aslam hears voices. There in the ravine below, with their goats beside a stream, are two shepherd boys. We run down towards them, and as I fill our water bottles, Aslam approaches the children. But though he tries the five or six languages in which he is proficient, they refuse to talk to him, and run away through the wood without saying a word.

  Now that we are down by the stream, however, we can see up through the trees to a clearing on a hill, where there are two houses and a recently ploughed field. As we climb towards the settlement, we see two women crouching in the field, weeding. But they refuse to sell us anything to eat: ‘We just came up for the day,’ they say, ‘we don’t live here.’ We walk on up to the second house, where there is a dog tied to the verandah. Aslam teaches me the words for bread and tea in Pashto.

  I walk round to the door of the house. Inside, everything is black. The bed, the pots, the chairs, are thick with dust and soot. I call out, and a woman emerges from a room at the back with her two shy daughters. She stares at me without understanding. From the yard outside, Aslam, who cannot appear before an unknown woman, shouts down something. She comes to the door to listen, and then she smiles at me, crouches down in front of her stove, and puts on her black kettle. Her name is Bibi Ayesha.

  Aslam and I are sitting on the wall above the house, drinking Bibi Ayesha’s tea, when a man comes by with a Sunni cap on his head and a load upon his back. ‘Pirsar is this way,’ he says. ‘Follow me.’ He is a student at the Binori Town madrassah in Karachi–infamous in the West as the nursery of the Taliban–where he is studying to be an alim (and get one hundred friends into heaven). We follow him for an hour through the wood. Before he leaves us, he shows us a stream where all wayfarers stop for water. ‘Just go straight,’ he says.

  But the path disappears again as the undergrowth grows thicker. By now we have been walking for almost ten hours without eating. We sit down against a tree and share out the last packet of salty biscuits. Above our heads, a storm is gathering–and we have no tent. Aslam, though, has a hill person’s sense of direction. We climb up a
nother hill, emerge on to its crest, and then we see it: Pirsar.

  ‘The Rock’ as Arrian called it–Aornos, ‘birdless place’, as it was known to Alexander’s army–juts out over the Indus, seven thousand feet above that agitated mass of water. Between it and the hill we are standing on, is the ravine that Alexander spent three days filling with brushwood in order to avoid the strategic disadvantage of descending into the ravine between Unasar and Pirsar (in fact he probably bribed, or forced, local tribesmen to show him the best way up to the Rock). The rain is just beginning to fall as we climb down Unasar towards some shepherds’ huts. We meet a man who is bringing his cow back home for the night, and follow him along the path towards a wooden mosque where we shelter while Aslam assesses the practicality of climbing up to Pirsar tonight.

  Clouds are darkening the sky as we leave the mosque and walk down into the ravine, and up around the south side of Pirsar. It is a slippery goat path; the hill is littered with blistered trees felled by lightning, and had the storm hit us then we would have been washed into the valley below. But we are lucky. The rain clouds pass over our heads and fall on the valley’s eastern side.

  At last, we emerge above the trees and on to the top of the ridge, where my elation at finally being here is tempered by the fact that the sky is still dark with rain and we have nowhere to stay. Down a path comes an old Gujar woman, who is taking her grandsons into the forest to gather some kindling. Curiosity gets the better of her, and she turns round and leads us along the ridge to her house, a three-bedroom hut where her daughter-in-law has a fire going.

  I sit inside by the hearth, removing my wet clothes bit by bit and drying them as the children crowd round and assess me. They cannot understand why I have walked for ten days to reach their house, so I tell them the story of the foreign king called Sikunder who marched up the Indus valley, of how he built altars to his gods in this very place, and of how, three months after he sailed back down the Indus to the sea, the tribesmen of Pirsar returned and exacted revenge on the remaining Greek contingent. The children listen with polite, wide-eyed interest as I expound the idea of their home being recorded in a two-thousand-year-old history book in ancient Greece–but it is my rendition of an old Indian film song that they really enjoy. They dance around the fire, joining in with the chorus, and Bazarini, their mother, who has been watching me silently as she snips wild spinach, suddenly smiles.

  Just as suddenly, the sun comes out, and I go to the door of the hut. To the east, over the Indus, emerging from an eddy of rain clouds, is a rainbow, and the trees and tiny fields of Pirsar are iridescent in the sunshine. There are thirty Gujar huts up here, small structures made of just one cooking room, a bedroom, and a place for the animals. Around every house is a fence and beyond the fence is a patchwork of fields, where maize is already coming up. I walk with Bazarini’s children to the eastern edge of Pirsar, and look down at the great silver crescent of the Indus, which curls around us on three sides, ‘washing at the base of the Rock’, as Strabo, Diodorus and Quintus Curtius put it. Encircling us to the north, east and west, like the gods on Olympus, are the snow-capped mountains, for it is here that the Hindu Kush, Karakorams and Himalayas meet.

  The hill tribes of Pirsar had been relying on the steepness of their mountain retreat as defence from the Greeks. But when they saw Alexander and his men filling up the ravine, they pushed some boulders on to the advancing army, beat their drums, and ran away down the north face. When Alexander and his men reached the top of the Rock, they met with little resistance. Naturally, they killed everybody they could find.

  Alexander, triumphant, ordered his men to build altars to Athena, the patron of war. This was more than just homage to a martial goddess–it was an epic gesture. Athena was Achilles’ special protector in the Iliad; and Alexander, who slept with a copy of the Iliad under his pillow, thought of himself both as Achilles’ physical descendant (through his mother’s family) and his spiritual heir as a warrior.

  Throughout his journey, Alexander used Greek myth as a stimulant to ever-greater martial conquests. Since the start of his world-conquering journey he had taken to calling himself the son of Zeus. In India, his compliant generals found cattle branded with the shape of a club: proof of the Indian wanderings of Hercules (Alexander’s other legendary ancestor). It was this very Rock, said Alexander’s campaign historians, that Hercules had tried and failed to besiege during his Labours. And if Alexander was Hercules’ equal on earth, so too on Olympus. Alexander began to encourage the rumour that he was immortal.

  From Pirsar, Alexander sailed down the Indus to Hund, where he ‘sacrificed to the gods to whom it was his custom’. This list did not yet include the rivers of the Indus valley, though it soon would. The Greeks worshipped rivers in various ways–by consecrating hair to them at puberty, for example (a villager at Hund told me that the clumps of hair I saw on the pebbly riverbed there, were left for a similar purpose). But for now, Alexander did not need to worry about the anger of India’s rivers. Thanks to Hephaestion’s bridge of boats–a stratagem that Sultan Mahmud, the Mughals and the British would all use after him–he crossed the Indus with comparative ease, triumphantly reflecting that he had gone further than Hercules, further even than Dionysus.

  Alexander was adept at playing local kings off against each other, and he did this to perfection at Taxila, capital of the local king Ambhi (or Taxiles), one hundred kilometres downstream from Pirsar. Taxila was already an ancient site of Hindu learning; centuries later it would become a Buddhist university; after that, a Greek-style city, and two millennia later still a World Heritage site ringed by orange groves. The Taxila which Alexander saw was populated by ‘tall, slim’ Indian noblemen carrying parasols, wearing ‘white leather shoes’ and with indigo, red, green or white-dyed beards. The men in this area, Arrian emphasized, were the finest fighters in all Asia. Yet King Ambhi turned traitor, welcoming Alexander into his country, allowing him to fell wood for boats and bridges, and sending him a present of 10,000 sheep, 3,000 cattle, 200 silver talents and 30 elephants. Perhaps this lavish generosity was a portent: in every Greek tragedy there is a peripeteia, a turning point. For Alexander, his peripeteia happened–literally and metaphorically–in the Indus valley.

  Alexander believed, when marching from Taxila across the Punjab towards the River Hydaspes (as the Greeks knew the Jhelum), that he was coming face to face with his greatest enemy: King Puru–or Porus, as the Greeks knew him–the Indian king with his huge army and elephants like towers. But Alexander’s downfall was caused by something harder to grapple with than military opponents–rivers in spate.

  Alexander, Arrian writes, reached the Punjab just after the summer solstice, ‘when heavy rains came down on the land of India’ and ‘all the rivers of India were running deep and turbulent with a swift current’. For a man who read the Iliad on his travels, and thought of himself as Achilles’ progeny, the flooding waters of the Punjab would have been disturbingly reminiscent of Achilles’ battle with the river god, Xanthus or Scamander–a warring Hellene, in Asia, pitting his wits against the primordial force of an angry river. In Homer’s story, Patroclus has just been killed, and Achilles is in a homicidal frenzy, cutting down Trojan after Trojan, and throwing them into the river. ‘Lie there among the fish where they can lick the blood from your wound,’ he screams at his victims, as he watches the water turning red. But Scamander–‘Xanthus of the silver pools’–soon tires of Achilles filling ‘my lovely channels’ with ‘dead men’s bodies’. He unleashes the full force of his waters upon the warrior and only the intervention of Zeus saves Achilles from being drowned in the ‘heaven-fed’ river.

  Perhaps Alexander thought that just as he had proved himself superior to Hercules, so he could outdo Achilles too. He stood with his Companion Cavalry on the banks of the Jhelum, looking east across the water to where Puru’s army was waiting. It would be foolhardy to try and ford the river during the rainy season. Puru knew that too. But Alexander was an Achilles with the cunning o
f Odysseus. Night after night, his cavalry charged along the bank, making as much noise as possible. At first the Indian king ‘moved parallel with the shouts, bringing up his elephants’, but eventually he grew tired, realized it was a false alarm, and stirred no more from camp. So Alexander lulled Puru into complacency.

  Alexander’s scouts, meanwhile, had located an island near a bend in the river. One night, during a summer thunderstorm, Alexander and a band of cavalry waded over on horseback to the island, and even though the rain was still falling and ‘had swollen the river’, they were halfway to the other side before the Indians saw them. Puru, who was far away in camp, began marching towards them, but as he did, Alexander’s reserve force crossed the river to the south, and attacked him from behind.

  As always, everything turned on the elephants. Usually these enormous Indian beasts petrified the Greek horses. But Alexander’s tactical victory was to press the Indian army from the left and right, forcing their infantry up against their elephant phalanx, and shooting down their drivers until the wounded mounts, ‘maddened with suffering, attacked friends and foes alike and…kept pushing, trampling and destroying’.

  Unlike Alexander’s other formidable opponent, the Persian emperor Darius III, who fled the battlefield, the Indian king fought on until his soldiers were too weary to continue. Alexander, always one for a magnanimous gesture to bequeath to his biographers (and perhaps keen to make up for the indiscriminate slaughter of the Indus valley highlanders), sent Puru a royal pardon and asked him how he wished to be treated. ‘Treat me, Alexander, like a king,’ Puru replied proudly, and thus was their alliance sealed in high-flown rhetoric.

  So Alexander and Puru became allies–not only because the Macedonian king admired the Indian’s beauty and pride; or because Alexander made Puru his regent and put him in charge of more land than he had owned in the first place; but also because it was simply not practical to do otherwise. As Puru himself pointed out, there were many other powerful Indian kingdoms to the east, with more elephants, wide rivers and large armies. Alexander needed all the help he could get if he was to succeed in reaching the Ocean on the edge of the world.