waysofreading10eIM

Shia Girls

On a grey winter’s morning, months later, the postman brought to my Edinburgh flat a green envelope from Pakistan. Even the stamps were covered in flowers. There was no other mail for me, apart from some standard communication from the Inland Revenue. I turned on the gas fire and huddled in front of it. Rashida wrote:

Your lifestyle is very strange and very difficult to us, because you know, we are purdah-observing. We live in home and safety. And you know, how much we are happy and full satisfy. We have no problems, and difficulties. We live a simple and Islamic life. I am very surprise to know you are living in a flat with your friends without your parents.

Now, what is your planning? Here I want to give you a suggestion, if you don’t mind. I am giving you a proposal. I want that you live with us in our country for ever. If you want to marry here, it will be good. If you want, you write to me and we shall arrange your marriage. I assure you, you will be very happy here. Your life will pass in peace and safety. But remember, you’ll live like us . . .

I got up to tend the kettle and stood shivering at the kitchen window, looking out at the driech skyline of a city full of strange and difficult lifestyles. Dear Rashida. Did I want to marry and stay in Gilgit for ever? Of course not. But I could picture so clearly the flower gardens and the sparkling irrigation streams, the deep shadows cast by a relentless sun. For months my stomach had been clenched against the cold, and if I went to the Pakistani shop on our corner, the smell of the spices intoxicated me.

By the Islamic calendar, the year had just turned 1410 when I arrived back in Rawalpindi. A full year had passed; again it was the month of Muharram. The Pakistan Times was carrying exhortations to the ulema, the clergy, not to stir up trouble. They printed a cartoon of clergymen with crazy turbans and rosaries, skulking behind a wall. On the wall was a poster urging peace. “Do we get more outa peace?” asked the mullahs.

The office of Masherbrum Tours was a card table erected beneath an umbrella, on the platform of the bus station. A fat man sat with a book of tickets and a rubber stamp. “You are lone? In our country this is most unusual.”

“So I can go at the front of the bus?”

He cocked his head. “Bus, 2 p.m. going.”

“Ticket 2 p.m. say: Pakistan, 4 p.m. going,” said one of the waiting men. “You are lone?”

At his side a snake-charmer set out his little baskets and began tootling on a pipe. Horns blared and boys bawled their destinations. The drinks vendors cried, “Boteli-boteli-boteli!.” I was offered a flannel; combs, hair restorer, fruit; the bark of a certain tree used for cleaning teeth; chewing tobacco called pan; scarves, shawls, toys, fans and sandals. A child with a set of bathroom scales contrived to insert them beneath my feet every time I took a step, and so earn a wretched rupee. A holy man, with painted symbols on his fine naked chest, threw things at me — a toffee, a banana peel — but I think it was meant in jest.

Hidden between a fly-ridden tea-shack and a tower of mangos was a waiting-room of sorts. Here was a transit camp of women surrounded by children and bulging baggage tied with rope and blankets. All were veiled for the journey, so they too resembled so much baggage. Outside buses were shunted and loaded, and belched black fumes into the already stinking air.

Mine was a deluxe service, which doesn’t go any faster, God forbid, and is still pretty uncomfortable. It meant that the mighty Bedford bus was even more heavily decorated. They are magnificent. Like heavyweight boxers dressed as clowns, the merry carnivalesque paintwork and chrome can’t disguise the solidity of the thing. A horn blared and I went out to see my bag swung up the ladder on to the roof. There was action; the passengers swarmed, fussed and boarded, climbed over the seats and found their places. I was indeed ushered to the front, one of the “privileges” accorded us because of our sex; here, in the dead of night, one is to some extent safe from the wandering hands and toes and elbows. Plenty of welcome breeze blows in; a front seat is well worth having.

We were loaded and ready. The driver’s lad had covered the luggage on the roof, wiped the windscreen, polished the mirrors, chosen a tape (my heart sank), performed all the pre-flight checks, ensured there were sufficient dangly toys and waving hands, prayers, stickers and plastic flowers and even started up the engine and dusted the seat before the driver, like the world-famous conductor of some magnificent orchestra, strode towards his vehicle. Here was indeed a Bedford of a man: a shaven-headed Haji with a face hewn from Karakoram rock. His beard was dyed orange, his thick and bullish neck rose to a head covered by the woollen cap of Gilgit. He climbed in. He didn’t even glance at the Hindu man who stood in the doorway imploring something of his passengers. He wanted to move, and wanted this heathen tramp off his bus. As though he had lifted his baton, there was a moment’s hush as he selected a gear. He released the brakes, and the bus emitted a shuddering growl. We were off, we veered towards the road, the poor Hindu crying, “Driverji, driverji, tairo, please, driver sir, sir please, stop!”

My body remembered this, fourteen hours’ worth of discomfort and ache. I don’t know whether you grow more used to it or less. We left Rawalpindi, horns blaring, crossed the railway line and were gone along the Grand Trunk Road — just one vehicle, but a big one, among the trucks and cars and camels and wobbling bikes. The conductor had perfected the art of climbing out of the nearside windows, up atop, traversing the roof and re-entering by the driver’s window, at speed. He sat on the hot cover of the gearbox, called me his sister and gave me an apple. I was glad to have him near; I felt nervous alone among all these men and, though frightened of the long night ahead, I longed for it, and the cool breezes of the hills.

At dusk we stopped.

“Pray stop!” said the driver’s lad.

“You pray,” I said. “I drink,” and jumped out of the window.

“I drink,” said the lad. “Nobody pray. Quick pray. Drink!”

If no mosque is near, a line of men forms at the roadside. They cover their heads with scarves and handkerchiefs, spread mats, and kick off their shoes. Side by side, they bow in prayer. Strangers to each other. How it must bind people, I thought, watching from a distance.

By dark we had picked up the Indus and were turned north on the Karakoram Highway. The hills began to grow into mountains.

Flickers of lightning illuminated the summits in a gentle show. We roared on and on. I stuck my bare feet out of the window; the scents of flowers and shrubs wafted in. Nothing, so far, had gone wrong. When it grew cool, I wrapped my shawl around myself, away from the sly gaze of some of the men at the back, the better to enjoy and dream. At Besham, which is a waspish and frenetic place even in the dead of night, we stopped for tea. At the roadside were sleepers on charpoys. They seemed not to heed the din. All through the night the tea-maker sat above his fire, boiling great vats of the stuff. Hurricane lamps hissed from the cobwebby rafters; and a swarm of bugs crawled around each.

Now the river began to twist and with it the road, blasted out of the mountainside. Above us rose great banks of rock and scree; on the offside the slope fell sheer to the thunderous river below. The Haji shifted the gears, and hauled the wheel round in his mighty hands. We thundered on. I knew we would stop again soon enough because ahead was dacoit country: bandits. There would be an army checkpoint with tents and beds at the roadside. We would stop, and get off to stretch our legs in the soft darkness, waiting until enough vehicles arrived to form a convoy. Then an uneasy soldier armed with a sub-machine-gun would jump on to the running boards, and the convoy would move on.

I fell into a doze, and woke as the driver cursed and brought the bus to a halt. In his headlamps I saw a few jeeps and trucks, and some people milling around on the road. It wasn’t a convoy forming up, or a checkpoint. An accident maybe. If you look down the precipice to the river below, you often see the axles of trucks upturned in the river, helpless as beetles. Like the others, I jumped out on to the road and looked ahead. A mound of rubble and stone, as high as a house, had spewed down from the hillside above. Road is block.

So final was the block that already passengers were climbing on to the roof of the bus and throwing down their baggage. I secured my own, and did as the others did — sat on it. They formed small grumbling groups at the dark roadside.

“Ticket?” said the driver’s lad, standing before me in the dark.

“You want my ticket?”

“Refund. Gilgit, no going. Road is block.”

All around us, rumours and accusations. The road began to take on that characteristic look — a war zone, a relief station. People squatted at the bumpers of their immobile vehicles, spreading rumours. It was the first of two, five, nine such blocks. The down-coming vehicles, similarly blocked on the other side, were one, two, ten miles away. However many blocks there were, all were agreed on this: the last was the biggest. It was this government! Where was the money to repair the road? Gone in their back pockets!

No money in the world would stabilise this road, blasted out of rock and mud. We were halfway to Gilgit, I received half my fare, as was just. Among the litter of vehicles shrouded figures wandered. Some were bedding down to sleep for the night. A family lay in the dust beside their jeep, shrouded like corpses from some dreadful accident. I began to feel nervous, in the strange dark night, and wondered what was for the best.

A thin voice called to me from the roof of the bus: “Sleepee here!”

“No,” said the conductor, “you go!”

Go where? I wondered.

“No go! Sleepee he-re.”

People were slipping away into the darkness, taking their baggage with them. I walked down to see the roadblock. People were swarming up it like ants, with their attaché cases and boxes on their shoulders. Some wore flip-flops. One mile, two, ten? The darkness was green-tinted with moonlight. The moon had risen above the jagged shards of mountains and, for a brief while, would illuminate the gorge.

I pulled my shawl, a man’s woollen one, around me. If I stuck with the gang already mounting the heap of rubble and mud, I’d be okay. I began to climb, using my hands to haul myself up. At least it was stable, but with one ear I listened lest more should pour down from above. I rounded a corner, but could see no one. The only light was the eerie tint of the moon. Away below, the river brawled. It was very loud, the sound trapped between the rockwalls that rose all around, darker even than the sky above.

“Yes!” said the thin voice. “Yes!” And he was beside me, a voice in the darkness, the voice from the top of the bus. Sleepee here! We were entirely alone.

“Go?” he said.

“Go.” I moved on.

He moved with me, as I chose my footholds on the rubbly heap. I crossed the ridge of the landslip, and began to descend again to the road.

He said, “My friend are?”

“Of course.”

“Love me?” he said.

“I love everyone.”

“No!”

Another heap of rubble and mud rose immediately. Nine such slips, the rumours said. There was a trickling of water.

“Love me? Five hundred rupees you love me?”

I looked at him for the first time — a thin, slant-eyed youth with a scarf tied round his brow. He was groping about in his clothing and my heart clenched, but no, he was taking out a 500-rupee note, and holding it up to the moonlight to prove to me it was real. Two weeks’ wages. Eighteen quid. Suddenly I wanted to laugh. What, right here? On the middle of this landslip? What would you do if I snatched your money and said all right, come on, all you’ve heard about Western girls is true? Run away screaming, no doubt. But there were voices coming: a party from the other side of the landslip was approaching, I could see their tin boxes glinting in the moonlight. More were coming behind me, going my way. I joined them. The two groups passed like parties of pitiful refugees, slipping across some remote border, with just the moon and the river to guide them. The thin-voiced youth disappeared, taking his fantasies with him. The rumours were all rubbish, his and mine. Only below, round a bend so you couldn’t see the lights, the road was clear, and the vehicles were arranged like a mirror-image of those we’d left behind.

Nothing was going to move till morning. Only then, having exchanged passengers, would the vehicles turn and go back the way they’d come.

I chose a huge friendly-looking bus, propped myself against its tyre and took a swig or two of brandy from the illicit supply in my rucksack. Then I rolled myself up in my shawl, and slept on the road until dawn.

We got on, all the rounded-up passengers. The driver began an eight-point turn on the narrow ledge. At the third point, when his back wheels were sending stones and crumbs of earth down into the river, we all jumped out. But he didn’t fall off, of course. When the bus was pointing north, we climbed back on board. This bus carried an entire replacement gearbox, just in case. Please God, I thought, don’t let it break down. Don’t let us have to wait at the roadside for five hours while they drop in a new gearbox.

We ground on and on and the heat grew greater and the rock brighter, and I was thinking about my friends. I was wondering why I got into these scrapes, and I was thinking about Rashida, the way she could glide into a room, silently. About the way all would draw their chadors over their noses and tuck in the corners, and would never, ever travel alone on a bus like this. Now the sun was up, the strangeness of the night was banished. Was it Murtaza who said, “It is very risk”?

We stopped for tea at a row of shacks. Some mangy dogs ambled about on the roadside. There was a puncture repair outfit and a long tea-house. The driver went off to a secret drivers’ place and I saw him climb on to a platform hidden from view, then the smell of burning hash wafted down. The men sat round tables and drank little cups of sweet, sweet tea. There was a woman on this bus. She remained aboard when we all got off. She was fully veiled and sat behind the driver. Her husband or brother flanked her, but he’d jumped off and gone into the tea-house. She had a headache, she said. I asked, wouldn’t she like some tea? She gave that charming gesture of refusal and thanks, a sort of turn of the head and crinkling of the brow. I could just see it under her veil. Her husband was indoors with the rest of them, tearing bits of chapati up to eat with his tea. Didn’t his wife want some?

“No! She is simple womans. Islamic womans. Water only.”

And I was thinking that the lightness of my friends, their feminine graces, their quietness, their quaint old-fashioned charm, was delightful, until it became profoundly irritating and I wanted to say: Stop it now. We’re friends now. Be real. Beside them I felt rough and ungainly. I felt as if I had stubble. And I was wondering what difference it would make were Rashida British. How would she be? Still “feminine”? I doubt it — she had far too hard a streak in her to do that all day. And Jamila. She would stay out all night, and give her father fits.

We’d set off again. I fell asleep, woke and watched the barren mountains go by. Then I saw a leg in front of my face, outside, climbing down from the roof. It wasn’t the bus boy’s, it was dressed in tight denim even in this heat, and it was seeking one of the bars across the windows. We were doing fifty on an over-hanging ledge. I couldn’t look. A hand came down, with long painted nails, then another clutching an expensive video camera. It was a woman with a big nose and short black-hennaed hair, in an expensive-looking cut ravaged by the dust and wind. She held on to the bars with one hand and raised the camera, panned the valley and the river behind us. Italian, filmmaker. Huh, I thought. Then she began berating the back of the driver’s neck, in Urdu. The driver’s shoulders tensed and he slammed into another gear. The conductor joined in the shouting match and a few men at the back added their tuppence-worth as she clambered through the driver’s open window. She sat down on the gearbox and ran her fingers through her hair.

“God, these people! The conductor was getting funny with me, on the roof. Did you hear me shout? The more I said slow down, the faster he drove. DIDN’T YOU!” The driver flinched.

“I didn’t know you were up there.”

“They only picked me up a few miles ago.”

“You’re not Italian, are you?”

“No. Pakistani. Half Afghani. Now I live in London. They don’t believe I am Pakistani.” She turned round and bawled out a man at the back of the bus. “Did you understand? He says if I am Muslim woman, I should wear modest clothes. God, these people! The conductor was on the roof with me. He was getting funny, you know. I said to the driver, slow down, I am coming in. He didn’t. No. Ugh, terrifying. How long to Gilgit?”

“Another four hours or so. Inshallah.”

“Inshallah. God, this country.”

Our trials were not over. In revenge the driver selected a tape and put it on at full distortion. A sort of subcontinental Goon Show, as far as I could tell from the silly voices and gales of laughter. Then that stopped and the now familiar tedium of the Muharram chanting began. He turned up the volume yet more. The speaker was at my ear. It went on for a solid hour. Then came a raving mullah. The very speaker seemed to jiggle and spit as the mullah worked himself up. He screamed like a soul in torment, screamed as though his very flesh were burning on his bones. The bus travelled on. As the mullah raved, passengers closed into a sombre or sullen hush. From the roadside, goat-herds turned to look at us, and village girls turned their backs. The mullah was all agin someone, and that someone was you. The London Afghani woman came back. She had been conducting a theological argument with some of the passengers on the back seat, about women, clothes and Islam.

I took my hand from my aching ear, the one the speaker was screaming into. “D’you understand this?” I asked.

“Shias! So what if he sacrificed his life for them, there’s no need to make such a fuss. The whole thing’s beyond my comprehension. Have you got a tissue?”

She tore two strips, rolled them up and stuffed them in her ears. Now why didn’t I think of that?

On the outskirts of Gilgit we had to stop at a police tent to sign the ledger that purports to log the whereabouts of foreigners. There was a brief argument among the passengers over whether the Pakistani woman should sign or not. She wore immodest jeans, had short hair and argued; ergo, she must be a foreigner, she must sign the book. But she argued in Urdu and had a Pakistani passport; she was one of us. Confusion. And then, at long last, came the sign reading “You are now entering Gilgit Cantt.” I thought I had never seen anything so welcome.

Fast food is no novelty in the land of samosa, but it had none the less reached Gilgit. At the corner of the chowk and the barracks stood the “Tax Burger” stall. What, oh what, was a tax burger? I thought: I’ll prove to the Inland Revenue that I’m still alive, I’ll send a photo of a tax burger. Little else had changed: the old hand-painted sign “Stop for cold drink, cock is it!” had been delicately removed, and one shopkeeper had installed glass windows behind which an array of ladies’ shoes were displayed, but he was alone in his innovation; still the shopkeepers lounged about in their open-fronted boxes. And all around, above the street and its little shops, the ochre-tinted imprisoning mountains.

It had been a long journey, I was filthy, and the day was intolerably hot. It was, they said, the hottest summer for forty years. I wanted only to wash and sleep, and made for the Golden Peak. The boy Mohammed would be there, it’d be good to see him. Maybe he’d take me for a jinni. I laughed to myself, remembering the incident last year, when there came a very tall German man with spectacles so strong his eyes were magnified behind them. I’d collided with Mohammed as he fled towards the gate, crying, “Jinni, jinni! You look his eyes! Oh, is jinni!” leaving the poor German standing owlishly on the grass. Good old Mohammed. He’d make me some tea in the old pot held together by string. Dr Noor and Mr Latif would be discussing ailments in the shade. I was thinking of the wrought-iron chairs, the cool rooms, the wallpaper, as I stepped through the old gate.

A cement-mixer stood open-mouthed where the garden had been. There was a row of half-built concrete shacks. No grass grew where the builders daily tramped about; all was dry dirt. I swallowed hard. A trench, for water or somesuch, tore through the parched and broken lawn. The Golden Peak itself still stood, almost eclipsed by the brave new world growing around it. The old mosque was demolished and its madman dead, gone. In its place a concrete watchtower had been built and painted orange. And Mohammed’s kitchen — where was it? Torn down. A concrete tourist unit replaced the smoke-blackened lean-to.

The office still stood, and I wanted Mohammed to appear from within, grinning all over his face: It is joke! I wanted him to show off his manly stubble, and make contemptuous remarks, but when I called his name, no one replied. I thought I might cry. I wanted to turn and go, but Mr Latif was here, he’d remembered my name, was shaking my hand. I could find no pleasantries to say to him, but blurted, “What have you done?”

“It is good business,” said Mr Latif.

“You think so? Where is the garden?”

“After finish, again garden, inshallah.”

“Inshallah! Where is Mohammed?”

“He is . . . in another place.” He walked like the Duke of Edinburgh, with his hands clasped behind his back. A small smiling boy appeared, and fell into step beside us. Mr Latif said, “He is my son! I am China going, soon, some days’ holiday, inshallah. He my son is manager. He is eight years.”

Manager, eight years. Despite myself I almost smiled. Not everything changes at once.

The room at the back of the Golden Peak was damp, and grotty. That much remained the same. There was a rug of local goats’ wool and a wooden fire surround, green-carved lintels on the door to the washroom. The washroom was so damp a minor landslip occurred during the night, and a bucketful of ceiling arrived on its floor. Huge drowned centipedes floated in the gunge of the blocked sink, white and ghastly and four inches long. I looked up “insect” in my Urdu book but could find only “animal.”

“Animal!” laughed Mr Latif. “This is very funny! Animals in sink.”

Mohammed’s replacement was an elderly Nagari man, huge and silent. He wore a woollen cap and a shy smile, always. All the men who come down from the villages wear both; the shy smile because they are unused to foreigners, women especially. He set about the blocked sink with gun rods. A large rat poked its nose through the drain and vanished fast when I banged the pipes. I thought: this is a disgusting place. It should be torn down. I wrapped myself up in a shawl against the bugs, and fell into a sad but welcome sleep.

Mohammed came bounding out of a tea-shop calling my name. There was no hugging, no exclaiming. This is a Shia town, and I’d done my restraint training in Scotland. We reached for a polite handshake and suppressed our voices into whispers, because the cobbler cross-legged at our feet had stopped sewing to stare, and a small crowd was already threatening to gather.

We went into the hottest tea-shop in the world, a concrete garage with pictures of fat film stars on the wall. Ten minutes in that place and they could have sweated themselves sylph-like. There were no windows, no fan. The kerosene stove chuffed and kettles steamed. Down the back of the knee the sweat ran, down the throat, the armpits, breast and brow. Mohammed Hussain had spent the winter in the south in Multan, cooking for Germans. “Yes, they are tourists. They go safari.”

Mohammed Hussain cooking for Germans on safari in Pakistan. I began to smile again. “So you don’t work at the Golden Peak any more?”

He screwed up his face. “It is bad, this Golden Peak, you have seen? Where is the garden? Before, you know, all mens are coming, take tea, talk. Now, no! I don’t like this, you know? Now I am at Riverbank Hotel. Nagari people.”

“Did you have an argument with Mr Latif?”

“No argument. Small argument.” He scowled, laughed. “Now there is this small boy! I do not like this buildings. It is very business. Mir of Nagar, you know, he sell Golden Peak. Now very rich Nagar man he has bought, he is making very change.”

“Would you go back?”

“No! It is too hard work. Always work. Now there is this old Nagari man, you have seen? He is very very nice. If he stays I go back. If I go back, Mr Latif will send him away.” He drained his tea. “Mr Latif is China going!”

“So he said, in two days. His small boy is manager.”

Mohammed gave a very pained look. “When he is China, I will come. Okay? Now I am cook! Dahl, chapati, subzi. Come there.”

I-suppose that to know someone or something is to see them through change. Poor old Golden Peak. The balancing act, so well maintained, between the needs of the local men and the foreign visitors was now destroyed. The rich Nagari man had come down heavily on the side of the tourism encouraged by the opening of the road to China. Now where would they present the polo trophies, if not on the lawn of the Golden Peak? Tourism had long joined that list of words, like “headmaster” and “bank,” that produced in my stomach a slight weariness and dread. It is, indeed, very business. Mohammed’s business. He had left the village and turned the full force of his scorn upon the army; so all that remained was tourism, the “very business.”

Poor Mr Latif was so looking forward to his trip to Kashgar. His passport and visa he checked over and over again, his small bag was packed and waiting days ahead of time. When he left, it was with a jaunty click of his heels, but he returned within an hour. “Road is block,” he said, and shrugged. It is the nature of the beast.

Then came the rumour that the border was for some reason closed, and then at last he was gone, he and his friends, leaving the hotel in the hands of the eight-year-old child and the silent smiling old man. This dear old fellow made tea so willingly that I came to feel bad about asking, and quite missed Mohammed’s kicks and scowling assertions that there was “no tea in Gilgit.”

I had a plan about Rashida, and the whole clan. I would surprise them. Unannounced, I would put my head round the green door and call her name. I was so looking forward to it, and could picture them coming pouring out, down the stairs, from the kitchen, from the sitting-room. There would be hugs and tears and admonishments — why you no write? I even put on a black dupatta over my shalwar-kameez, to please them.

First I went to the Major’s office, and collided with him coming out. He was in full uniform, a beige affair, an impression of medal ribbons and shiny buckles and epaulettes.

“SO! KATHLEEN, YOU ARE IN GILGIT!”

“You are in uniform!”

He slapped my back till I choked. He ignored it. “It is this Gulf, this Kashmir. I am a reservist, of course. Today, I have Appointments. So, tomorrow morning, you will come to this office, we will take tea, we will DISCUSS!”

Rashida’s father was just where I’d last seen him a year ago, shooting the breeze with the keeper of a shoe shop. They occupied the benches intended for people trying on shoes, but no one ever did. Only men sat there, gossiping. He gave me the nod and I climbed through the gate.

There was a cow in the garden, eating a rose. Women’s voices came from behind the curtain. Jamila came out, making for the kitchen. Too much work! She looked different, older. She saw me and we laughed, and here the restraint of the street was lifted; we were among women and family. We hugged, and again I was overcome and almost in tears, such was their warmth. My hair was showered in kisses. She pushed me back and looked me full in the eye. “Two days you have been here! Why you didn’t come? In Golden Peak! What you think, this new construction?”

100

“I meant to give you a surprise! I thought you lot kept purdah?”

101

She shook her head impatiently. “Everything we know!”

102

Rashida was married, only ten days before, and moved to her new home. Now she lived beneath the roof she used to spy upon last year. It was a stone’s throw away. Someone sent for her and while we waited for her to arrive, there was lunch, and Salma’s new large-eyed daughter to admire.

103

“We call her slow-motion baby,” said Jamila, lifting the ample child up into her arms. Indeed, she did move like an astronaut, as she was dandled from auntie to auntie. It was a full house — another sister was home from Lahore, with her husband and her two kids. A house full to the brim of sisters and cousins following Rashida’s wedding.

104

We sat on the floor around the cloth, as plates stacked high with chapati arrived.

105

“Plenty of company,” I said to Jamila.

106

“Much work!”

107

“But tell me about Rashida. Is she happy?”

108

“Happy! With her Hussain Ali, very happy!”

109

“What’s he like?”

110

Jamila flexed her arm. “He is very big — You like?”

111

“Yes, I like a bit of muscle.”

112

She screwed up her nose. “I like small, small. This other sister she like Big! Why you laugh?” She tugged the dupatta over her hair. There came the familiar china cups — one for Mother, whose welcome was genuine and effusive, and one for me, and one for the husband of Fatima, the Lahore sister. He had a potbelly and was served first. With him in the room the women were different, less talkative, slightly impatient. He’d just been on Haj, and had brought back from Saudi a present of toys for the children. They ignored the toys and were squabbling over the wrapper, but were hushed so he could hold court and describe the Haj, the terror of being in a crowd of two million people in an area, he said, the size of Gilgit bazaar. Two million! Das Lakh!

113

“So!” the pot-bellied husband declared, helping himself to rice. “Your friend Rashida is married. This Hussain is thirty, very old. I too was thirty. She . . .” — pointing at Fatima, a plump, tired-looking woman — “She was fourteen! A baby!” He stuck his thumb in his mouth and made sucky noises. “A baby! For one year she did not look at me!”

114

She wasn’t looking at him now, but listening. I was sure she was understanding more of his English than he thought. He pulled an imaginary shawl over his face and simpered. Fatima gave an embarrassed little smile.

115

“Her first pregnancy — she was seventeen — she cried and cried, “I will die!” Ha ha!” He amused himself with this memory for a moment, then announced, “We have seen London!”

116

Fatima said, “Yes, London. Very beautiful.”

117

“How long were you there?”

118

“Five days only. Very expensive! But I have noticed these things: in your society, women after marriage have boyfriends! Yes? And are fond of Negroes. Well, Negroes are human too. And old people are Sent Away.”

119

I was aware of an embarrassed shifting among the women — those who understood. Mrs. Shah had no English; she was merely delighted to have us all gathered and conversing in her home.

120

“In Islamic culture we are permitted four wives! But economic conditions prevent. The father of Rashida’s husband had six wives, two died — very rich man. They quarrelled! Ha ha! You know, one Pakistani girl said recently, “Why should not a woman have four husbands?” Everyone laugh at that!”

121

I wondered who that woman was. “Why did they laugh?”

122

“It is not Islam. You know, Shia people, we have system of temporary marriage. You know about this? No mullah is necessary. Man and woman agree, by mutual consent, and marriage is dissolved. My brother-in-law did this thing with a widow from Skardu, and never told his wife! Ha ha!”

123

In the best room, with the heavy furniture and a maddish frieze of camels, there is a huge print of the Ayatollah Khomeini, almost smiling. Jamila took me there. We sat on the sofa and played with the babies. Rashida, she should have gone on the stage. (This is not possible, I can hear her say, we are Shia girls.) Her entrance was silent and effective. She drew every head, even in her own home. Gone was the workaday plait, and the plain outfit. She was in rich turquoise, her heavy hair was folded into a knot at the nape of her neck. As we hugged, I sensed a faint perfume. Her eyes were made up. She wore lipstick, jewellery (“gold!”) Her bearing was straight and strong. And something of her aura had changed, that over-devoutness. I didn’t want to say that here was a woman who had ditched her girlish virginity, and now enjoyed some little power in her own home, but it went through my mind. Her English was rusty and she knew it. Because she learns from dictionaries, her vocabulary extends to outmoded and archaic words like “mirth” and “hapless,” charming because so rarely used. She hugged me and looked into my eyes. Was she happy?

124

Yes. “Now I am married girl! Why did you no write to us?”

125

“Rashida, I did.”

126

We went to Rashida’s new home, a few doors away down the narrow wynd. I don’t understand the etiquette of chadors and dupattas, but just to run a few yards down the back lanes, no chador was required. Dupattas are always required, or it is shame. As we entered another, smaller courtyard, Rashida showed me through a door which led directly into a bedroom. There was a double bed, and two dressing-tables. No room for anything else. Two little girls peeked in on us; Rashida sent them to fetch water for squash. She served the squash in two new matching tumblers of pink frosted glass which stood on the dressing-table, on a matching tray. I was glad to note that other people’s wedding gifts are as frightful as our own.

127

We sat on the edge of the bed, spread with a pristine counterpane. I looked around the tiny room where Rashida was mistress. There was not a speck of dust; every glass ornament and boxed-up Chinese tea service was in its place.

128

“Well!” I said, for want of words. We wondered why it was that so few of our letters had got through. I didn’t even receive the invitation to her wedding, which I would have accepted at once. “It is very strange,” she said. Ah, innocent flower, who can’t even pop down to the post office, who must entrust her mail to a range of brothers and cousins! But she was bursting with news and change. Change, change, it was a word she used over and over.

129

“What’s he like, your Hussain Ali?”

130

“Very good man. Since January he has got a job, welfare officer. With Women’s Literacy Projects. Yes, He wants me to continue with my education. If we go to Pindi, inshallah, I can attend college.”

131

Women’s literacy projects! I felt very happy for her, hugged her. “So now you live with his family. Your mother-in-law.”

132

She snorted. “She is foolish! Everything she does wrong, but I am new girl, so I must respect. My life is very change. Look!” She stood and made for the other door. “This is my bathroom. I say to Him, I must have private bathroom, I do not want to go in the house, you understand? So He build for me.” A new toilet, a washbasin, an old-fashioned upright washing machine. She touched it. She touched everything, the novelty. “My washing machine, my parents gave. And this is my shoes. Twenty-five shoes!”

133

“Twenty-five pairs of shoes?” There was indeed rack upon rack of the things.

134

“Yes, I bring. Also: fifty dresses. In here.”

135

She left the bathroom behind and hauled a heavy suitcase out from under the bed; inside were yet more shoes. In another, shalwar-kameez and fabrics: summer weight, winter weight, flowers, polyesters, some horrid crimplene plaids. She even patted the blue carpet on which she knelt. “This my carpet. Room only is His, but everything — mine!” She was mistress of all the gifts, the glasses, flasks, tea sets, the shoes and carpets, the washing machine.

136

“But what is it like, living with his family?”

137

“He has brothers, so I want my own bathroom. I am shame. Hussain Ali is rich, He has two jeeps, He did inherit his father’s lands. He is building a house in the village. He wants me to continue my education. My wedding clothes are here.”

138

She pulled out a red shalwar-kameez decked with gold braid, like a Christmas cracker. The trousers cut so wide and flared that they moved like a dress, a sari. A seventies pop star might have died for it. And jewellery: beaten silver set with tiny chips of ruby. Dangly earrings like inverted cups. Chains that linked nose and ear.

139

She opened box after velveteen box. I thought it all vulgar. “This gold! This ruby!” She drew back her hair and showed her earrings. “Gold!” “He” — “He” applied to no one but Ali — “He is graduate of mixed college, in Karachi, but I am not jealous of these girls. He was pious at college, and waiting for me. Nine years He has waited! He tells me the stories of His college days and sings to me romantic songs . . .”

140

“Really? Jamila said so . . .”

141

“What! What she say?”

142

“That he sang romantic songs to you, nothing else.”

143

She took a little pink booklet from a crowded drawer. “My diary, you may read. Yes, read. It is written in English. It is my feelings. He said: “Write your feelings, your life is very change.” I write in English.”

144

“Does he speak English?”

145

“No.”

146

“No one can understand this diary?”

147

She lowered her eyes. “It is for practice. The English, when I am not speaking every day, is . . .”

148

“Rusty, like old iron.”

149

“Read! And tell me the mistakes.”

150

Rashida had nothing to fear from anyone finding her diary. Again we sat side by side on the bed. She read it, aloud: “ “It is the last two days in my parents” home; tomorrow I am dulhan” — dulhan, it is meaning bride — “What my feelings for Hussain Ali? What His thinking to me? We will become two bodies, one soul; and after almighty Allah He is lord to me. This is my wedding day, I am very nervous.” This” — she turned a few pages — “This is after I am come here. Read!”

151

“ “Their way is different, and I must make efforts to fit with Ali’s brothers, and His mother. Today I am shamed.” Shamed, Rashida? You often use the word.”

152

“Often I feel. I am not accustomed . . . The first time we drive in the jeep together. I am with a man, you understand?”

153

“But he’s your husband.”

154

“First time for twenty-four years, I am without my sisters and parents. My feeling is very shame. My life is completely change.”

155

I tried to imagine never having been alone in all my life. No solitary walks, no quiet evenings alone with a book or the telly, no cycling or mooching about galleries, no shopping, running, driving. Another curiously Western pleasure, being alone.

156

“Do you miss your sisters?”

157

“Very miss, Jamila. Now I go only as guest to my parents’ home.”

158

“Every day?”

159

“Twice a day!” she laughed, and read again: “ ‘After two or three months some couples get fed up with each other. Such has happened to this brother and his hapless wife.’ ”

160

“Who?”

161

She pointed through the window to another little door, firmly closed, and cupped her hand around my ear. “He beats her.”

162

“What can she do?”

163

Rashida shrugged.

164

“Well, you can’t just let her be beaten . . .”

165

“She is — how you say? — compelled. No one likes this brother.”

166

I remembered meeting the year before a woman, intelligent, educated, with sunglasses and powder to hide the bruising around her eye. Compelled.

167

“Read! And tell me the mistakes.”

168

“‘Ali,’ I read, “ ‘I am happy for you, you have fought and won what your heart desired.’ His heart’s desire. What’s that, then?”

169

“Me!”

170

“Of course!”

171

“He did ask my father nine years ago. But Jamila was not yet engaged. It was not correct. You know, she is elder to me.”

172

“Read! ‘Today my sister is gone . . .’ ”

173

“Lahore sister, you did meet. For two days after my marriage she lived with me in this house. It is our custom.”

174

I read on: “ ‘I must be used to unfamiliar people, unfamiliar house, unfamiliar . . .’ What’s the blank?”

175

She patted the bed. “Sex! I have no experience!”

176

“What do you think?”

177

“I think he is very big and I am small. Still I am not used to this.”

178

“But you like?” She smiled.

179

“You’ll be having babies next.”

180

“After one year. First we are enjoying. Family brings big responsibility. Contraceptive methods, no, this is not unIslamic. It means every child has much attention.”

181

She showed me some poems, little Patience Strong homilies written at the back of her notebook; and some longer verse in Urdu. I asked her to translate. She worried at it for a moment. “I cannot.”

182

She took the book away and sat again beside me. “What is your thinking of this diary?”

183

“Anyone who reads it will think you are a very good Islamic woman. You do seem very happy. I’m glad.”

184

She nodded, and took both my hands in hers. “Kathleen, I pray to Allah that soon you will find your life partner, too.”

185

She was pregnant within the month.

186

Of course there are no drinking houses in Gilgit; none in Pakistan at all. The corner tea-and-sweet-house is the nearest thing to a working men’s pub. Certain older men in the cities remember the days of the first Bhutto as a golden age of liberalism, when there were clubs and drinking houses for those un-Islamic enough to want them. They closed under Zia. Now Benazir was herself in deep trouble; the newspapers rustling in the tea-houses talked of corruption and nepotism. Benazir’s is a difficult place.

187

Needless to say, there are no women in the tea-house. There is a TV in a dusty corner. The rags that serve as curtains are tied in a knot, neglected and stained. Above the hubbub of conversation is the drone of the fans as they gently stir the cobwebs. There might be a couple of posters on the walls, gaudy affairs trumpeting the proprietor’s politics.

188

After dark the police stop in for tea and lean their rifles against the wall. The tea is thick and sweet. A listing tower of burfi is displayed in the window, held together by its own stickiness. A selection is weighed and served on a chipped plate.

189

There is always a boy running back and forth with orders. Tea-house boys are not always the most intelligent of lads. Perhaps they would prefer to be out in the dark street at night with their pals and the stray dogs. Bats come out at night, and toads creep along the rough pavements of the bazaar.

190

News came that Benazir’s government had fallen. The Cabinet had been dissolved by the President, and elections announced for the autumn. People either danced in the street, or wept bitter and angry tears. There was growing tension in the Gulf, and to many Pakistanis’ disgust, their government had come out in favour of sending troops to the allied forces, the side of the USA, Saudi and Israel, their three great bugbears. “The Americans say jump, and this government jumps.” More to the point, closer to home and heart, there was trouble in Kashmir. I was to look at photographs of schoolboys: “This my brother, my cousin, killed! And for what, for walking in his own street!”

191

The Major shook his head none too sorrowfully. There will be war over Kashmir, again. In his office, at least, the world was being put to rights. He greeted me effusively; pumped my arm up and down, slapped my back. I thought: Maybe he thinks I’m a man. No, he complimented me on the black dupatta arranged artlessly over my breast. He pinched his nose. “What is your saying? ‘When in Rome!’ It is good, we are Shia.”

192

I swear he enjoys this nonsense. I wonder how far he was over-stepping bounds by entertaining me, by ushering me into his office. I wanted to ask him questions, I wanted another run-through of the history of the province; the constitutional question in a nutshell. He was good at giving gloriously partisan accounts which made all of history sound like a particularly exciting polo match, and you were the puck. Why was India so determined to hold on to Kashmir?

193

“You see,” he’d said patiently, “it is these rivers. Three rivers flow from Kashmir into Pakistan: the Indus, the Jellum, the Chenab. They are our lifeblood. Who controls these rivers controls Pakistan. Now India wants to ruin us. If these rivers are blocked, or diverted . . . Pakistan is starved. Yes! They are diverting.”

194

Today, though, no one could talk of anything but Benazir Bhutto. On the wicker chairs of the office were two other fellows: one a neat dapper birdlike chap, in a blue safari suit. He was from Islamabad. The other looked so like a Scottish poet of my acquaintance that he startled me. Red-eyed and swollen-nosed, he looked as though he’d been on a bender for a week. There was much rising and bowing and dusting of chairs. The debate which I had interrupted quickly resumed. “Now, Miss Kathleen, what is the difference between Margaret Thatcher and Benazir Bhutto?” asked the red-eyed one. He wore a wool waistcoat over a large stomach. Faced with such a gentleman, always I thought of the burghers of Hamelin and their rats.

195

“Sahib, we are talking Global Concerns,” growled the Major. “Not this little fellow Pakistan. You must forgive him, this fellow, he is — what you say? — diwana, crazy!”

196

“Benazir crazy,” the red-eyed one sighed.

197

“Benazir crazy! A Staunch Peoplist. He left his job for this PPP; now she is gone.”

198

“A disaster!”

199

“We are not talking about this little Pakistan! This little fellow! Are we, Sahib?”

200

The man from Islamabad gave a diplomatic smile. “We can only sympathise.”

201

“Sympathise! It’s the exact word. Now, Sahib, please, your opinion of the status of the Northern Areas?”

202

The man from Islamabad cleared his throat. “It is my belief . . .”

203

“He holds Sensitive Posts in Islamabad . . .” said the Major.

204

“My opinion . . .”

205

“. . . and believes this country is run by bureaucrats. Ha ha!”

206

The man from Islamabad nodded. “It is true all over the world.”

207

“Governments come and go . . .”

208

“A disaster!” cried the Peoplist.

209

“. . . but the bureaucrats remain.”

210

“Quite. Now, if one consults the 1973 Constitution . . .”

211

“The 1973 Constitution! I have it here.” The Major began rummaging about on his desk. The tea-boy came in backwards, gave us one wild look, left his tray and scarpered.

212

“I have it!” The 1973 Constitution, bound in unremarkable beige. “Here it is; one has only to read and understand!”

213

“Page one,” the man from Islamabad persisted, “defines Pakistan: and I have consulted this and believe your case to fall under 2(b). Miss, please read.”

214

I read, and concluded that anything and everything could fall under Section 2(b).

215

“Read, and understand,” said the Major. “These lawyers . . .”

216

“What lawyers?” I asked.

217

“It is coming to the High Court, the case of the Northern Areas. Are we, or are we not, a part of Pakistan? These lawyers, all they have to do is read, and understand. It is not so difficult. It is written in Black and White. Read, and understand. I was a lawyer, an administrator of martial law.”

218

“Martial law!” snorted the Staunch Peoplist. “Zia abjured this constitution.”

219

“Amended!”

220

“Abjured!”

221

The Major sat heavily. “And she is asking me why there is no unity between Muslim nations!”

222

“I am?”

223

“Why not? It is this King Fahd, this USA!”

224

The man from Islamabad persisted: “It is because in your Section 2(b), it does not say ‘Northern Areas’ by name.”

225

Staunch Peoplist took the book, and agreed. Nowhere was the Northern Areas mentioned by name.

226

“The High Court will decide!”

227

The man from Islamabad leaned forward a little. “In answer to your question. It is because the Muslim nations are underdeveloped economically, politically, socially.”

228

Something in his accent made me wonder if he’d studied in England. “Please go on,” I said. He drew breath, but the Major was on his feet, crying “Unstable!”

229

“This one man has the power to dissolve Cabinet!” wailed the Staunch Peoplist. “Is this democracy?”

230

“Pakistan at least has a written constitution,” I tried.

231

“You have Convention.”

232

“Enough!” cried the Major, and threw down the Constitution. “You will excuse us. My friend from Islamabad and I have an appointment.”

233

“We will meet again,” said that enigmatic gentleman. “I will explain many things.”

234

The Major slapped my back once more. “Later, Kathleen, we will discuss, but not in this bloody place, this office.”

235

Murtaza said: “Are you angry to me?” I said: “Of course not.”

236

“Last year, it was a misunderstanding.”

237

“On both our parts. Is Salma here?” She was, nursing her daughter, the slow-motion baby. She was plumper; her hand was soft. Murtaza and Salma grew ever more like Jack Sprat and his wife. Given her head she would be fat and jolly, he would become yet more dour and grey. They sat on the couch on their verandah, and their new baby ogled the flowers which grew all about, tall orange blooms I did not recognise.

238

“You have this flower in your country?”

239

“No, too cold.”

240

“Ah, it is the hottest summer! Too hot. It is the first year I have this plant.”

241

I was glad Murtaza had forgotten my promise to bring him some seeds, or was too polite to mention it. I had thought it a nice idea, then thought of the Scottish rhododendron, or the Australian rabbit. Visions came of some humble British flower, say the daffodil, introduced by me, spreading like wildfire through the Karakoram, jaundicing whole valleys, wrecking sensitive and unique ecosystems, sending species to the wall. Bird life decimated, families driven from their land by the golden host . . . What I really wondered was: Would I ever dare own up?

242

Murtaza was occupied with some calculations. Two big projects were under way: a school at Astore, a bridge on Gupis side. Work was plentiful, flowers bloomed, peace had reigned and a new baby was born, but Murtaza was as miserable as ever.

243

“Why do you people take no sugar in tea?” he asked as it was served. Here was a question I could cope with. Much whispering in the kitchen. Separate tea for the guest, separate! No sugar. Sugar in a bowl, it’s what they do. We spoke amiably enough about health; it was a subject in which he could take a mournful interest. I said, “We believe sugar to be bad for the teeth, and general health.” I was doing it again, lapsing into a sort of Pathé Newsspeak. Major Khan, General Health.

244

He stirred plenty into his own cup. “And so, still you are not married?”

245

“It’s common, you know, among professional women.”

246

“What is the meaning of ‘professional women’?”

247

“Commonly, one who has qualifications. Women of higher education who, after attaining their degrees, spend some years at work in their chosen careers before considering marriage.” That’ll do, I thought.

248

He nodded glumly. “Thank you. You have Free Choice. I suppose it is a good system. In our system, our parents make the arrangements. My father says: You will marry with her. You have Individual Freedom.”

249

“It can bring its individual problems.”

250

“Divorce is common in your country.”

251

“It is no great shame now, as it once was.”

252

“But now you have your qualifications, and several years in your occupation. Now you can get married!” I looked at his eyes; there was not a hint of a joke.

253

“You have visited the Major, my cousin?”

254

“Yes, we were speaking of local politics.”

255

“Ah, do you understand our problems? Do you know, here in Gilgit we have a Commissioner, for the whole Northern Areas. This one is from Peshawar. He, the heads of the various departments, even headmasters of middle and high school, are from Outside. Subordinates only are local, they can’t speak with us people. We are like sheep, like colony of Pakistan!”

256

“I know, my country too.”

257

“But you can vote.”

258

“We are five million, against fifty million.”

259

“After this Dogra regime we offered our services to Pakistan, and this is what we get, that the headmasters of our middle schools are from outside. Urdu, Punjabi, Pushto speaking. They can’t talk to us! We are like cattle, like sheep.”

260

“It is,” I said, “so interesting.”

261

“It’s a mess! A mess! This question of language. My language is Shinas, it is Gilgit language. In Hunza, one side of the river, one language: Burushaski. On the other side, another tongue. Between Ganesh and Passu, another. Between Passu and Sost, yet another. In this Shimshal valley, another. In my village, in one village there is two difference of words, how do I say?”

262

“Dialect?”

263

“Just so.”

264

“In my country,” I said, “we are struggling to keep native languages alive. English has taken over everything.” Like daffodils, I thought. We shook our heads.

265

“What’s the solution, Murtaza?”

266

“There is no solution.”

267

Up towards the library they were building more offices. Boys were swimming in the irrigation canal, their huge trousers inflated like crinolines. Another hot day in this too-hot summer. I wanted to go to the library because it was cool. I remembered the anonymous door in a whitewashed wall, green fronds tapping against the windows. The lane took me past the “Lady Shop.” The Lady Shop was advertised by a large painting of a white-skinned woman giving a bright lopsided smile. She was surrounded by floating jars of cream and hairbrushes and nail polish, as if bothered by a poltergeist. I wondered if they have poltergeists, all these teenagers cooped up together.

268

The grass of the library garden was wet, and a pleasure to walk through. A hose propped on a stone spluttered out water. There was a gardener, squatting at the wall with his shirt-tails trailing in the grass.

269

Of course it was all still there, the studious quiet of the reading room. The librarian nodded in his tall and sombre way, like a flower, and unlocked the little rustic alcove which housed the local collection.

270

There was The Travels of Fa Hsein, the unassuming memoirs of a Chinese Buddhist monk who struggled over the Karakoram in the fourth century. Shelved next to that: The Hunza Diet, a cheap 1970s paperback which guaranteed that a particular mixture of fruit, exercise and meditation would produce appalling longevity. I chose an unbound book, a photocopy of an older typescript which had been bashed out on a Remington Rand. It was The Autobiography Sir M. Nazin Khan KCIE, Mir of Hunza State (died 1938). Translated from the Burushaski into Urdu, Persian and English.

271

This was treasure indeed. I took it to an easy chair beneath the softly turning fans, and composed myself by gazing at the photographs. A row of long-dead handsome boys looked down upon me, each with flying moustaches and a drawn sword across his knee. Did their spirits crowd around as I opened that glorious book?

272

Within ten minutes I was lost in a lost world of fratricide and hostages, of falcons, tithes and magic frogs, of British and Russian push-and-shove and the story of a gun cast of all the kingdom’s copper. I was in clover; this is what Himalayan romance was all about.

273

At that time the Mir of Hunza controlled the passage between the British Agency in Gilgit and their outpost in Kashgar. Whether mail or messengers got through in safety, the Mir decided. He was therefore the happy recipient of astonishing gifts and sweeteners from every quarter. If merely to receive presents bored him, he could always go out and steal. There were raiding parties to enjoy; should he wish to stock up on horses, he merely rustled them from next door. The book progressed through a story of horrible complexity; of coups and murders amd power struggles. When the author was a small boy in bed with fever, with his faithful servant asleep across the threshold, there was a murder in his garden. He recounted the gory tale with complete equanimity. I got lost, couldn’t understand who was murdering whom, who was married to whose sister, whose nephew was despatched to the Chinese court and why, but neither could the translator, for he interrupted the steamy narrative with an exasperated aside: “Note: I do not quite see what all this is about, nor is there any clue as to whom the people concerned are.” I was mightily relieved, and grateful to him. It meant I could drop any pretence at scholarship and just get on with the yarn.

274

It opened when the author was a boy of eight:

Fond of riding and shooting, I went out daily on my donkey with a bow and arrow, and just before my eighth birthday my father presented me with a matchlock. In those days pebbles were used instead of bullets and in a very short time I became an expert shot. When I was nine my father let me select a pony from some he had captured on a raid on Ladakh, but alas, though it was as big as a Kashmiri pony, it was so lazy that it would not trot, so I sought counsel from Ghulam Naghshband who recommended a good beating each morning, a prescription that soon remedied matters.

So began a life of intrigue and raids, and court affairs so boring the Mir could hardly bring himself to recollect them. As an appendage to the book were written huge lists of grandiose names. These were noteworthy people whom the Mir had once met. There were dozens of dreary Rajas through from Srinagar; there were Chinese officials bearing gifts of coin and silk; but it clearly bored the Mir to write of them. Here was a man who could remember vividly and with love the names of his father’s horses until that gentleman was overtaken by age, “thereafter he used to ride a yak.” Only after the list of horses come the Rajas, then the Multibars, but the names of his father’s six wives escaped the Mir. He insisted, though, that every child was conceived in wedlock, and no bastards were left in his father’s wake.

275

The treachery of the dread Nagaris filled the typewritten pages. For generations these tribes, who face each other across a wild river, had been at war. Occasional attempts at peace through intermarriage between the royal families invariably failed. More years passed, more gifts of horses and weaponry were showered upon the Mir; these he remembered. He remembered being sent as a young boy to Gilgit; no three-hour trip on a wagon in those days. He was to act as hostage and so guarantee the safety of the British Agent, Biddulph, as the latter made his dangerous journey to Hunza. The boy was entertained here for the duration of Biddulph’s stay. Only when Biddulph was safely home was the boy released, with his usual game-show shower of gifts. Other moustachioed heroes of the Victorian age are mentioned in the Mir’s despatches: Younghusband, and Curzon. The latter distinguished himself in the Mir’s memory by his inability to speak Persian, the lingua franca, above a single word: that for very good! which he repeated, parrot fashion, throughout the banquet.

276

The casting of the Hunza gun clearly fixed itself in the young Mir’s mind. It entailed the services of one Adina, gun-maker to the Afghan Court, and no wimp, I’ll warrant. He was persuaded to come to Hunza and set to work with one copper utensil from each household. (The more I read of this book, the more it felt like a Russian film script. How I could see the messengers riding from the palace down to the people’s hovels, and demanding from the peasants within a copper jug for the greater glory of the kingdom.) Two-thirds of the Mir’s own copper utensils were added to the hoard, and Adina made a clay mould. The molten copper was poured into the mould, but the cast was too big and the Hunza clay different to that of Adina’s native Badakshan.

277

So men were sent to Badakshan to fetch clay, and returned with it, and another expert gun-maker. They melted down the original copper, and rode farther afield to Ghujal and Mayun to scour the land for more kettles and cups; and all was poured into the cast of Badakshani clay. Forty men, it is noted, worked daily on the process. The cast was broken after two days . . . but the gun was one and a half handspans short. The gun-maker, no doubt wondering if he’d ever see Badakshan again, patched it. For a week the gun was bored and polished, while another smaller Kohistani gun was cast. “The secret of the gun’s manufacture was kept from the Nagaris.” Just as well — they’d have split their sides: “at Dungdars the Kohistani gun was fired for the first time and incontinently exploded.” What became of the expert gun-makers is not recorded, but the big gun didn’t let them down. It survived to fire a welcome to Biddulph, on his arrival in Hunza. His journey from Gilgit — from this, his very house wherein I sat — had been delayed for two years while the road so desired by the British was improved, and Biddulph’s fear of treachery abated.

278

I got up, and began to look with renewed interest at the photographs — where was the Mir, where Biddulph? One of the pictures high and out of reach? There, though, was the last Mir of Hunza. And here was a mad squinting photo of the first jeep to cross the Shandor Pass; full of boffins and bespectacled engineers. To take it the photographer must have lain on the bonnet of the jeep, which was canted at an angle of 30 degrees. The film, at least, had survived.

279

I sat again, and continued with the story of the magic sieve, which began: “In the olden days, people were much troubled by ghosts who would appear in villages with their feet turned back and one eye in the middle of their foreheads . . .”

280

Back at the Golden Peak — the palace of the enemy, the Mir of Nagar, the kingdom across the river — I thought: I would like to meet a Mir. The present Mir of Nagar is reputed to have a passion for Slough. Does he lean out of the window of his fairy-tale castle in the mountains, above the wheat-filled terraces and apricot trees, and dream of Slough? Are his nightmares full of friendly bombs? Was Slough the source of this wallpaper? And the children of Slough — whence do their fairy-tale images come? From the days when darkest Europe was like Nagar and Hunza: divided into innumerable kingdoms, each with palaces and princesses and ghosts with their feet on backwards. I thought how wonderful to have been here then; when poor Biddulph had to wait two years for his improved road. His track is still visible from the modern road, a hair-raising line sweeping and falling like a roller coaster up and along the rockwalls. At Nilt, it looks like the entrance not to another kingdom, but to another world entirely.

281

The next day was Friday, and the family were going on a picnic. I went to say goodbye, that I was going up to Hunza for a few days. They waited on the garden couch in a great display of finery. Each woman wore a richly coloured shalwar-kameez, with a yoke of mirror-work and beads. Rashida wore tiny jewelled slippers. Their perfumes were light, their handbags fit for an evening dance. A strip of jewels ran from Jamila’s ear lobe into the folds of her hair, and enhanced her golden earrings. They had polished their nails. Even Mrs. Shah had used some lipstick. They were waiting for the men to show up with the jeep. Young Hina, in a frilly skirt with leggings, ran to the green gates and peeked through the crack looking for the jeep.

282

“Where are you going?” I asked.

283

“Naltar!”

284

“I thought that was a glacier.”

285

“Very beautiful!”

286

“You’re going on a glacier dressed like this?”

287

Jamila punched my arm.

288

“The jeep’s here!” cried Hina. The women rose and processed towards the gates. Mrs. Shah checked through the crack to make sure. At her word each woman took a vast embroidered shawl and began to hide herself. Folds of cotton covered the jewellery, the mirror-work yokes, the wrists and bangles, the lipstick and earrings. The last fold crossed the bridge of the nose until only the eyes could be seen. I was standing in a crowd of ghosts.

289

I could tell Rashida was smiling, because her eyes crinkled up. She pressed her cheek to mine. “We are Shia girls.”

290

One by one they lowered their eyes and stepped outside to walk the few yards to the jeep.