Khalid Ishaq drove me back to the Intercontinental. When we were on Club Road he turned off into the grounds of the Karachi Gymkhana, the British club of colonial days.
It was late; the lights were dim; it was quiet. There were a few elderly men in the bridge room; but the wide verandah-with an old, dark, uneven wooden floor-that ran the length of the building was empty. The British had built Karachi and the Gymkhana. The club, at this hour, still felt like theirs; but their fantasy, of empire building, had been absorbed into another.
AHMED was taking me to dinner at his house, and I went down to the lobby of the Intercontinental to wait for him. As soon as I sat down on the sofa a young man whom I had barely noticed left where he was sitting and threw himself next to me, with a movement so sudden, violent, and intimate that I was startled.
He wore the long Pakistani shirt and loose cotton trousers; he had the squat physique and the round face of the taxi driver who had driven me round Karachi. His English was thick and hard to follow. "Cafeteria"-was that what he was saying?
"Cafeteria," he was whispering, "where is cafeteria?"
I pointed to where the coffee shop was. But he wasn"t interested. He said, "Nothing else here? Upstairs?"
"Rooms."
"Rooms. Only rooms? You live here?"
"For a few days."
"Only rooms, eh? Pool, where is pool? You know the pool?"
"It"s closed."
"Closed. This Islamic government closed it."
The lobby was busy. The foreign air crews-the princ.i.p.al users of the Intercontinental-came and went. One tall young German girl, lusciously hipped, with her hair in a pony tail at the side, was attracting the young man"s attention.
He said, "Woman is G.o.d"s gift to man. You think?"
"Yes. You come here a lot?"
"My first time."
And it turned out that he had been in the lobby for only twenty-five minutes. He had come with a friend-that older, thinner man in a brown country outfit on the other chair.
The young man beside me said, "We come to see the traffic."
He said he was a student. I asked what he studied. He said he was really a shopkeeper; he had said he was a student because he wanted to be a doctor; his family wanted him to be a doctor and do well. He was twenty-four; he came from Sukkur, which he said was four hundred miles to the northeast (it was nearer). He sold cloth in Sukkur. He had come down with his brother to Karachi "to do a little business." He had done his business; he was a little bored; and the friend from Sukkur on the other chair, more experienced in Karachi ways, had suggested they should come to the Intercontinental to see "the traffic."
They hadn"t yet broken their fast on this Ramadan day (there was a sign in the Intercontinental coffee shop saying that Muslims would not be served during the hours of the fast), and the friend seemed exhausted, seemed even to be falling asleep. His eyes were half closed; he was nodding unsteadily. I said, "Your friend is falling asleep." I thought that the young man said in reply, "My friend is blind, cannot see." It looked true. But what the young man was saying was only, "My friend cannot speak English."
And the luck with the traffic came to the friend. A French group came out of the lift, a man and two women. The man was the true beauty in the group, slender, all in white, the towelling texture of his jersey contrasting with the smooth drill of his trousers. He remained standing, but one of the two women of his court sat next to the sleepy man from Sukkur.
He woke up and, sleepy-eyed as he was, wriggled until he was touching her. He knew about the traffic in the Intercontinental; he knew that foreigners and their shameless women, non-Muslims, could be treated with contempt as open as this. The woman took out some colour photographs from her bag. The man from Sukkur leaned over the woman"s shoulder to look. But the pictures were not as exciting as he had perhaps expected; and sleep began again to get the better of him. He stared vacantly ahead, too exhausted to consider the traffic moving in and out of the lifts.
I introduced Ahmed when he arrived. This was a misjudgement. Ahmed was of Pakistan, not a visitor, and he wasn"t amused. He said, when we were in his car, that the men from Sukkur (whom he had greeted ceremoniously, thinking they were friends of mine) were villagers, rustics. People like that came to the Intercontinental to look at unveiled women and women in bikinis. There were rich Pakistanis who came for the same thing; they rented rooms that overlooked the pool. Palestinians-Muslims-had contributed to the craze. Some of them (they sounded like guerrillas living on subsidies, but Ahmed didn"t say that) had come to Karachi with European women, who had lounged around in bikinis by the Intercontinental pool; the story had spread.
For villagers like the men from Sukkur Ahmed had no regard. These were the men-villagers who had got to know about the traffic at the Intercontinental, had the coolness to defy the doormen, and thought they had understood the world-who became communists. Politics in Pakistan could be as simple as that.
Ahmed said, "The world is mixed up now. People are confused. There is no longer any symmetry in many people"s lives."
I put to him Khalid Ishaq"s point about the emotional rejection of the West. How much of that rejection was self-deception? Could a civilization so encompa.s.sing, a civilization on which people here depended for so much, be truly rejected?
Ahmed was divided. He said he himself didn"t like being abroad. He was always "under tension." It was because of "the time factor." When he was abroad, in a big city, he was ruled by the need to be on time. It weighed on him; it tormented him; he ceased to feel master of himself. Then he said, "But when people here talk about the emotional rejection of the West, they usually mean one thing. Women."
On the subject of women Ahmed was touchy. He saw himself as a liberal; but his liberalism was shot through, more than he might have acknowledged, with Muslim anxieties. Having grown devout in middle age, he had become oppressed by the Muslim idea of accountability. I believe he feared some retribution for his own womanizing past; and his daughters, lovely girls, liberally educated, were at the centre of his anxieties. During the Bangladesh crisis, reports that Pakistani soldiers were raping Bengali women had caused him unspeakable anguish. Rape, for a Muslim, was more than a physical a.s.sault on a woman; it destroyed her honour, and so destroyed her life; it destroyed the honour of her family. Ahmed said, "For two months, while that was going on, I couldn"t sleep."
His house was in one of the many new housing colonies of Karachi. It was a big concrete house. But Ahmed, important as he was, lived simply. The drawing/dining-room, lit by a dim ceiling light, felt bare: it had only essential furniture and two television sets, one of them broken.
Ahmed"s son came in. He was in his twenties, and a doctor. He worked in a local hospital and didn"t intend to go abroad. He said he wanted to serve the people of Pakistan, and I believed him. He was smaller than his father, paler, more Aryan in features, a gentle man, as withdrawn as his father was ebullient. He was content to let his father speak for him.
Like a man still making a public statement of his faith-and his voice filled the room-Ahmed said, "I wanted all my children to serve in hospitals. As doctors, nurses, even as sweepers. Because in hospitals you lessen the distress of others."
Ahmed said he hadn"t forced religion on his son; he had left him free to choose. And the son, with a kind of nineteenth-century earnestness, was preoccupied with the whole question of belief.
He said, "In the beginning men worshipped stones. Then fire. Today we find those practices funny. Wouldn"t men tomorrow find the practices of today funny?"
Ahmed let him say that. Then he spoke for his son again. "When people come around to ask for money for religious causes, you know what he tells them? He tells them it is better for people to give blood for the sick."
The son nodded, looking down, acknowledging what his father had said, but shrinking from the tribute.
The dinner was brought out by Ahmed"s wife. Ahmed and I were the only people who were going to eat. The son was just going to sit with us; and so, too, was another man, who now arrived. The talk turned, as it so often did in Pakistan, to the situation of Pakistan.
Ahmed said: "I will tell you the story of this country in two sentences. In the first quarter of this century the Hindus of India decided that everything that was wrong had to do with foreigners and foreign influence. Then in the second quarter the Muslims of India woke up. They had a double hate. They hated the foreigners and they hated the Hindus. So the country of Pakistan was built on hate and nothing else. The people here weren"t ready for Pakistan, and people who don"t deserve shouldn"t demand."
It was what many conservative Muslims said: that the Muslims of India, as Muslims, hadn"t been pure enough for a Muslim state.
Ahmed said: "Then they began to distribute the property of the Hindus who had left Pakistan. So many of the people who came here from India got something for nothing. That was the att.i.tude in the beginning. That is the att.i.tude today. But I am too old to be unhappy now. It happens, you know. You find you are old, and you just stop worrying about certain things. It is for young people to worry. I am fifty-nine. At that age life is just death in instalments."
There came into the house a very big man, an overgrown peasant, he seemed, and Ahmed"s irritability vanished. He got up to greet his visitor and solicitously led him in. The newcomer was immense, well over six feet, and built like a wrestler. At the top of this bulk was an incongruous baby-face: a face unmarked by pa.s.sion, rancour, expectation. He was in Pakistani country clothes, not especially fresh, and he wore a flat Sindhi cap. For a man so big he moved very quietly, and with small steps. He spoke no English, spoke scarcely at all; and when he sat at the table-sitting well away from it-he still seemed distant.
Ahmed said, "You remember I told you about an old shrine in the interior of Sind that I want you to visit? I told you about the people there who have given up the world to serve the poor-you remember? He comes from that place."
But the face was less the face of someone who had chosen to serve than the face of someone lost and patient, a man from whom some essential human quality was missing.
Ahmed said, "I will tell you a story about this man. He developed a tumour on his leg and the doctors said he had cancer and there was nothing they could do for him. He went to the h.o.m.oeopathic people. They wanted him to have an injection of snake poison: he would have to let the snake bite him."
I made an exclamation.
Ahmed"s son said, "A snake bite is like an injection."
(Some weeks later I read in the paper that the police were looking for a man who specialized in snake-bite injections.) Ahmed said, "But he couldn"t face the idea of the snake bite. So he went back to his shrine and prayed. He prayed for days. And one day the courage came to him. He took a knife and cut off the tumour. And he"s been all right ever since."
Ahmed spoke in Urdu or Sindhi, and the big man pulled up his loose trousers to show the scar on the inside of his firm, elephantine thigh. The scar-irregularly shaped, the skin shiny and seamed-was six inches long and in places about an inch wide.
Ahmed"s son went and looked.
He said almost at once, "It wasn"t cancerous. It was a benign tumour. See-he has another on his head, here."
The scar was there; the act of courage remained. But the embarra.s.sment-together with the placid giant, who continued to sit at the table but couldn"t follow English-was set aside in renewed talk of Pakistan.
Ahmed said, "Everybody fools everybody else here. Politicians, civil servants, everybody."
And Ahmed and his other visitor (who had so far said little) agreed that people were turning to Islam because everything else had failed. Even at the universities the Islamic wave was swamping academic life.
But wasn"t that, I asked, the special trap of a place like Pakistan? Couldn"t people now accept that they were Muslims in a Muslim country, and that Pakistan was what the faith had made of it? Did it make sense-after the centuries of Islamic history-to say that Islam hadn"t been tried?
Ahmed became grave. He said, "No, it has never been tried."
3.
The Little Arab
Forty miles east of Karachi was the little town of Banbh.o.r.e, an ancient port site dating back to the first century B.C. Banbh.o.r.e had become important because excavations there had uncovered the remains of what was thought to be the first mosque in the subcontinent, a mosque built in the first century of Islam, shortly after the conquest of Sind by the Arabs in 712 A.D. Ahmed took me there on the last Friday of Ramadan, which was also the last day of Ramadan.
The Ramadan month ends, and the Id festival is proclaimed, when the new moon is sighted. Ramadan was expected to end on the Thursday; but the government moon-sighting committee hadn"t sighted the moon. So Ramadan in Pakistan lasted an extra day, and Mr. Salahuddin, the newspaper editor, had to hold back his festival supplement and hurry through a non-festival editorial. If it had been Id on the Friday, Ahmed would have been busy receiving and paying visits and wouldn"t have been able to take me to Banbh.o.r.e.
We didn"t go there right away. We went first to a mosque to find some people Ahmed thought I should meet. They weren"t there. We drove around the sprawl of Karachi for a little. Then the time drew near for the noon prayers, and Ahmed became restless and decided to drive back to his neighbourhood mosque.
I asked him whether he believed literally in the afterlife.
He said, "Oh, yes." He widened his eyes and nodded, just as he had widened his eyes and nodded when he had said that Islam hadn"t been tried. "Oh, yes. I am curious about it. You see, I"m like a child in some ways." Then he sought to explain his belief. "People die. But they exist in my mind while I remember them. I cannot say they have vanished while I remember them." It was in some such way that he expected to be remembered-but in the spirit-until the remembering agent disappeared. Simpler people had their own ideas: they believed in a paradise that duplicated this world, but with everything put right, and-with the women. But in fact, Ahmed said (or so I understood him to say), the women in paradise were to be without periods: they were to be pure.
I would have liked to hear more of this idea of purity, but I felt that Ahmed, with his sensitivity about women and s.e.x, would have thought the interest prurient. So I didn"t press; I thought I would save it for later.
The mosque, in a hot, dusty street, was new, of concrete, and undistinguished, its walls ochre and chocolate. The street outside was spread with rugs for the overflow crowd. It was time for the main Friday prayers; the mullah had finished his Koran reading. Ahmed took his prayer mat from the car and knelt with the crowd in the street, in the sun. I waited in the car.
Later, as we were driving through Karachi, I saw printed posters: We Sacrificed for Pakistan Not Bangladesh.
Ahmed didn"t tell me what group was responsible. But the posters-with their hint of further divisions and animosities in his country-made him irritable. He said, "They sacrificed nothing. If there was no Pakistan I would have been a third-cla.s.s clerk. Big jobs came to people like me when we got Pakistan." Later he said, "In two hundred years it will be the same here." And still later, the irritation continuing to work on him, turning to a kind of gloom, he said, "When I was a young man I was told that my country was Hindustan and that it was the finest country in the world. The poet Mohammed Iqbal told me that. Then one day in the 1930s I was told that my country was no longer Hindustan and the people I had thought of as my brothers were my enemies. Then I was told that my country was Pakistan. Then I found that that country had shrunk. Now I can feel it shrinking again."
For seven years, until the creation of Pakistan in 1947, Ahmed had served in the Royal Indian Navy, the navy of undivided, British-ruled India. He had taken part in the Bombay naval mutiny of 1946. But, thirty years later, his naval memories were not heroic or political; they were memories of sin. He drank. "Whisky was three rupees a bottle. Beer was free." And there were the women. "My friends and I used to form cooperatives. And we would buy a woman for the evening and make love to her in turn."
I wanted to hear more of those cooperatives-I liked the word, apart from everything else. But it was the sabbath; Ahmed was in a penitential mood, scourging himself for his past and also, it seemed, scourging himself for the state of his country.
I said, "Age takes care of the pa.s.sions."
"You think so, you think so?"
I liked him for that.
He drove fast; he always did; there was in his driving something of the release and excitability of his speech. Karachi was enormous. The city had spread over the flat desert; there were many housing developments, and some of them looked grand; the remittance economy could suggest a rich country. At last we were out in the desert: the early-afternoon heat, the openness, the flat scrub of useless trees. Without the Indus River and the lake-reservoirs there could have been no Karachi.
I said, "What were you saying about the cooperatives?"
He said irritably, at once explaining and punishing himself, "We did it more for the wickedness than for the pleasure."
It was clear he was going to say no more. I couldn"t ask again, and I wished I had followed my first instinct and saved the matter for another day.
Desert. But the land of Sind was old: seventeen miles from Karachi we came to a necropolis of many acres on an eminence in the wide wasteland: tombs two to four centuries old, of decorated soft stone, block set on block, unmortared, to form little stepped pyramids: a dead tradition, perhaps enshrining older mysteries, but now, in modern Pakistan, just there, in the desert.
Modern Pakistan. The road led past the enormous area reserved for Pakistan Steel, the country"s first major industrial project-a steel plant and a new port-a controversial project (as I discovered later), costing millions a day, and possibly in the end uneconomical, since everything would have to be imported. The Russians were building it. On the other side of the road, at some distance, were the apartment blocks for the Russians. But the port was named Bin Qasim, after the Arab commander who had conquered Sind and brought Islam to the land.
After this, still on the road to the ruins of Banbh.o.r.e, a lesser oddity: a large model village, line upon line of two-roomed huts with concrete walls and red roofs, but absolutely empty, empty since it had been built six years before, and now beginning to crumble. Had the village been built too far from where people were? Hadn"t people wanted to live in that bureaucratic fantasy of straight lines and red roofs? Ahmed wasn"t precise and didn"t want to say too much. He said only the houses hadn"t been "allocated."
They had been built six years before. That would have been in Mr. Bhutto"s time; and Ahmed was one of those who hadn"t got on with Mr. Bhutto. He had in fact left the government service when Mr. Bhutto came to power in 1971. Mr. Bhutto "carried grudges," and Mr. Bhutto felt he had a score to settle with Ahmed"s family. So Ahmed resigned; he would have been sacked by Mr. Bhutto anyway; his name was on the list of two thousand people Mr. Bhutto wanted to sack. Ahmed said he had only a few rupees when he resigned. He was building his house, and that had taken up most of what he had. He borrowed and lived on borrowed money for a year, doing a variety of little jobs, until he got a job as adviser to an industrialist.
He advised the industrialist on the procedures of government departments. Previous advisers had claimed to be spending large sums on bribes. Ahmed bribed no one. He used his authority and knowledge of the rules to get the industrialist"s work done; and the industrialist was amazed and grateful. Ahmed was soon getting a prodigious salary. He finished building his house; he paid off all his debts. And then, feeling himself near the end of his active life, he thought the time had come for him to think of others. That was why (after Mr. Bhutto"s fall) he had gone back to government service, where he earned a quarter of what he had been getting from the industrialist. Ahmed loved and admired the industrialist still. He was a truly religious man, Ahmed said, a devout Muslim who followed the Koranic injunction and set aside a percentage of his wealth for charity.
A sandy track off the main road led to Banbh.o.r.e. It was a short run, but the track looped and forked through beach vegetation; and Ahmed had to ask the way of a barebacked peasant who was dragging freshly cut branches. To come upon the excavated mound of a walled town with semicircular bastions was suddenly to feel far away: a rough outpost at the eastern limit of the Arab empire, a place of exile.
The town stood on a creek, but was now some little way from the water. The creek opened out, in the distance, into the sea. In the middle of the creek were salt flats; on a whitish spit of land, which looked intolerably hot, were the contemporary houses of the salt workers; on one flat far away were little white pyramids of salt.
It could never have been a rich town. The museum displayed one gold coin; the other coins were shoddy bronze things, cast in honeycomb moulds of hard-baked ashy clay. But there was the mosque, or the floor plan of the mosque, modelled on the mosque of Kufa in Iraq: that was the treasure of Banbh.o.r.e.
Kufa was a.s.sociated with the rightly guided Muslims at the very beginning of Islam; it was one of the earliest military towns the Arabs established among the conquered peoples north of Arabia; it was from Kufa that Ali, the cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet, ruled as the fourth caliph, from 656 to 661 A.D. Conquest first, Islam later: it was the pattern of Arab expansion. So Banbh.o.r.e, repeating Kufa, and in the first century of Islam, linked Sind and Pakistan to the great days. The Banbh.o.r.e mosque, if it was what it was said to be, was fabulous. The remains had been made neat; the floor had been retiled around the few old tiles that had survived.
Fragments of decorated pottery lay all over the excavated town site. And everywhere, too, mixed with the earth, and commoner than pottery, were crushed bones, white and clean and sharp. Ahmed said they were human bones. But such a quant.i.ty! The bones weren"t only on the surface; the excavation trenches showed the mixture of bones and earth all the way down, the bones like a kind of building material. Had the town been built on a cemetery? But why were the bones so crushed? If Ahmed was right, and the bones were human bones, Banbh.o.r.e held another mystery.
I was keeping the Ramadan fast with Ahmed, and that disturbed him. He said again and again that he should have brought something for me to drink. He said that, but when we left Banbh.o.r.e he seemed in no hurry to get back to Karachi. He, who normally drove fast, now drove slowly. I thought he might himself have been tired out by the long fasting day, and the sun and salt of Banbh.o.r.e. Abruptly, after we pa.s.sed the Pakistan Steel area, now called Bin Qasim after the Arab conqueror, Ahmed drove off the road and stopped the car in low bush. I thought he wished to rest. But no: he had only been looking for a place where he could get off the road and pray. He said, "You can"t stop on the road. Those fellows in the buses and cars take pleasure in bouncing you."
I pa.s.sed him his prayer mat. He walked briskly to the edge of the road, erect, military-looking in his grey-blue Pakistani costume, the long shirt and the slack trousers; and, oblivious of the pa.s.sing traffic, he offered up his prayers for a long time. He said, when he came back, that if he missed a prayer during the day he grew restless in his sleep; his wife would wake him up and he would do the prayer he had missed.
We drove back fast to Karachi after that, not to his house, but to the house of the industrialist for whom he had worked. It was in one of the richer housing "societies." There was a wide concrete drive at one side of the big plot. Royal palms lined the front of the lawn, which went back to a terrace that ran the width of the house.
On this terrace, on an easy chair, lay an elderly man in brown; he was paralyzed. He was the grandfather, the head of the family, and once the head of the firm. Two young boys, his grandsons, were dressed like little Arabs, with the cream-coloured gown and the headgear with the black bands. They had just been to Mecca with their father, and it was clear they had done the pilgrimage in style. The father was a tall man, dressed in white, the pilgrim"s colour, and with a white skullcap. He was soft-featured, soft-voiced. He was as Ahmed had described him: in his pilgrim clothes he seemed as much a man of religion as of business.
He, Ahmed, and I sat out on the lawn. For my sake Ahmed asked for some drinks to be brought out. The servant brought out three tumblers of a red liquid. I was nervous of the colour, let my tongue touch without tasting, and-not wishing to appear to be spurning their hospitality-I asked whether I could have a Coca-Cola instead.
Ahmed was shocked. He said, with distinct irritation, that the red liquid was a delicacy; it was used to ease people off their fast; it was made from special herbs and was very expensive, twenty-three rupees for a small bottle. I would have liked to try it; but I felt, after Ahmed had mentioned the price, that I would have compounded my vulgarity by going back on my choice. So the astonished servant brought out a Coca-Cola. And through all this pother on the lawn about my drink-which I didn"t really need-the man in the white skullcap smiled sweetly.
I complimented him on his house. He said it looked much better after Mecca, because of the green. I asked about the hotels of Mecca. I was hoping to hear something about the effects of the new Arab and Muslim money; but he said only that the hotels nearer the Great Mosque and the Kaaba were more expensive, the ones farther out less expensive.
The family had migrated from Bombay, and a branch was still in business in that city. But Muslims in India were "not encouraged to come up." Some had "come up"; but generally there was no "encouragement." It was easier in Pakistan. Everything was new, just starting; and there were more opportunities; but there was as yet no "infrastructure."
I asked what difference there was for him between being in Bombay and being in Pakistan. He said that for him, as a businessman, there was no difference; business was business. But when you were in India or some other foreign country you were never sure whether the meat had been slaughtered in the correct way; you had to ask and you couldn"t always get answers; you had sometimes to go without. In Pakistan there was no such problem. Sometimes when you were abroad you felt like going to a mosque. But mosques weren"t always easy to find; you had to ask. Here, at prayer time, he said, gesturing to one end of the lawn and then to the other, here at prayer time a muezzin called from this side and a muezzin called from that side. There was no problem about finding a mosque in Pakistan.
I had expected someone less serene, more complicated. But Ahmed had spoken of the industrialist less as an industrialist than as a pious man, a good Muslim, someone who followed the rules in deed and heart. The rules made a man free: Mr. Salahuddin the newspaper editor had told me that.