Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (Vintage International) (55 page)

For the first time that evening there was a police jeep, moving cautiously in the narrow lane.

The big man said, “The police are rubbish.”

They all agreed.

The big man said, “They come at twelve-thirty, when everything closes down.”

He was in trouble with the police. He was on a murder charge and had spent a year in jail before being released on bail. That was why that morning he had been in the lawyer’s office.

He said, “Justice is rubbish. Law is rubbish. Law is only for the poor, not for the rich.”

We went up the steps to the lobby of a movie house. The lobby was empty; the cinema looked closed. The big man showed the still photographs on the display boards, and his friend in the jersey said, “All these girls are pros.” Again as though they were being offered to me. I said I was embarrassed. The friend—a sudden, unexpected fellow feeling arising between us—said, “I know very well what you mean.”

We went back to the van. An absolute derelict had been watching it. He came out of the darkness and, shriveled, skin and bone, hardly a man, asked for money, which, wordlessly, but without disregard, the men gave.

The big man said, “Last round.”

We drove slowly down and up and down the narrow lanes again. Rich men came and took away the girls, they said. Right at the end of our last round, pointing to a dark thin man in a dark
shalwar-kameez,
drugged-looking, pulling at a cigarette, the big man said, “A broker. Those three.” He meant the girls in the lighted room. The dark man was standing in the dark street just in front of the room.

The big man said, “Now where do you want to go?” I said, “Back to the hotel.” They were all disappointed.

In the old days I would have grown dizzy with excitement here. Up to my mid-thirties I had been attracted to prostitutes and sought them out. My memories of those times were not really of pleasure, however; they were more of the enervation that came after the dizziness. The men in the van might have thought that I was pretending—prostitutes in Pakistan had a recognized place in lower-middle-class and upper-class life: there would have been no dishonor for me—but I now had no brothel urge. My ideas of sexual satisfaction had changed.

The big man picked up a bottle-shaped cutout that was standing against the windscreen. It was of Nawaz Sharif, the opposition leader, broad-waisted in long shirt and unbuttoned waistcoat. The big man said, “He is my leader.” The cut-out figure was the leader, in fact, of all the men in the van. I was, to my surprise, among politicians of a sort.

Politics and sexual repression and cruelty and captive women and music and grime and lepers wasting away and exposed food: many ideas and sensations were in conflict in this pleasure area. Everything was to be distrusted; everything canceled out.

The big man wasn’t lying, I learned later. He was as important as he said he was. He had done the things that important men in this kind of area did, and some people wanted to get him. We might easily have been fired on that evening, from one of those dark upper windows.

3
 

O
N
F
RIDAY, THE SABBATH
—it had been declared the sabbath only in 1977, as part of a political auction in Islamic pledges between a prime minister and his challengers, in which it could be said the prime minister had both lost and won: he had been deposed soon afterwards and tried and hanged, but the Friday sabbath had stayed—on Friday, when Rana didn’t have to put on his lawyer’s black suit and black tie, he took me to his father’s ancestral village.

His father had no land there now. But the village was full of relations, and Rana had arranged for an uncle to receive us. Five uncles of Rana still owned all the land. They had the same grandfather; they were brothers or cousins. There were four or five hundred houses in the village, Rana said. Each house had from eight to ten people, and at one time most of those people would have worked the land for the landowners. Now a few had gone abroad, to Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and other places; and a few had started businesses of their own, small poultry farms, little shops, an ice factory. Life there still followed the old pattern. Everybody got up before sunrise, whatever the season and the weather. They worked until noon. The field workers took their food in the fields; they didn’t return home until the end of the working day.

It was this old and beautiful way that Rana wanted me to see. He made his own arrangements for the car. It was a friend’s car, and the friend was the driver. The friend was shorter and stouter than Rana. He was as young as Rana, but things were already moving for him. He had his own business in a small town. He made and exported garments, still in a small way, but he had dreams. They made him talkative, until we hit the bad roads and the drive became a trial.

The way out led for some time past a tree-lined canal, and then we were on the very flat plain of the Punjab. It was the area of Raiwind, Rana said; every summer religious scholars met here. They were more than scholars; they were missionaries. I remembered the gathering in 1979: like an immense fairground in the flat land: the roads and glinting cars seen from far and diminishing in the distance; the hummocked spread of tents; the waterlogged ground as springy as a mattress, breaking at every footfall into minute cracks that sealed up again as soon as the foot was lifted; and then, in the enclosed space of the tents, the accentuated perspective view of tent poles leaning this way and that and going back and back, smaller and smaller; a great restless seated crowd in the aqueous covered light; with shifting and very white gashes above, where the tent covers didn’t absolutely meet, and the sky showed.

The Raiwind gathering that year had come at a time when the country was having its first taste of religious terror, under General Zia. He had hanged Mr. Bhutto, the Friday sabbath man; he had gone then to Mecca to do the little pilgrimage, not the full one, but he had still come back with a hundred million dollars of Saudi money. Government offices in Pakistan were required to stop for all the prescribed prayers; Islamic whipping vans were being sent out to deal with the wicked. People were cowed. Some of them felt they couldn’t be good enough; they felt they had to do more and more; and all around Raiwind, even after the ecstasies of the missionary tents, people could be seen on the roadside saying more prayers.

The land—on this Friday morning, when we were driving to Rana’s village—was so flat and the air so clear that people could be seen from very far away, two or three villages at once: very small figures, some playing cricket on this holiday morning, some running or walking: the sharpness of the detail, and the small size of the figures, giving the eye a kind of pleasure. The houses were of clay brick and were the color of the earth. From time to time there were the fat, tapering chimneys of brick kilns, with disordered or broken-into brick piles around them.

There was a shortcut, Rana said. If we could find out where it was we would get to the village in an hour. He couldn’t remember where the
shortcut was, and he didn’t know what condition it would be in after the floods. We began to ask. Rana was right. There was a shortcut, and two or three people told us that the floods hadn’t done it too much harm. But the shortcut, when we came to it, was nothing like a real road. It was full of ruts and wide puddles, and at every village there was a jam. The shops at these village intersections were set far back on their plots; on the trampled, muddy space in front of the shops goods were displayed. This illusion of extra space encouraged people to make wide maneuvers and added to the confusion. Once for about ten minutes we couldn’t move at all, because there was such a tangle of horse-drawn tongas, carts, cars, bicycles, buses.

Many of the carts were driven by very young boys, sitting on the very edge of their carts and smoking like men, allowing themselves to be bounced up and down a little more than was necessary, and handling the reins with something like dash: the labor still new and exciting, a proof of manhood. On a dreadful stretch of stony, half-made road we saw a narrow-backed boy of about ten pushing hard at a little handcart behind the horse cart of his father. The boy was having trouble. He leaned to one side of the cart and then to the other, making the handcart tack from side to side on the stony road.

I asked Rana, “What will happen to that boy?”

Rana said, “His future is lost.”

After two hours of the shortcut—always villages, always jams—Rana said we would come back by the other road.

At last we came to the little town that served the village. And then a while later to the village itself. Brick-walled plots; gutters on either side of the road; many pools for waste. Rana showed a building which he said was the girls’ school, but we didn’t stop. We drove on to the uncle’s house.

He was waiting for us, and when we entered the outer courtyard where he received people we saw him. He was a fine-faced, slender man all in white except for the black shoes—white turban, white
dhoti
and
koortah:
country clothes—and with a well-trimmed white beard.

The small house was at the end of the courtyard: a dirt-floored verandah with brick columns supporting the roof, and a wide dirt-floored room with concrete walls and wooden doors. There was a reed mat on the dust of the dirt floor in the verandah, and a string bed in the inner room. A ceiling fan hung from the timber ceiling; the crossbeams on which the ceiling rested looked like iron rails. A new bed frame, as yet unstrung, stood on its end against one wall. Big nails on a wall for clothes; two wall niches, one above the other.

Two extra string beds were brought in for us by men who suddenly appeared. A string chair was brought in for Rana. A cousin in a dhoti and singlet, and with a towel over his bare shoulder, came in then and offered salted
lassi,
buttermilk. This serving cousin was much smaller than Rana or the uncle in white.

A young boy, carefully dressed in a khaki-colored
shalwar-kameez
and black sandals, switched on the fan. It was too cool for the fan. We turned it off. The boy who had turned the fan on was another cousin. He was mentally defective. Rana told the story. When the boy was about a month old another cousin had accidentally dropped a block of ice on him; the boy had been like that ever since. And perhaps the ice had come from that ice factory Rana had mentioned.

The boy had a booming voice he couldn’t control. He was full of attention for the visitors, and when he attempted to talk in his booming voice he became the center of attention, with Rana looking tenderly at him, and the uncle looking at him.

Other people began to come, to pay their respects to Rana. The
patwari,
the man who kept the village land records, came on his motorbike. He was dressed formally, in an olive-gray shalwar-kameez suit. He was in his own way an important official; his position and duties had been defined in Mogul times. The taxes a landowner paid depended on the patwari’s records. But he wasn’t properly introduced, and he said nothing at all; he just stayed in the room.

A high brick wall divided the outer courtyard, where visitors could be received, from the inner courtyard of the family house, where they couldn’t go. A little girl in a flowered green long dress peeped round the wall, as if to find out whether visitors had really come, as she might have been told. When she saw us she pulled back as if frightened. A neem tree grew on the other side of that wall, and smoke rose from a fire of some sort in the inner courtyard.