Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (Vintage International) (57 page)

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1945, at the end of the war, when Shahbaz’s father was demobbed from the British Indian army, he thought he would settle in England. This was the kind of thing that some Indian princes did before the war; their money and their titles gave them a kind of exotic dignity, even if India was a colony. It was perhaps in Shahbaz’s father’s mind that the coming independence of India and Pakistan would give an equivalent dignity to a Muslim settler in England. Other Muslims from the subcontinent thought so, too; they distrusted independence for various reasons, and saw residence in England, a land of law, as a way out.

So, though Shahbaz was born in the year after independence, he hadn’t grown up without colonial and racial stress. He had gone to both primary school and public school in England, and he had suffered especially at the public school. He was the only Asian, the only Muslim, the only one who didn’t eat pork and go to the chapel. It didn’t help when his father became insolvent. For three terms Shahbaz’s fees couldn’t be paid, and it seemed at one time that he would be asked to leave. That didn’t happen, but it made Shahbaz feel separated from his friends.

Shahbaz’s father gave up the idea of settling in England. He began to prepare for a return to Pakistan. He started a business in the interior of the
Punjab. When he was twelve or thirteen Shahbaz went in the school holidays to see this business of his father’s. They visited certain feudal families in the area. These “feudals” were great landlords who owned whole villages. The sons of some of those families had been students in England, and Shahbaz’s parents had looked after them. Shahbaz now saw that on their home ground the sons of these feudals didn’t act like Oxford or Cambridge graduates. They treated their workers and peasants like serfs. The peasants would touch the feet of their landlord in submission and greeting; it was more submission than greeting; and the landlord would not ask the peasant to rise. Shahbaz, fresh from England, wanted to weep.

His last three years at the public school in England were very happy. He was on his own. At half term and in the holidays he stayed with friends or in paid accommodation. Once he stayed with a rector in Oxfordshire and he had a platonic romance with the rector’s daughter. Life was good for him; and though he was now more English than Pakistani or Muslim, though he hardly knew Pakistan, the poetry he began to write was all about poverty and beggars and cripples and people in the streets.

When he finished the public school he went back to Pakistan, to Lahore, to do a degree. He took an interest in local politics; he was against the rule of the generals; he was a man of the left. But his true political life began when he went back to England. He went to a well-known provincial university to do a degree in English literature. The place was hot with politics. It was 1968; it was the time of the Vietnam movement; and, as he remembered twenty-seven years later, “very emotional.” Everybody was saying that the “system” was rotten and had to be changed. He said it; sexy Latin American girls said it. There was “a lot of smooching around.” University life was “a kind of carnival.”

There were close Pakistani friends at the university. Many of them were doing English literature, like Shahbaz; it was one of the lighter courses, possibly the lightest, and at this time it was very political and restricted. It was encouraging Marxism and revolution rather than wide reading. So Shahbaz and his Pakistani friends in their Marxist study group read the standard (and short) revolutionary texts, Frantz Fanon, Che Guevara. And while they read certain approved Russian writers, they didn’t read or get to know about the Turgenev novels,
Fathers and Sons
(1862) and
Virgin Soil
(1877), which dealt with conditions not unlike those in feudal Pakistan, but questioned the simplicities of revolution.

Shahbaz said, when I asked about Turgenev, “The fiction I was not relating to my political development.” As though his ideas about Marxism
and revolution, however formulaic, were personal to him, part of his development.

There were similar Pakistani study groups at other universities in England. They came together and began to have meetings every two weeks in Cambridge or London. In London they linked up with Indian leftist groups. Earl’s Court in London was the leftist area, with bars and restaurants with a leftist tone. Leftists from all over the world met there, and in this international atmosphere there were discussions and all-night parties. It was “exhilarating.”

A cousin of Shahbaz’s was part of the larger London study group. She had been to Cuba and had cut cane there for six weeks and had met “Fidel.” Shahbaz was half in love with this cousin. She was a good-looking girl, and her stories of the equality in Cuba and the medical services made him love the idea of the collective even more. He became impatient for the revolution. But then, after the university, the beautiful cousin began to regress. She went back not only to having peasants cut her canes in the Punjab; she went back at the same time to a mullah-like passion for Islam. Shahbaz said, as though he was speaking of a medical condition, “She went through a complete regression.” To round off this regression, she even married a “creep.” Now in Lahore, on those social occasions when they were in the same room or place, she didn’t recognize Shahbaz.

But there was someone else for Shahbaz, another Pakistani girl from his own university. With this girl he fell fully in love, and she was apparently in love with him. Shahbaz said, as though he was talking of making love or baking a cake, “We wanted to go back and make revolution together. It was marvelous.” This idea of the future supported Shahbaz right through his time at the university. But then, at the end, when it came to packing up and leaving home and going off to the guerrilla wars, the girl found she couldn’t follow Shahbaz.

Shahbaz said, “She couldn’t make the political break with her family.”

The thought of their love kept Shahbaz warm through the ten long guerrilla years, in the deserts and mountains of Baluchistan and Afghanistan, to which, somewhat to his surprise, he found he had committed himself, in those exhilarating all-night discussions and parties in Earl’s Court and Cambridge and his own university. Ten long celibate years, because although a man might be in Baluchistan fighting for the Baluchis, he had to stay away from the women. Adultery among the nomads was a murderous business. A man thinking of adultery had to go to a woman’s tent, awaken her without awakening her husband, lead her out past relations and past the family
flocks, make love to her, and then take her back, all without being discovered. This kind of adultery was like a guerrilla war within the guerrilla war, Shahbaz said; and, though the most successful adulterers made the best fighters, Shahbaz was content to observe it from a distance. All of this, though, and his own long celibacy, lay in the future.

One of the things his Marxist student group used to discuss was the “nationality question” in Pakistan. Punjab was the dominant province; people in other provinces felt left out. Iqbal, the poet who had proposed the idea of Pakistan, had thought, with his convert’s zeal, that Islam would be identity enough and cause enough for people in the new state; and that historical ideas of clan and caste (like Rana’s Rajput pride) would disappear. Iqbal was wrong. Regional feeling was bubbling up, especially in the east; Bangladesh would soon secede.

It was the idea now of Shahbaz’s Marxist group that Marxism and revolution would do what Islam had failed to do. Shahbaz explained the idea in this way: “You needed a revolution from below. From within all the nationalities. And the process of revolution would cement the nationalities.”

Shahbaz didn’t think the idea was too abstract; it was taken from Marxist literature, and the group had spent a year and a half working it out. And they knew, too, where the revolution should start. It should be in Baluchistan, a big, near-empty desert province to the west. The population was small and backward, many of the people nomadic. There had been three uprisings since independence, and the people were still disaffected. It was a difficult area to police. It was, all in all, the place where, in the more abstract and scientific-sounding language of revolution, “the contradiction between the state and people was very clear.”

The group was now dominated by a South African Indian. His family had moved to Karachi and had a shop there. He met the group when he came to London on a visit. He was very young, nineteen or twenty, but he said he had been a Marxist all his life, and he was full of revolutionary and guerrilla stories. He said that he and all his family belonged to the African National Congress; he himself had been underground in South Africa. He had done more, young as he was: he had been underground in Pakistan itself, in Baluchistan. That shut the Pakistani Marxists up completely. The South African had no formal education, and they liked it when he abused them for their privileged backgrounds.

Shahbaz thought him inspiring and “charismatic” (that was one of Shahbaz’s words). He was a good-looking man, short and very stocky, with
piercing eyes. He had no time for people’s personal problems. To him the cause was all. This was another relationship that was to end badly for Shahbaz. The South African was to try to kill Shahbaz. The piercing eyes that attracted Shahbaz turned out to be the eyes of a paranoiac. Twenty-five years later, when all guerrilla wars were over for him, and he was back in Africa, in Zimbabwe, he committed suicide after trying to kill his son. This was something else that was in the future.

One day in London in 1969 the South African was especially abusive of Shahbaz’s university Marxists. That was his way of bringing them to order. Then he said, “You guys should stop talking and start acting. If you are serious you should give up everything and make Baluchistan the focus of a revolution in Pakistan.”

This was like the revolution from within the nationalities that the group had discussed. The primary aim of that had been the cementing of the nationalities. The South African was far more ambitious. He was aiming at total revolution, and he said he was following the precept of Lin Piao, Mao’s second-in-command during the Cultural Revolution. The countryside, Lin Piao had said, could be used to swamp the cities; the countryside was where you could start guerrilla war against the cities, which was where the state was.

They were all awed by the South African’s vision. Che Guevara of Argentina, Cuba, and Bolivia, Frantz Fanon of the French West Indies, the African National Congress, and now Lin Piao: it seemed to Shahbaz’s study group that, late though they had come to revolution, all the great and tried forces of revolution had begun to run unconquerably together for them and in them. They all began to dream of Baluchistan and guerrilla war.

The next year Shahbaz graduated. He told his parents then that he was going to a film school in Yugoslavia. He came secretly back to Karachi, spent a night there, and went by train and bus to a small town in Baluchistan. They were met by a Baluchi tribesman. He took them to a training camp in the mountains. The South African was there, and someone from the London group.

Baluchistan here was like Iran, desert plateau and bare mountain, with very little water, very little vegetation, and extremes of temperature. This was where Shahbaz was to spend ten years. For the first three years he and the others were learning the language and trying to start social services for the Baluchis.

But I felt that the narrative had become too fast here. I felt when I considered my notes that certain things had been elided. I telephoned Shahbaz; he
didn’t make difficulties. I went to see him again. I wanted to hear more about those very early days in Baluchistan. I wanted to hear more about the first day.

Shahbaz said, “I took the train from Karachi. I was met at the other end by two tribesmen on the platform. They were more urbane than the tribesmen I was to meet later. We took a bus for ten miles. We got off the bus and walked for two days. It was my first walk through mountains. Very rough terrain. I was dressed in shalwar-kameez and shoes, and a turban I was not used to. I was carrying a rucksack I was not used to carrying. On the way we made bread, and ate dry bread, and I spent my first night out in the open. It was summer. We just lay on the bare earth. It was exhausting. I got blisters. I was in pain. My whole body ached. When I arrived at the camp I was exhausted.