Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (Vintage International) (62 page)

For some reason a sheet or cloth was hung over the window, and the air-cleaner was working away. I asked the friendly servant to put on the air conditioner, and he did so.

Saleem, when he came, was in white
koortah-shalwar,
a loose cotton outfit, a man at rest. We went over the details of his father’s kidnapping case. The case obsessed Saleem; it had marked his life. As a child, for his first six years, he had gone once or twice a year to a Multan jail to see his father. Then, when his father had come out, the whole family had lived together in Sargodha for twelve years, before the father had moved to Mansura. Saleem was twenty-two when he had joined the commune. For three years as an adult, no more, he had been on his own.

He said his religious feelings had developed outside the commune. He said of the commune, “They don’t push you. We have a dish.” A satellite dish, which the Jamaat didn’t like. “Sometimes our ladies ‘meet.’ ” He meant they met strangers; this was something strict Islam forbade.

His wife, Tahira, came. In the hotel the day before, when she had come to see me with Saleem, she had looked bright. Now there was something extinguished about her expression. It might have been the absence of makeup; the Jamaat didn’t like makeup. She was handsome without it; and she had the heaviness of the lower body that came to women of her class after they became mothers, from the many days of lying-in after each birth, and the extra-rich foods they ate.

She said she was troubled when she first came here. She would have liked a better house. For the first three or four years she had been a little upset, not at all satisfied. But now it was all perfectly all right, though she would have liked a separate room for the children. She would have liked a house like the house at Sargodha, with a proper drawing room, a proper dining room, and a proper guest room.

She said, “Here we have a lot of servants. Fourteen or fifteen. A lot of guests. Very upsetting.”

Saleem said, “What she really wanted was a nuclear house.”

She said, “Now it’s all right. I am used to it. I don’t wish any more.”

The air conditioner gave a
whoomph
and a whine, and died. A power cut: and there was something like a silence all over Mansura, like the silence in a mountain valley just after a snowfall. An unsuspected door was pushed open to the left of the sheeted window, and we could see that the door opened on to the flat roof. It would have been very hot, perhaps unbearable, up here in the summer.

Saleem’s sister came in. And it was an entrance. She was a big woman in a khaki-gold shalwar, and all her head and face was covered with a loosely wrapped, light-colored, lightweight cotton cloth, which had a small, scattered decorative motif; so that she called to mind the bandaged Claude Rains in the lovely old film of
The Invisible Man,
and perhaps, like Claude Rains, she too had wrapped herself up to conceal a vacancy.

She had gone into purdah, Saleem said. (But this was not proper purdah. Proper purdah would have kept her away from Saleem’s study.) I could ask her anything I wanted about Mansura and religion, Saleem said; it was their way. He himself had spent the first five years here without saying the prayers. He said them now, but there had been no compulsion.

The sister was twenty-seven; so she would have been born the year after her father had come out of jail. She couldn’t absolutely say why she had gone into purdah. She had just felt one day she should go into purdah. And she was much calmer now. She didn’t say much more; and perhaps there was nothing more to say.

Perhaps there was no mystery, nothing to be elucidated; perhaps places like Mansura, by the prayers and outward forms of piety, and the repetition of forms, and the self-awareness that came to people through simply being here (Mansura was like Oxford in this respect: it was an endless topic of conversation to people there), perhaps places like Mansura, which could dull someone like Tahira, Saleem’s wife, could at the same time give quite simple people this possibility of constant personal theater. It was possible to imagine the drama of this sister of Saleem’s going into purdah. “Have you heard? Saleem’s sister is thinking of going into purdah.”—“She is going into purdah.”—“She’s gone into purdah.”—“It’s a question everybody asks me. I just thought one day I should go into purdah. I feel much calmer now.”

Mohammed, Saleem’s elder son, who was going to learn the whole Koran by heart, came in; with Ahmed, the younger son.

There were visitors. They were a young couple. The woman was very handsome; the man was big and strong and, young though he was, looked like a man of authority. The young woman said she came from a political
family. I knew the family name, from the newspapers; Saleem was of a feudal background, and well connected.

The woman said she hadn’t been to Mansura before. She hadn’t wanted to, because she didn’t think she would like it. She couldn’t like something that took away her freedom. And yet, though she came from a family with a name, she had given up her studies when she got married.

Her husband, the strong man, said, “It was against the custom of the society.” And since that sounded harsh, even to him, he said, “In another society it would have been different.” As though it was all only a matter of his wife’s luck.

We talked—the eternal subject—about Pakistan.

The woman’s husband said in his blunt way that the modern state was giving way to “separate fiefdoms,” as in the past. And in his blunt way he said that it would be good for business. He spoke with no regret for the passing of the state. And I could see how for him, with his tribal background, the modern state had simply been a burden without reward, a consumer of energy, a series of snares.

All the ideas—of freedom and the loss of freedom, religion and the state—were linked. It was where Iqbal’s convert’s dream of the pure Muslim polity had led, back and back to the death of the state in the region where the man had come from, and to Mansura here.

After some delay the tea was brought up the difficult steps by the servants. The power came on. And soon there was nothing more to say. We had exhausted Mansura as a subject. Saleem’s sister, in her own style of purdah, had gone down unnoticed.

6
 

F
OR MOST OF THE
M
USLIMS
of the subcontinent the partition of 1947 had been like a great victory, “like God,” as a man had said to me in Lahore in 1979. Now every day in the newspapers there were stories of the killings in the great port city of Karachi. That was where many of the Muslim migrants from India, townspeople, middle-class or lower middle-class, had gone after partition. Nearly half a century later the descendants of these people, feeling themselves strangers still, unrepresented, cheated, without power, had taken up arms against the state, in a merciless guerrilla war.

In Iqbal’s convert’s scheme Islam should have been identity enough for everybody. But the people of Sindh (the province where Karachi was) didn’t like seeing their land, half empty and half desert though it was, overrun by better educated and more ambitious strangers. The land of Sindh was ancient, and always slightly apart. The people had their own history and language and feudal reverences. They had set up political barriers, some overt, some hidden, against the strangers from India, the
mohajirs.
And in Pakistan the mohajirs had nowhere else to go.

Partition, once a cause for joy, had become like a wound for some of these mohajirs. For some the memories of those days still lived.

Salman, a journalist, was born in 1952. He was tormented by, and endlessly sought to reconstruct, the events of four days in 1947 in the town of Jalandhar, now in Indian Punjab. At some point in those four days, between the fourteenth and eighteenth of August, 1947, the absolute beginning of independence for both India and Pakistan, his grandmother was murdered in her house in Jalandhar, with others of the family. On the fourteenth she was alive, protected by Hindu neighbors. On the eighteenth Salman’s mother’s father, who had been hiding somewhere else, went to the house, a middle-class Indian courtyard house, and found it empty, with blood spattered on the walls but with no corpses.

Salman’s grandfather ran away. He must have been about fifty at that time. He managed to get on a train going to what had become Pakistan—just a short run away, along lines that until four days before had been open and busy. The train was attacked on the way. He arrived in Lahore buried under dead bodies. He was one of the few survivors.

Salman got to know the story when he was fifteen. Until that time he had lived with the idea of the Hindu and the Sikh as the ultimate evil. But when he heard this story he felt no anger. The story was too terrible for anger. It didn’t matter then who had done the killing.

The blood on the walls of a house he didn’t know (Salman had not been to Jalandhar or India) and could only imagine, the absence of bodies: the details, or the blankness of detail, from a time before he was born, worked on Salman, became the background to his life in Pakistan. He could spend minutes wondering, when the story came back to him, how the people in the house had actually met death. Had they been cut to pieces? Had they—dreadful thought—been abused?

There were other stories of that time which he got from an uncle: of the uncle (and no doubt others) hiding behind oil drums and taunting the Hindu and Sikh rioters, who didn’t want India to be broken up:

In the 1960s these stories, of death and riot, began to rankle with Salman. “I would think we had lost so much for this country, and this is what we are doing to it now.”