Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (Vintage International) (66 page)

Separate from this, and in its own little cleared area, was a traditional clay-walled cooking place of northern India, the
chulha:
something again which the Indian immigrants of a hundred years before had taken to Trinidad and which I had known as a child. So for me in Rahimullah’s family courtyard, though the chulha here had another name, it was a little bit like finding pieces of my past. Even the disorder—the bed, the drum, the basket—was like the disorder I had known in my grandmother’s houses.

I asked Rahimullah whether the masons who were at work on the house were also going to pave the yard. I asked that because of the apparent disorder; it seemed temporary; it seemed that soon everything in the yard was going to be put away again. But Rahimullah said no; what was there was good enough. And though it seemed strange then, a little later I understood: the people in the house would know where to find everything.

Rahimullah’s younger son came out of the house and ran up to me, firing an imaginary pistol. He said in English, “You! You! You are a British policeman!” It might have been the effect of television, or my jacket; or his father might have told him about their guest.

The animal pens were at the back of the main house. Just outside the walls were the dung heaps and the fields. The family’s five acres here, irrigated land, were sharecropped. Sugarcane, corn, fodder, vegetables: half of everything was for the family.

We—Rahimullah and I and the little party who had attached themselves to us—began to walk towards the main canal. We walked on the new concrete walls of the feeder canal or drain, between sugarcane fields; sugarcane here was the most profitable crop. We saw, some fields away, the sugarcane patch of another family and their low mud-and-brick house. That was a barber’s house, they told me. Not Qaim Khan; another barber.

I said, “Rich family?”

No, no, they all said in a kind of chorus, as though the poverty of that family with the mud-and-brick house was very well known.

The main canal was smaller than I expected. But it looked clean and controlled, a sudden touch of order, and the flowing water was refreshing to see. It was lined with young trees. The government looked after the
canal; the government even looked after the trees. Water and trees in the foreground and the well-kept, variegated fields stretching away in sunlight made for deep, romantic views. The openness and distance was a surprise after the crowded sabbath roads and the cluttered shops and the bicycles and the people walking to market. And yet that sense of crowd remained, in the aspect of the precious irrigated land, parceled out in small pieces.

I asked whether the barber, Qaim Khan, was of the Yusufzai clan. Rahimullah said no; Qaim Khan had no land, and land mattered. Only the blue-blooded Pathans were landowners, and they preferred to buy land here, high as the price was, rather than buy a house in a town like Peshawar, though the house in Peshawar was the better investment. Until quite recently barbers and other artisans, carpenters, blacksmiths, goldsmiths, washermen, weavers were not allowed to buy land. They were able now to buy land for houses, but it was rare for them to own agricultural land. They were not considered part of what Rahimullah called the mainstream; the mullahs were above them; and the blue-blooded Pathans were at the top. Rahimullah didn’t make much of it; but it was interesting in this account to find the mullah slightly downgraded.

Rahimullah said, “Since the nai is living among the Pathans, and has to survive in this male-dominated and very tough society, he actually has come to regard himself as part of it, and he strives to live by the same standards and principles. An artisan might say, ‘We are Pathans.’ And they might be accepted as such outside the province, but the blue-blooded Pathans will not accept them as such. They will not let their daughters marry them.”

So we talked, as our party picked its way along the concrete walls of the smaller canal back to Rahimullah’s house, and the outer courtyard. When we were in the guest house again, among the beds and the armchairs, he talked of the Pathan idea of honor. He was proud of this idea. When we had first met, in the hotel in Peshawar, it was what he had talked about. He had told a story about a Pathan girl who had run away with a male servant of the family. The couple had been hunted down—no place in the frontier for them to hide—and tied to a tree and shot; the police had stood by and done nothing.

Rahimullah sought now to codify the Pathan idea of honor. Language, home territory, hospitality, sanctuary, revenge: honor extended to all of these things. Though in some of its details the code here would have been purely of the region, there was a general, related idea of honor in the subcontinent. It was something I had always understood, growing up in the Trinidad Indian community. It was one of the things that had given that
community a reputation for murder in the 1930s. I knew, though, that murder wasn’t always simple murder. When men know in their bones that governments are malign, and that there are no laws or institutions they can trust, the idea of honor becomes vital. Without that idea men who have no voice or representation in the world can become nothing. The poor, especially, need the idea.

Rahimullah said, “It’s only yesterday that somebody was killed. Four years ago a local poet was killed, and yesterday revenge was taken. His son had hired assassins to kill the murderer, and they have done it now. They waited four years. They can wait for twenty years.”

A wrinkled old man, thin and dark and white-capped, was sitting in one of the armchairs. He appeared to be listening, but I don’t know how much he understood. Rahimullah said he was a cousin; that might have been only a courtesy. The old man had a son in Dubai; the son wanted to come back to the village. The old man thought Rahimullah could help; that was why he was there.

A small, dark young man with wavy hair, and in a gray shalwar-kameez, came in.

Rahimullah said to me, “Do you know this guy?”

The young man shook my hand. His hand was wet and cold. His name was Kimat Gul. He was Rahimullah’s servant, the only one. He looked after the cattle. He hadn’t gone on the walk to the canal with us because he had gone to the sugarcane field to get fodder for the buffalos and cows. The guest house was where he lived. He slept here and he watched television here. The television set was on the big dining table; Rahimullah had bought it for him in Peshawar.

Kimat Gul was an orphan and no one knew when he was born; he could be eighteen or nineteen or twenty. His father had remarried, so Kimat Gul was absolutely on his own. He had stayed with relations before coming to Rahimullah; then he had left Rahimullah to go to Karachi. Everybody here went to Karachi. They loved the land and the village, but the land couldn’t support them. Kimat Gul didn’t stay long in Karachi; he had come back to Rahimullah.

Someone in the guest house said in English, “He is a barber.” Another nai, then. And, in fact, he was the brother of Qaim Khan, the earlier young man in blue.

Rahimullah said, “He wants to become a driver. He says, ‘I will drive your car.’ But right now I have another driver. Kimat Gul is getting six hundred rupees plus food and room and clothes and TV. He has been with
us since he was very small. If he stays with us we will arrange for his marriage and provide him with a house. We have three houses, two houses here and one in the village. For the marriage he will be able to get a girl from his relations. He has to keep to his relations. He can marry, but he will have to pay for that. Clothes and household goods.”

In Karachi Kimat Gul had worked in a barbershop. It wasn’t a good job. And there was the trouble in Karachi. It was dangerous moving about to look for another job. He moved from a locality called Landhi to another called Sher Shah: Karachi for him was these names, and the memory of danger. Even going to work was risky. People were killed. A policeman he knew was killed; the policeman’s name was Ayub.

Qaim Khan, Rahimullah’s sabbath barber, the man in blue, came back from whatever he had been doing and sat down open-mouthed in an armchair. Perhaps he wasn’t even listening. He would have known the story very well.

There used to be strikes, Kimat Gul said, still talking about Karachi. Nobody came to the barbershop. There was no work. So he came back here.

He was barefooted. His wavy hair, hanging down his neck, was black and thick and shiny. He had a deep, almost booming, voice. He had a ring on the fourth finger of his left hand. If you wore a ring, the fingers didn’t get diseased. It was a silver ring and it stood out against his very dark hand. The dark white-capped man, with the son in Dubai, was also wearing a ring like that to keep his fingers healthy.

Rahimullah said, “I am the only one not wearing a ring.”

I asked Kimat Gul, “Are you happy here?”

He said in his extraordinary voice (and Rahimullah translated), “I’m happy. But where else can I go?”

There were laughs all round, and Kimat Gul laughed too, showing his big teeth. He didn’t like barbering, he said, though he knew how to do it. He preferred feeding the cattle.

It was time for the midday prayers. Rahimullah got up and, wrapping his big sand-colored chador or shawl about him, went out into the sunlight of the guest courtyard, and at the far end turned behind the small bougainvillaea bushes and small trees—one day perhaps a proper hedge and screen—into the family courtyard.

Later the two men who had been working on the house, the mason and the son of the shop assistant, came and sat on a string bed in the arcaded verandah and shared food with Kimat Gul, the herdsman and servant who lived there and watched television.

After lunch—thick whole-wheat
roti,
vegetables, chicken, mutton
pilau,
apples, and grapes—we went the short distance to Rahimullah’s ancestral village of Shamozai. Just outside Rahimullah’s gate a young girl was playing in the dust: the first girl, the first female, I had seen since I had arrived. Purdah was soon going to fall on her; the rest of her life was going to be spent in that void where time was without meaning.

In a half-open hut not far away some men were making coarse brown sugar, and we stopped to watch. The cane was crushed in a simple steel grinder worked by bullocks. The cane juice simmered in a big, shallow, saucer-shaped iron pot; the fire below, in a kind of tunnel, was fed by trash and wood and dried cane husk. The sun was bright outside, and the heat here was great. A man used a long-handled ladle to skim off the cream-colored scum and to lift this waste into wicker baskets; from time to time he used a rake to scrape the upper wall of the black pot. It took about two and a half hours to make the sugar, crumbly and aromatic, delicious on its own when fresh, and quite unlike the refined product.

It was left to Rahimullah to tell me that though the area was poor, the men making the sugar came from outside. Local people, with their own idea of what was fitting, wouldn’t want to do that hard and very hot job.

Shamozai was spectacular. It was surrounded on three sides by rocky, abrupt, sharp-edged mountains which were part of a mountain range. In the foothills of this range the settlement lay: from a distance, flat-roofed, flat-walled, a pattern of rock and wall and sun and shadow, cubist in appearance. The house where Rahimullah’s father had been born in 1918 was high up. A narrow lane wound down the steep hill; near the bottom, next to the mosque, was the house Rahimullah’s father had established as his own. Not far away was the circular stone-stepped pool or tank fed by the spring that ran down the mountain.

The site, with the mountains and the spring and the pool, was clearly special. It felt even sacred, like the hot springs of Pariyangan in Sumatra, where the Minangkabau people were said to have come out of the earth; like the volcanic ground at the foot of Mount Merapi in Java which the poet Linus felt to be sacred, suffused with the emanations of the Hindu and Buddhist monuments a few feet below the surface. There would always have been a settlement at Shamozai; below the surface here, too, would be ruins that would take the human story back and back.

The main lane was crowded. There were children and more children everywhere, lank hair and smudged faces and dusty little limbs, as though
the village houses could no longer hold them in. It gave a touch of fantasy, almost, to the shut-away setting, considering how desolate the abrupt mountains looked from not very far away. A nai, in his mid-forties, already had ten children; a farmer had eight. All the families who could afford it had moved out of the village. But the village was still full of Rahimullah’s relations. He shook hands all the time; the narrow lane (with its twelve or thirteen shops, small and dark and low, some of them dirt-floored) was like one extended family hall.

On the way back we passed Rahimullah’s wife’s family house: a tube-well at the end of the lane, a blank brick wall before that, with a half-open gate revealing the cow pens at the back of the living quarters. The family were originally better off than Rahimullah’s, with more land (and they too had moved out of the old village); but they were not as well educated, and Rahimullah and his brother were able to buy some land off them.