Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (Vintage International) (67 page)

Rahimullah’s father had arranged the marriage, though Rahimullah chose his bride. She was a distant relative and used to come to the house, and he used to go to her family house, the blank-walled one we were looking at now. She was in purdah, but since the families were on visiting terms they could see each other; though they didn’t actually meet and talk. The most he said to her, when she came to his house, was “Welcome.” They met properly only on the third night of their wedding. They were both very shy. He didn’t know what to say. He could only say, “How are you? Are you happy? How do you feel in your new house?” She didn’t reply. Now she lived just a short distance away in the new house Rahimullah and his brother had built, her life completely defined.

A splendid white-capped figure was waiting for us in the guest house. This was Mutabar Khan, another cousin of Rahimullah’s. He had spent all his working life outside the frontier, and now he had come back for good, to the twenty acres that his family had, in different pieces. He was born in Shamozai in 1930 and he had left the village and gone to Karachi when he was sixteen. Now, a little like an actor who had made up for the last act, he had a great parted yellow-black-gray beard. When he spoke of his life outside, he compressed it; it was as if it had occurred in a kind of parenthesis.

That life, as he told it, was reduced to the names of places, Karachi and Dubai; to two employers, a Hindu grain merchant in Karachi, and an Arab in Dubai who owned an orchard; and the money they paid. There were no details, no pictures, no suggestion of the passing of time, the passing of life. But time here was an unconsidered flow; and to his fellows Mutabar Khan
was a man who had seen the whole thing through and come back safe. He was what they wished to be, and the little crowd now sitting on the beds in the guest house were attentive. The mason and the man with him were there, work-stained; they had finished their work for the day on Rahimullah’s family house, and out of courtesy and simple fellowship were spending a little time here before going home.

Mutabar Khan talked about Karachi. He said (in Rahimullah’s translation), “I still remember with fondness the days I spent in Karachi. You could sleep safely even on the footpath. I don’t think it can return to peaceful times now.” That was what Karachi was for him.

He was worried about the Pathans there. Rahimullah had told me that there were two million, that Karachi had a bigger Pathan population than Peshawar or Kabul.

Mutabar Khan said, “They are such a huge number. They will die rather than come back.”

I asked him, “Are there too many people here, then?”

“Too many children in the schools now. No place to sit. But it is our belief that children are God-given and cannot be prevented from being born. Allah will provide for them. When a child is conceived Allah has already decided that this child is to be born.”

8
 

I
N THE MORNINGS
now in the countryside around Peshawar chador-draped figures stood in front of low brick houses with kindling on the flat roofs; cooking smoke mingled with mist. In the flat chill fields there were patches of tropical sugarcane next to small orchards of temperate fruit. On the edge of some fields there grew a line or two of spindly hybrid poplar that cast little shadow. This was also a crop; the poplar could be harvested after four years; the wood was used for matches. The crop was new here. And in that was a little history: until it seceded in 1971, Bangladesh supplied Pakistan’s matches.

I took a hotel car to Rawalpindi. At Attock the muddy Kabul River met the blue Indus, in a confluence about a mile wide. It was one of the great river views of the subcontinent. It was where the frontier ended, and the Punjab began. It would have been nice to stop and look, but there could be no stopping or dawdling on the bridge. And as I went on, by car to Rawalpindi, and then by train to Lahore, the land getting flatter, the views crowded always, the Pathan ideas Rahimullah had introduced me to began to feel far away. Honor and home territory, sanctuary and revenge, the hiding away of women and the strictness of religious observance: they were
ideas that needed their own setting, their own enclosed world. But the Pathans had to migrate; they needed the outside world; and then their idea of honor could become warped. Few were educated or had high skills; and the clan code, which gave them protection, could also make them predators. That was an aspect of their reputation in the outside world. It was the other side of their reputation as soldiers.

In the hotel lobby in Peshawar there had been this notice painted on a board:
HOTEL POLICY. ARMS CANNOT BE BROUGHT INSIDE THE HOTEL PREMISES. PERSONAL GUARDS OR GUNMEN ARE REQUIRED TO DEPOSIT THEIR WEAPONS WITH HOTEL SECURITY. WE SEEK YOUR COOPERATION. MANAGEMENT.
And when I got back to Lahore it was to news of a frontier kidnapping.

I had got to know Ahmed Rashid. He was a journalist. He also owned, with a partner, a coal mine in the Punjab hinterland. The news, from him, was that three of the mine’s jeeps had been stolen, and six of the men kidnapped. The stealing and the kidnapping had occurred in stages. First a jeep and the two men in it had been taken, in the big town of Sargodha. After ten days there had come a ransom demand for two lakhs, two hundred thousand rupees, five thousand dollars. Ahmed had sent two men in a jeep to negotiate with the kidnappers. He hadn’t sent any money by these two men. This had enraged the kidnappers. They had seized the two men and the second jeep. Ahmed, taking the hint, had then sent two clerks in a third jeep with the ransom money. But the kidnappers were apparently still very angry. They held on to the two clerks and the ransom money, and made a fresh demand for twenty lakhs, fifty thousand dollars.

Ahmed, ever the journalist, was excited by the whole thing, this nice little story breaking on his own doorstep, as it were; and in his detached journalist’s way he found the sequence of events funny, the men from the mine going in two by two into some kidnappers’ pit somewhere in the frontier. He had got in touch with the army and the intelligence people; only they could help him. And he thought now—and this wasn’t going to be so funny for the kidnapped men—that negotiations could go on for many months. It was important to keep the negotiations going, and in this way to prevent the kidnapped men from being taken across the border. If that happened, it was all over; the jeeps and the men could be forgotten.

Where there was no law, no institutions that men could trust, the code and the idea of honor protected men. But it also worked the other way. Where the code was strong there could be no rule of law. In the frontier, as Saleem Ranjha’s Pathan guest had said at Mansura, the modern state was
withering away; it was superfluous. People were beginning to live again with the idea of clan and fiefdom; and it was good for business.

Three hundred miles or so to the south, where the Punjab met Sindh, in the desert, there was the old princely state of Bahawalpur. There were more than five hundred of these semi-autonomous states in the days of the British. About seventy of them were important enough for their rulers to be called Highness; Bahawalpur was one of them.

It was one of the small opportunist states or fiefdoms that came into being in the middle of the eighteenth century during the breakdown of Muslim power in the subcontinent. It was bounded for three hundred miles on the west and north by the Indus and its tributary, the Sutlej. These great rivers on one side—the Sutlej with a ravaged, meandering watercourse many miles wide—and the desert on the other side preserved the Bahawalpur territory against the Sikhs from the north and the Hindu Mahrattas from the south. In 1838 the British made Bahawalpur a protectorate; and then at last the Nawabs of Bahawalpur knew imperial security. They ruled until 1954, when the state was absorbed into Pakistan.

The Nawab had hoped that when the British left the subcontinent in 1947 his state would become independent. This was madness. Bahawalpur in 1941 had a population of less than a million and a half, and most of these people were agricultural serfs. But the Nawab, after an untroubled century of British protection, had developed a fantasy about the reach of his authority. It was impossible for him, when he had lost his state, to live on in it as a private citizen. In his concept of the state there were, almost certainly, no free private citizens; there could only be a ruler and the ruled. He abandoned Bahawalpur and went to England, taking much of his fortune with him. He bought a house in Surrey and lived there until his death in 1966.

He left behind in Bahawalpur many children, recognized and unrecognized, three palaces, an idle and disoriented harem, some schools and colleges, and the ambitious Sutlej Valley Project. That project, carried out by British engineers and with a loan from the British Indian government, had taken irrigation to the desert and opened up vast areas for agriculture. The land was offered for almost nothing to people who would cultivate it. The local people were too broken-backed to be interested in this gamble with the desert; more spirited settlers came in from the Punjab. The success of the project tripled the revenues of the state and made the Nawab a very
rich man. This wealth, no doubt, was one of the things that encouraged him to think of independence.