Magic Bus (23 page)

That day I take in the town. The Hazara, who claim descent from the Mongols, are Afghanistan's largest Shia community. The Taliban, as Sunni rulers, considered them to be heretics. ‘Hazaras are not Muslim,' the governor of Mazar-e Sharif once claimed. ‘They are infidels.' During the civil war, Taliban forces blockaded the poor, drought-stricken province for a year and, when Bamiyan surrendered in August 1998, they killed 6,000 residents. Houses were burnt and fields sprayed with chemicals. Men were beheaded or shot in the testicles. Women and children were loaded into metal shipping-containers without food or water and driven around the country until they died. The bazaar was put to the torch and smoke had enveloped the whole valley, blocking out the sun.

I climb in the cool sunshine past the salt and wheat shops,
back toward the Buddhas' niches, thinking about Sanjar and his ambition to rise above the bitter betrayals. Near the Bamiyan Hotel, a band of Korean tourists snap photographs of the rubble.

On a hill flank beneath the sandstone cliff, the singing child sits cross-legged in the dirt, building then destroying his ‘cookie' house. I listen to him for a moment and then, like a window of light opening in the sky, I recognize the words.

‘Sunny day, sweepin' the clouds away…'

‘Cookie?' I say to him. ‘Cookie Monster?'

His flat Asiatic features crease into an alarmed smile and he laughs, delighted to be understood at last.

‘On my way to where the air is sweet,' he sings on.

I join him for the next line. After all, I grew up with the programme. ‘Can you tell me how to get…'

And I saw the pirated DVD copy in Sanjar's shop.

‘… how to get to Sesame Street.'

I'm at the frontier, swept up in a Koranic scene, pressed between praying refugees, tired-eyed traders and half-starved dogs, herded by soldiers through a propitious gate.

I slipped out of Kabul this morning, leaving behind a bit of my heart, carrying my small rucksack of nascent ideas, driving towards Jalalabad and the dirty white Safed Koh mountains. As if to reflect my mood, the taxi outran the hard-skinned and reptilian landscape. Rough ranges of lizard hills, with scaly flanks and scalloped backs, rose shoulder to shoulder above the burnt-ochre plateau. The mountains seemed ready to shake their snow-capped heads, to lift their foothill tails and lash out at the car. But like the Intrepids before me, I sprinted ahead to find a new way forward.

Ten minutes ago, I emerged from that primeval terrain into this crush of men, animals and machines. A mother pulled her headscarf over her reddened lips and a pale baby. A high-sided truck hauled home a whole village and its single buffalo. A detachment of Khyber Rifles paused in their search of an aid convoy to drop to their knees and pray. The Torkham checkpoint marks the second great historical border of the trail. Behind me lay the Turkish and Persian empires, ahead spreads the Indian world. On the subcontinent live one-fifth of humanity. Here, four of the world's great religions – Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism and, oldest of them all, Hinduism – were born. Here, too, the twentieth-century Islamic revival first took root. I'm on the threshold of a uniquely spiritual land, waiting beneath stony grey-brown mountains in the midday heat for my ride into Pakistan.

‘Homeland of Muslims?' roars Iqbal, finding me in a tea shop bent over my notes, writing with new confidence. ‘By the grace of God, you are a dreamer, sir. I am obliged to inform you that
Pakistan is no Kingdom Come.' He drops his voice in sudden melodrama to hiss, ‘It is a heavenly nightmare.'

Canadian friends in Islamabad have sent their driver to collect me. Big-bellied and jocular, Iqbal is not what I expected. With good humour and stale breath, he sweeps me into the LandCruiser. He tucks the dashboard's CD plate beneath an embroidery of the Prophet's teachings, unleashes the horn and accelerates away from the Durand Line. I feel as if I've stepped into the jovial pages of an eighties travel romp.

‘I will go further,' he ventures, cutting in front of an oncoming Afghan bus. ‘My Pakistan, which was born with such high hopes, has become a whore.'

Iqbal is lucid and charming, a frank fiftysomething with piercing brown eyes and an air of urgency that suggests any delay might cause an explosion. His crisp clothes and remarkable colonial English are immaculate. Only his corpulence seems to weigh on him, as does his back, the consequence, he claims, of too often ‘lifting the legs'.

‘I will relate a story for you,' he says. ‘When your good friends were posted to Islamabad, their house was a bordello. Shocking but true. Big Fat Tony, their driver, also secured by the High Commission, had run it under the noses of the previous incumbents. I felt it my duty to tell your friends about the taxi girls.'

‘Taxi girls?'

‘Ladies of chancy virtue,' he informs me, ‘who arrived every day in taxis – bold as brass – and proceeded directly to the basement.'

‘To do what, Iqbal?' I ask.

‘Sir, to do. To
do
. The next morning, armed with brooms, your friends and I greeted the girls and whisked them off the doorstep, along with Big Fat Tony. The pretty things had diamonds in their noses and rings on their fingers and they wailed at the injustice of it all. How would they feed their babies? Who would care for their parents? I realized then how very much I love my holy, shameless country.' As we barrel headlong towards a crash barrier, Iqbal stops laughing long enough to add, ‘Forgive me if my illustration is inexact. I do fall short of due expression at times.'

‘You're saying Pakistan is a whore?' I ask him, gripping the seatbelt's shoulder strap and remembering with fondness the relatively sedate journeys in Turkey. ‘America's whore?'

‘Glorious is God,' he replies. ‘Not just America's.'

Since 9/11, Pakistan has become the United States' greatest ally in the war against terrorism. Even though the Pakistani army's backing of the Taliban helped ruin Afghanistan. And its intelligence service sanctioned armed militants' attacks on India. And its global mail-order business in nuclear-bomb technology endangers the whole world. In spite of this, the US State Department pours $700 million of assistance into Islamabad's coffers every year.

‘My dear sir, people may be Christian or Muslim or no matter, but every mortal soul prays to the one and only great god of money. Like those pretty ladies, my Pakistan will sleep with
jihadis
, Koreans, even Texans, anyone who butters their bottom.'

‘Butters their bread,' I say, unsure myself of the suitability of the expression.

‘I am beholden for that apt correction,' he replies.

The Grand Trunk Road veers into the Khyber Pass. Through it marched armies of Greeks, Buddhists and Mughals, carrying their banners high. The British followed them, building a new road around the side of the arid mountain, leaving behind milestones and sad little graveyards. Now, old men cool their feet in dull, roadside streams. Boys in rags play cricket on dusty pitches with stone wickets. The monsoon is weeks overdue and dirt-poor villagers have moved out of their earth houses and on to string beds under dusty neem trees. We wind around them and deep limestone gorges in a convulsion of terrifying twists, as Iqbal mops his neck with a handkerchief and turns up the air conditioning. ‘I beg you to excuse the woefully backward scenes before you,' he says. ‘Ours is a country of great inequality.'

I'm hungry to discover what has befallen the ‘Homeland of the Muslims' and say, ‘Pakistan was born of a flawed dream, wasn't it?'

‘Not a flawed dream, sir, but a dream flawed by man.'

In 1930, ‘the Poet of the East' – Mohammed Iqbal – called for
the creation of a single Muslim state in north-west India. The compelling idea couldn't be resisted, especially in the face of escalating violence between Hindus and Muslims. In 1947, when the British left India, Pakistan was partitioned off at the cost of millions of lives and livelihoods.

In the early days, the new country was liberal and tolerant. Christians and Shias worshipped alongside Sunnis without fear of prosecution. Wine and
bawas
– quarter bottles – of gin were sold in the cantonments. But, in gaining independence, the nation's founders lost their only cause and, unsure of their new role, they decided not to jeopardize their futures by risking fair elections.

With political life throttled, the army – Pakistan's only organized group – flourished. Its growing frustration with weak civil authority sparked a series of military coups. Army, government and populace became estranged. Prime ministers were deposed or executed. The population was allowed to grow unchecked. A gifted people were crippled by corruption and mismanagement. Poverty fed anger. Each dictator left behind him – according to Iqbal – ‘filth, stink and very ugly scars on the society'. The state began to fail.

But those failings couldn't be blamed on the dream of a faith-based nation – such candour would have undermined Pakistan's very existence. Instead, its shortcomings came to be attributed to men failing the faith. The country recast itself as the first Islamic state since the days of the Prophet. Multi-dimensional Islam was narrowed into a state ideology. Opportunistic democrats bolstered their position by building up a small and passionate following of radical Islamists. National insecurity – disguised as the assertion of faith – prolonged animosity with India and propelled the building of the ‘Islamic' nuclear bomb. Today, poor, failing Pakistan, seventh largest nation in the world, has an annual GDP of less than $540 per head.

‘Hats off to the creators of Pakistan,' says Iqbal. ‘They changed the map. They dreamt of building a society that was – we can say now in hindsight – utopian. But to answer your question: how did Pakistan get this way? By believing that God wished to
be a politician.' He smiles to himself. ‘Now, we sit in the bazaar in our wooden cubicles, winking at strangers, offering up our rubies…'

Iqbal's big hands never leave the wheel nor the horn, driving bullock carts and taxis out of our way. He travels at a tremendous speed, past hand-painted lorries adorned with F-16 fighter jets, not pausing for breath, losing neither his narrative nor his good humour. As we drop out of the tribal lands on to the burning plain, he tells me that in his time he has been a tailor, a seaman, an actor and a cook. He says he has driven cars for the Aga Khan and the former director of BOAC in Karachi. He confesses that for a couple of years he fell on hard times.

‘Gambling,' he admits, ‘with the wrong sort of people. Just like my beloved, unequal country.'

Peshawar is 35 miles from the Afghanistan border. On its outskirts spread the now-flattened Kacha Garhi camp, once home to 100,000 Afghan refugees. Across the highway from the wasteland of broken earth walls laze the manicured lawns and new condominiums of retired military men. ‘City of Flowers' to the Kushans, ‘Frontier Town' to the Mughals, ‘the city which comes first after the wilderness' to the Persians, Peshawar remains a thriving, roughedged trading town. Caravans paused under its shady trees, put their animals to grass on its lush acres, bartered weapons and favours in the Storytellers' Bazaar – activities which haven't changed in a thousand years.

Iqbal jumps my first red light on the subcontinent and pulls into a sunless alleyway between the Asia Arm Store and Tip Top Cleaners. Beneath a billboard for City University (‘Get studying! Get out of Pakistan!'), he tells me, ‘My dear, I am bushed to the bone.' He has been on the road since before dawn, and we still have a four-hour drive to reach Islamabad.

‘Do you want to take a nap?' I ask him.

‘Not exactly a nap, sir, but perhaps you'd enjoy exploring the town?' he suggests, conjuring up his own story. ‘While I take a little R&R. My cousin lives in Peshawar.'

‘Your cousin?' I ask, both bewildered and delighted by the sudden suggestion.

‘A friend of my cousin,' he says with a theatrical wink. ‘Please forgive my lack of hospitality. I must attend to her by myself on a pressing matter. See you back here in an hour?'

I leave him to meander around the Old City, weaving between buzzing bee-yellow Qingqi rickshaws and horse-drawn tongas, into a warren of crude concrete shops, pavement barbers and cycle-repair stalls. I open my notebook and write. ‘Black flags, sugar-cane juice stalls, mule drivers, overstuffed fleece shops. A cyclist pushes through the crowds with a bed frame balanced on his head. Braying donkeys, broom-closet sweet stalls,
qawali
music playing on transistor radios. A dirty green kite rises on thermals of exhaust fumes over the proud new offices of the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission.'

My snatched glimpses heighten the sense of flux, both of a world rapidly changing and of myself changing within it. I find a chair in a smoky samovar house to gather my thoughts. As I gulp the black tea, I catch my reflection in the shop's mirror.

‘Large, down-turned green eyes. Pale cheeks burnt by the day's journey. Translucent skin, silver beneath eyelids. Receding red hair. My father's long ears. My mother's mouth. A hungry travel writer with pen poised, trying to replace cliché with something more human and variable.'

I decide to send home my notes, so make for the City Net Café. A policeman stops me at the door.

‘What is your intention here, sir?' he asks me.

‘I need to send an email,' I explain.

‘Please ask permission from my superior.'

I didn't expect to need official approval to go online. But I hadn't noticed the bullet holes in the plate-glass window.

That morning, a young Pashtun named Habib had come to City Net. He logged on at one of the twenty terminals and sent a message, ‘I am waiting for you in net cafe. I have mother with me and will go to the village.' A few minutes later, a bearded Arab
entered the shop. When he greeted Habib, half a dozen plain-clothes intelligence agents jumped up from the other terminals and seized the men. Habib drew and fired a pistol before he was overpowered. A dozen anti-terrorist commandos then bundled the pair into waiting jeeps.