Magic Bus (24 page)

I don't hang around to meet the senior officer but retrace my steps to the vehicle. Iqbal is waiting in the driver's seat, complaining about his back.

‘I have been reflecting most deeply,' he says once we are back on the GT Road. ‘I do not wish you to have a negative snapshot of my land.'

I don't mention the incident at the café.

‘It is true that in the early days there was an intense hope for improving ourselves overnight.'

‘And now most Pakistanis worry about their need for food and shelter?'

‘Perhaps, but we've always cherished the promotion of peace,' he insists. ‘Not only that, we've been dedicated agents of those forces who project these ideas.'

‘Like the CIA and the Taliban?'

‘I think Pakistan can be a bridge between Islamic countries and the Western world, just as we played a role in bringing America and China together in 1972. Geographically speaking, Pakistan is at the very heart of Asia. You shout loud enough and you hear the echo from Tashkent to Tibet.'

‘I'll remember that,' I tell him.

East of Peshawar, the colossal mountains loop away to the north and the land levels into green fields dotted with goat herds and army camps. Children cut fodder from the central reservation, darting between the buses with armfuls of grass, helping their elders stack busby-like hay ricks. In Nowshera, a camouflaged battle tank rises on a concrete plinth next to the School of Mechanized Warfare and a Military Dairy Farm. The broad Kabul River ripples on our left-hand side, its banks high, sandy and flanked by smallholdings of cauliflower and corn. At Attock, its sanguine, brown
waters sweep into the swift, blue Indus – which sources high in the Himalayas – the contrasting coloured currents flowing side by side for over a mile downstream.

Iqbal accelerates into the Punjab, passing on the inside lane and once on the gravel shoulder. As the shadows lengthen, the roadside grows even more crowded, pedestrians and creaking carts moving home from the fields alongside the thundering traffic. The country's only overpass, being constructed by hand, curves above our heads toward the Karakoram Highway and the Silk Road link to China.

‘You know, I'm baked in this culture,' volunteers Iqbal. ‘When I go across the seas, I am mighty delighted the moment the aircraft touches back down in Pakistan. I like to listen to the language, to see the casual mannerisms of the people, to experience the hospitality.'

A gauze of high, wispy cloud spreads with the night but neither dissipates the relentless heat.

‘No nation is without failings of course,' he goes on, the darkness unleashing a loquacious intimacy. ‘But in the Koran, Lord God Allah says, “I don't give good rulers to bad societies,” so I blame myself for what has befallen Pakistan.'

‘In what sense?'

‘In the sense that I am part of this society. Few citizens have played their role, have stood up and defied the untruth loudly and clearly. Loudly and clearly. That is where we're lacking. We shrink from risks at times. We don't call a shovel a shovel.'

‘A spade a spade,' I say. ‘But if you had spoken out, wouldn't you have been shot?'

‘Not shot, my romantic friend. Perhaps beaten and imprisoned for an unspecified period of time, but never shot. We are a civilized clan,' he says, laughing himself back into good humour. ‘Forgive me this one last time, but it is never easy being a divided man of torn loyalties.'

‘Loyal to what?' I ask him.

‘Loyal to Islam and money. Loyal to the old British ways and
the modern world. Most of all, loyal to my holy but shameless brown whore.'

Lime-coloured neon tubes burn in scrawny, bandy-legged eucalyptus trees, drawing drivers into busy roadside canteens with earthen forecourts stained sticky-black by motor oil. Our headlights catch them and the hand-painted road signs for ‘I Love Allah a/c Centres'. I drop my notebook and scrabble in the shadows at my feet to find it. Iqbal races on until the lights of the capital flash before us.

Islamabad reveals itself as a planned city of leafy enclaves, broad avenues and white-walled villas protected by armed guards, like the hideaways of Latin American dictators. Even in my exhaustion, the place feels artificial, divorced from intrinsic culture, its grid system and shopping malls part of the homogenized post-modern suburb. Along Constitution Avenue – which locals call Suspended Constitution Avenue – stretches the sterile diplomatic quarter: ranks of embassies, the French School, the Canadian Club, and the Secretariat, Benezir Bhutto's folly, which looms out of the dark like a moghul's palace. As in Washington and Canberra, not a soul walks on the deserted streets.

We wheel into my friends' driveway and Iqbal hides the Prophet's teachings behind the red CD plate. I realize the muscles of my forearm have seized around the passenger's hand strap.

‘Welcome to the fool's paradise,' he says.

I rise up out of darkness, out of sleep, into a soft, cool dawn. Light floods my room, washing away its edges, smoothing out the corners. I blink at the brightness, in my glaring disorientation, feeling all but disconnected from the earth. Around me, the high, wide windows are draped in thin white cotton. Beyond them a faint breeze stirs into dance a silhouette of leafy branches. The shadows of pigeons sweep across the translucent veil. A pale lily stands in a stone vase. In the distance I hear the soft pad of footsteps and the click of a gardener's shears. I lift back the bed sheet, slip across the white marble floor and vomit in the toilet.

I feel bad, not from Afghan pilau or a roadside tikka but from a single unwashed lettuce leaf which garnished my late-night peanut butter sandwich. I scoffed it without thinking, on arrival at my Canadian friends' villa, overwhelmed by their larder-full of Wonderbread and taco kits. Now a boulder squats in my stomach, and in the light white room I want to surrender under its weight, but I have an appointment.

To many Intrepids, Pakistan was another ‘passing through' country. ‘You may end up blasting through West Pakistan in about forty-eight hours,' wrote Douglas Brown in
Overland to India
. Mik Schultz advised his readers to ‘take the morning bus from Kabul to Peshawar, then continue with the night train to Lahore and India.' Geoff Crowther described the country as a ‘heavy trip' for women. ‘If you're the slightest bit underdressed in their terms, you'll be mauled and touched up constantly.' Only three pages were devoted to Pakistan in Wheeler's
Across Asia on the Cheap
.

In the sixties and seventies, travellers tended to overstay their time in Afghanistan, then, emerging from the blue fug of hash smoke, remember India and want to get there in a hurry. Most
overlooked the Sufi shrines at Uch Sharif, the spectacular Vale of Swat and the Graeco-Buddhist ruins at Taxila. Those who did dawdle in the republic may have wished that they'd hurried on. After his twenty-two-day bus ride from Bradford in 1971, Allan MacDougall, a Canadian traveller, reached the Indus, dived in and contracted typhoid. An Encounter Overland driver was shot in the leg near Taftan trying to outrun bandits in a Toyota pick-up. A German backpacker was machine-gunned to death in her tent in a bungled robbery. Even the authors of the current Lonely Planet guide admit, ‘Pakistan
is
a wild and woolly place.' Few kids ever considered the ‘volatile' nation of ‘drugs, guns and military coups' as a place for spiritual enlightenment.

‘I don't think I'd be a Muslim today if it wasn't for Mr Zimmerman,' admits the
imam
.

‘Bob Dylan?' I say.

‘Trust yourself to do the things that only you know best,' he sings out loud. ‘Trust yourself to do what's right and not be second-guessed.' Then, with a smile, he adds, ‘Allah works in mysterious ways.'

John Butt, a tall and passionate man with a lean, weathered face and white spade beard, was a dope-smoking, rock ‘n' roll-loving Intrepid. In the late sixties, en route to India, he ran out of money and converted to Islam. He became a
talib
and scholar, rising in time to the position of Muslim chaplain at Cambridge University. Every few months he returns to Pakistan, his beloved North-West Frontier province, and Afghanistan.

Now he sits with me on the scorched earth beneath a date palm in Shakarparian Park, a low green ridge between planned Islamabad and chaotic, sprawling Rawalpindi. To the east, the Margalla hills rise above the pines and jacaranda trees. To the west stands a vast, unsubtle sculpture of a star and crescent.

‘There is a saying in the East that experience can be bitter,' Butt says, holding his open palms together. His short neat hair is trimmed beneath a four-peak, green velvet Uzbek cap. ‘But if you can learn the same experience from another, then you can grow from it without the pain.'

Butt was born in Trinidad, a son of one of the island's oldest European families. At the age of nine, he was sent away to a Jesuit boarding school in England. The experience was so traumatic and dislocating that, when he left Stonyhurst in 1969, he needed to return to his roots.

‘But I didn't think of going back to Trinidad,' he tells me, ‘even though I'd been torn away from that country which I loved. I felt a greater need. For us in the sixties, our deeper roots were in the East. The hippie trail was my escape route from Western civilization.'

Butt's journey was emotional from the outset, not simply a youthful adventure of the self but also a pilgrimage. He had been introduced to the Koran at school, and the holy book's directness moved him. Yet he never considered converting to Islam. He – like so many others then and now – simply felt a gnawing absence in his life, as well as a sense of being at odds with himself.

‘I went down to Morocco, stuck around in Paris for a while, then spent the winter on Crete. There were caves in Matala, and it was like a big hippie commune. Next, I stopped in Rhodes and met a Norwegian girl who I really liked. With my Catholic upbringing, I was a bit shy with girls but she was leaving the following day. We had a sort of one-night stand and I had to smuggle her back to her parents' hotel.'

‘She didn't entice you to stay in Europe?'

‘I wasn't into the sexual thing. I looked at my journey as a spiritual path. I felt the need to control desire. Uncontrolled self-gratification seemed to be part of what I had to relinquish.' His sage-coloured eyes soften and his long mouth stirs into a smile. ‘But that Norwegian was a very nice memory.'

‘After she left, I spent two weeks in Rhodes just
looking
at Asia. Just
thinking
about Asia. It's quite important, you know, coming to Asia for the first time. Asia meant so much.'

As well as hedonism, Butt also renounced materialism. He wanted his life to be enriched by greater works than a new car or luxurious house.

‘When I was ready, I took a fishing boat to Turkey. What hit
me right away was the Muslim hospitality. The Turks brought us this huge fish and no one wanted us to pay. On the train heading east, I said to everyone, with a lot of warmth, “
Merhaba
”. Greetings! There was so much love. I felt at home.'

As he speaks, the morning heat ripples up from the twin cities like the wash of a tide, bringing with it the smell of roses and drains.

‘I was set on going to Afghanistan and India. I reached Kandahar sitting on top of hay bales in the boot of an Afghan post bus. I liked Kandahar, and not only because of the fabled dope. Everything was so different: shepherd boys playing their flutes, old men smoking hash chillums in the tea shops, bells tinkling in the morning.'

But, in Kandahar, Butt contracted dysentery. He tried to stick to his macrobiotic diet by eating onion sandwiches – the only
yang
food he could find – and became seriously ill. He ran out of money. In Kabul, he sold his cassette recorder – on which he had recorded Dylan's
Come Back
Isle of Wight concert – and nursed himself back to health. Then he overstayed his visa and was ordered to leave the country. He hitched to the Pakistan border.

‘My first night outside Peshawar there was a full moon,' Butt remembers. ‘I was with two friends in the tribal territory. I wasn't under the influence of anything so I wasn't hallucinating. Suddenly, celestial lights started flashing around the sky, landing close to the spot where we were sitting. I was spellbound.'

The experience was to mark the beginning of Butt's conversion to Islam. He later learnt of the ‘Night of Power', when celestial lights fill the skies and sins are forgiven. The phenomenon is described in the surah
Laylat'al-Qadar
. ‘Verily, We revealed the Koran during the Night of Power. And how can you realize what the Night of Power is? The Night of Power is better than a thousand nights. During it, the angels descend, along with the Spirit, with the permission of their Lord, imparting peace to everything: peace, until the breaking of the dawn (Koran, 97:1–5).'

Butt travelled deep into northern Pakistan, crossing the Malak- and Pass into a land ‘like something out of Middle Earth: a tapestry of meadows and rolling hills'. He fell in love with the patterns of
the fields and the juxtaposition of scooped ravines and jutting mountains in the Swat Valley. He realized he felt at home amongst the people. On a bus a tribal policeman tried to collect from him a foreign-traveller tax. A local man sitting next to Butt took issue with the policeman, saying, ‘He shouldn't pay. He belongs here.'

Above all, Butt felt he belonged in the religion. In Kalam, three curious Punjabi men broke into his room, just to have a look at a long-haired, disreputable European. ‘Oh, believers, do not enter homes other than your own,' Butt snapped at them, quoting the surah
An-Nur
, ‘until you have asked for permission and invoked peace upon those who live there.' The wide-eyed intruders apologized and withdrew.

Finally, Butt took a long bus ride during Ramadan.