The Wet and the Dry (13 page)

                                  
From Dubai, that spring, I flew
alone to Islamabad. After the smooth ease of the Emirati city airports, their marble and technology, their generous space, the airport in the restless and dangerous city of Rawalpindi, Islamabad’s sister town, felt atrophied and sad, surrounded at three in the morning by idlers and touts and men with heavy weapons. The road outside empty and half-lit, the taxi driver eager to get out of there as soon as his gas pedal would permit. A guesthouse in F-6, the safest and wealthiest quarter of the capital, a bare room with British fixtures, a smell of council house bathrooms, a terrace outside surrounded by the patios and windows of neighboring houses. A single house guard with an M15.

The days were sunny. Marmite fingers for breakfast and PG Tips with Carnation condensed milk. I could walk to the Great Mosque, that monument of 1960s taste that seems too big even for a mosque, and sit in the courtyards of white marble and be alone, untouchable almost.

I took a motorbike and rode out to Taxila, the Gandharan ruin in the hills north of the city, a Buddhist monastery patronized by Alexander the Great and destroyed by the White Huns in the sixth century. The guide took me around, astonished to see a white man on a bike, and pointed to the signs of fifteen-hundred-year-old fire.

“White Huns, sah. Here, White Huns.” He shook his head with extreme but melancholic distaste. “Again White Huns, sah. Here”—pointing to hideous scaffolding—“
British
, sah.”

The White Huns, the British, Alexander the Great. The Greek kings of the Gandharan era who minted their silver drachmas with images of both Buddha and Athena: Islam is only the most recent import into the ancient hills of Sind, subdued in the eighth century by the armies of nineteen-year-old Umayyad general Muhammad bin Qasim.

I went back to the city after these long trips to Taxila, and the city at night seemed secretive and withheld. Even at Hotspot, the ice cream place for the beautiful youth, there were men outside with weapons, and in the deserted restaurants there was a tension, an anticipation of unknown catastrophes. It was a place to savor life’s inevitable solitude and uncertainty.

One night, nevertheless, tired of solitude, orange juice, and ice cream, I went to the Serena Hotel to meet a Pakistani businessman who had once been a friend of a friend in New York. The Dawat is by far the grandest restaurant in Islamabad, just as the Serena is the Pakistani capital’s only true luxury hotel.
My guest, who insisted on anonymity, leaned over the table and whispered that the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, was staying in one of the suites upstairs. “We might see him at dinner,” he said. “We might be—alone with him.” I looked around at a desolately empty room of considerable plushness. It didn’t seem likely that Karzai would appear or that we would soon be enjoying a nice bottle of Bordeaux, though I was hopeful. I had heard that you could get a drink in the city’s hotels, and not the fruit kind.

We were both in crumpled suits, awkwardly off-key. My guest, with the violently hennaed hair so disconcertingly popular among aging Pakistani men, talked in an unnecessary whisper. He wanted to know what I was doing in Islamabad. The country was hardly for the tourist trade, and he was pretty sure that I was not “an American operative.” Certainly not CIA.

“I came,” I said, also whispering, “to see if I could get drunk here.”

He looked panicked. “Are you serious? Get drunk in Islamabad?”

I had heard that alcohol was so repressed now in Pakistan that getting drunk might be a cultural adventure all by itself. In one of the most dangerous and alcohol-hostile countries in the world, I wondered what it would be like to intoxicate oneself.

“You put that on your visa application?” he burst out.

I admitted that getting my visa in New York had certainly been an ordeal. Weeks of questions, delays, and paranoia inside the Pakistan embassy in D.C. Once when I called to inquire as to the status of my never-appearing visa, an employee had,
after a polite altercation and a few expressions of frustration, screamed at me: “We don’t have your passport! Go away now!”

My guest laughed.

“Yes, I see. They thought you were a visiting alcoholic.”

“I am a visiting alcoholic,” I said.

From a palatial marble lobby came the sound of a lonely pianist struggling with the simple tunes of
Love Story
, which echoed over and over through the Serena’s glass-bright arcades and salons, which are lit with chandeliers but which never seem to fill. Seedy Americans sit in corners glued to their cell phones, also frantically whispering, also in crumpled suits, and a man in a red turban stands by the outer doors ready for trouble. They say the CIA are in fact fond of the place. Surprisingly, it hasn’t been bombed yet, but terrorists are patient people.

With the rise of Islamic militancy, bars are obvious targets across the Muslim world, and for years, with grim fascination, I have been following the mass murder of humble tipplers in suicide attacks from Bali to Islamabad itself. When the Marriott Hotel in Pakistan’s capital was destroyed by a suicide truck bomber on September 20, 2008, fifty-four people were killed and 266 were seriously injured. No one doubted that the Marriott’s famous bar and its long-standing association with alcohol were one reason it was hit so viciously. In 2007 another suicide bomber had killed himself in a botched attack on the same hotel.

There is therefore an undeniable thrill about getting liquored up in Islamabad. The possibility is very real that as you sit discreetly sipping your Bulgarian merlot from a plastic bag, you
will be instantly decapitated by a nail bomb. You might even be shot in the head for the simple crime of drinking. Your chances of dying in this way are not astronomically high. But nor are they astronomically low.

The girls in saris brought us our
haandi
curries with exquisitely tense expressions, and I asked Mr. A if I could suggest—it was just an idea, I’d heard it could be arranged—a glass of wine.

His eyes opened wide. “Glass of wine,
na
?”

I also whispered: “They can do it sometimes, no?”

“They can?”

He beckoned over a waitress and spoke with her in Urdu.

“Wine?” she said to me in English.

“Just a glass.”

The businessman began to squirm a little.

The waitress, too, leaned in to whisper: “We cannot. Not even in a plastic bag. How about a fresh strawberry juice?”

“Watermelon, too,
na
,” the businessman suggested hopefully. “They call it natural Viagra.”

“All right.” I sighed. “I’ll take a fresh strawberry juice. On the rocks.”

The waitress whispered even lower: “Sir, there is a bar downstairs. You can go after dinner.”

“Bar?” the businessman hissed.

“Yes, sir. There is a bar. In the basement.”

When she had gone, my friend frowned.

“It may be true. But it may not be true. I cannot come with you either way. They will never allow a Muslim in. I would be arrested.”

I asked him what the punishment would be if he were caught sipping a Guinness with me in the Serena bar.

“It depends,
na
,” he said glumly. “It could be prison.”

“Prison?”

“Prison, sah, or a good thrashing.”

Islamabad is the capital of a nation of 160 million people and is itself a city of about a million. And yet, my companion assured me, the number of places where you could get a drink could be numbered on the fingers of one hand. There were three open bars in the entire city, and only about sixty outlets for alcohol in the entire country. In the capital, aside from the secret basement bar of the Serena, there was a bar called Rumors in the Marriott Hotel. And there was reputedly a bar in the Best Western, though he had never been there. Outside the city, there was a luxury hotel in the hill station town of Murree called the Pearl Continental, where—again, according to rumor—there was a bar that enjoyed views of the snow-capped mountains of Kashmir. He had heard of a friend of his enjoying a gin and tonic there,
once upon a time
. There had also been a bar, he added, in Islamabad’s alter-ego twin city, Rawalpindi, in a hotel gloriously named the Flashman. But the minister of tourism had vindictively closed it down.

The noose was tightening around the city’s bar culture. There were bars of sorts inside some of the foreign embassies, but they were accessible only to the diplomatic corps. There was a UN Club, with access similarly restricted, and there was an Italian restaurant called Luna Caprese, popular with Westerners, where, as dark gossip had it, they would bring you a glass of
wine from a bottle hidden inside a plastic bag. They wouldn’t show you the label, but they would pour you a glass, and you would pay for it separately so that it didn’t show up on the restaurant’s books.

“Is it popular?” I asked.

He looked infinitely sad. “It was—until it was bombed.”

After dinner my friend made a rather desperate gesture with his hand and walked off, wishing me a “pleasant drink.”

I doubled back through the echoing arcades to a grand staircase near the Dawat that plunged down into an altogether different part of the hotel. There was not a soul there. I went down, slipping on the polished marble, and as I came into the immense underground gallery, a rather magnificent figure suddenly appeared, a bellboy of sorts done up in a beautiful white uniform with gloves and a turban.

“Where,” I whispered, “is the bar?”

“Bar, sir? Bar is here.”

And he executed a magnificent and regal flourish, indicating a pair of doors around the corner. I thanked him, and he bowed, moving with glacial elegance up the staircase. I looked around to make sure I was alone, a pervert approaching his darkest desire, and moved quickly up to the unmarked doors. I pushed the doors, and they merely rattled: the handles were tied together with a padlock. I shook them, but they didn’t yield. It was not even nine p.m., and I realized that it was going to be a long night of strawberry juices.

•  •  •

A few nights later I went to the Marriott because I had a hankering for a gin and tonic, and it appeared that at nine p.m. it was the only bar in town that was dependably open. The hotel has now been completely rebuilt and is surrounded by soldiers and by those sad concrete barriers that you see all over Islamabad covered with stickers for Zic motor oil and a thing called Tasty. Inside, the Marriott lobby—garnished with fish tanks, Punjabi art, and box-shaped fountains—was nervously half alive; its opulent coffee shop was filled with Saudis planted stiffly in front of slabs of nonalcoholic cake. I went through to Jason’s Steak House.

There was no one there. I ordered a steak and then asked, with my usual delicacy, if I could get a bottle of wine.

“I’ll ask,” the waiter said.

He came back with a black plastic bag with the top of a wine bottle sticking out of it. It was the red.

“And the white?”

“Not recommended, sir.”

I asked what this one was.

He leaned down to whisper in my ear: “Greek Shiraz, sir.”

The Marriott chain is a symbol of American imperialism across the Muslim world, but it was, as I have suggested, Rumors that had made this one so offensive to militants. This was the bar I repaired to after my steak and my rancid glass of Greek Shiraz. I was taken there by a bellboy. Down an immense lonely corridor, down a flight of stairs, turning left at a desolate landing with a lone chandelier, and down another flight of steps. At the bottom, like an S&M club buried under the sidewalk,
was the neon for Rumors and the doors of the bar, shielded by security cameras designed to pick up errant Pakistanis. “This is bar,” the boy whispered firmly, pointing up to the door. This time it opened.

I went in, expecting a riotous speakeasy filled with drunken CIA men and off-duty Marines perhaps abetted, I was hoping, by a smattering of loose Pakistani Hindu women. But no such luck. There was, as always, no one there. I took in the fabric walls, the fringed seats, the two pool tables, and the foosball, as well as the dartboard next to a plasma TV playing an episode of the British sitcom
EastEnders
. It was a very British and homey pub. A barman in a waistcoat stood at his post cleaning beer glasses and watching me with great interest. He was Muslim, and it took him little time to joyfully admit that he had never tasted the nectar of Satan even once.

He made a mean gin and tonic, however, and I asked him about the security cameras by the doors. He was happy to discuss them.

“We are catching those blighters every week,” he muttered, shaking his head. “Muslims coming in for a drink. We see them on the screen, sir, so they cannot succeed.”

Blighters?

“And what happens to them?”

“Ejecting, sir. We are ejecting. Sometimes police are called.”

“Are the blighters thrashed?”

“Very much so, sir.”

Alcohol has been banned for Muslims in Pakistan since 1977. A Muslim patron trying even to open the door of a hotel bar, as
the barman intimated, will be asked for his ID, refused entry, and possibly prosecuted for the attempt to enter. Non-Muslim foreigners can enter, and so can the “unbeliever” 5 percent of the Pakistani population (Hindus, Parsis, Christians), who are asked to present both ID and a “permit book,” in which their monthly permitted alcohol quota is registered. They are usually allowed six quarts of distilled liquor, or twenty bottles of beer, a month.

I asked him about the bombing in 2008.

“No one knows who did it. Osama bin Laden maybe. RDX bomb, sir.” RDX packed with TNT and mortar.

“Are you afraid to work here?”

“No, sir.” But his face said otherwise.

It was said that on the night of the bombing, thirty American Marines about to drop into Afghanistan were staying at the hotel, as well as an unspecified number of senior CIA officers. (A navy cryptologist named Matthew O’Bryant, working with the Navy Information Operations Command, was killed.) I looked down at the pulsating “stars” in the dance floor and wondered when that floor was last crowded with revelers. The barman said that in fact the bar was often full. Monday, he said proudly, was their busiest night.