The Wet and the Dry (14 page)

“But,” I said, “it’s Monday night tonight.”

A twitch. “Yes, sir.”

“Is this really the busiest time of the week?”

“Most certainly.”

At that moment the power went out. The barman lit a ghostly match, and we stared at each other across the bar in total
darkness. Monday night at Islamabad’s hottest spot. He managed a fatalistic smile.

Perhaps every bar now is a potential target. Nobody knows who masterminded that immense explosion that was heard miles away—Al Qaeda? an obscure group called Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami? a group known as the Fedayeen Islam?—and no one ever will. U.S. officials have stated that they believe the bombing was masterminded by Usama al-Kini, Al Qaeda’s operations chief in Pakistan, who was himself killed by a drone missile strike in January 2009.

In a sense, it doesn’t matter. Modern 1960s Islamabad, Pakistan’s Brasília, sits on the fault line of a lethal culture war. There were many reasons to hit the Marriott, but its association with booze was certainly one of them. Because not only does the Marriott house a famous bar, it also offers a curious Pakistani institution known as a “permit room.”

A permit room is an unmarked liquor store sometimes tucked away at the back of a top-end hotel. Clients armed with a permit book or suitable foreigners can creep around to this secretive facility and buy bottles of vodka and Murree beer and then take them back to their rooms. The one at the Marriott is next to a laundry, around the corner from the main entrance. Surrounded as it is by sandbags and armed guards, you would never see it unless you were directed there explicitly. I’ve bought bottles of Scotch there, then had to do a kind of “walk of shame” as I hauled my boozy loot back to the main road, the Pakistani soldiers glaring at me with barely concealed sarcasm. It’s like buying unwrapped pornography in a Walmart Supercenter in Salt Lake City.

As I sipped my over-iced gin and tonic and watched
EastEnders
, I recalled that Pakistan was not always hostile to drink. When it became independent after partition from India in 1947, it was still a country where alcohol was legal, as it had been under the British. Indeed the revered founding father of Pakistan—the British-educated lawyer Muhammad Ali Jinnah, known in Pakistan as Quaid-i-Azam or “Great Leader,” who died in 1948—is widely thought to have drunk alcohol until he renounced it at the end of his life, though no books published in Pakistan may mention the fact or even suggest it as a rumor. (He was also reputed to eat pork.)

Alcohol was more or less freely sold and consumed from 1947 until 1977, when Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, eager to appease the country’s religious leaders, outlawed it months before he was himself removed from power in a coup by General Zia ul-Haq.

Zia softened some of the original prohibition, allowing alcohol to be sold to non-Muslims, but the ban for Muslims stuck. The prescribed punishment for infringement was set at six months in prison. Pakistan suddenly went dry, and Zia’s overall determination to Islamize Pakistan made that fact permanent. As Zia supported the mujahideen in Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation in the 1980s, a gradual conversion of the country from secular British common law to sharia religious law was set in motion by the American-backed dictator, who apart from privatizing much of the economy also instituted Islamic
hud
laws, whereby a person convicted of theft can have their hands and feet amputated. Alcohol would never return—officially.

For in reality alcohol pours illegally into Pakistan from all
sides. It flows in from China and through the port of Karachi, bootleg vodka, gin, and Scotch that can be found ubiquitously in private homes and at private parties. “Bootleg wallahs” operate in all the big cities, plying the well-off with contraband liquor. Johnnie Walker, as everywhere in Asia, is as desirable a brand as Gucci, symbol of an entire way of life and consumed with the relish that we reserve for cocaine. The poor, meanwhile, gorge on moonshine.

In September 2007 more than forty people died in the slums of Karachi from drinking toxic homemade moonshine, an incident that scandalized the country. The producer of the lethal brew was a cop, as was one of the victims. The press wrung its hands, and legislators asked if the suppression of alcohol might not be connected to the rise of drug addiction in the young. A Treasury member called Ali Akbar Wains made the argument publicly after the parliamentary secretary for narcotics told the lower house of parliament that there were now four million addicts in the country. Parliamentary affairs minister Sher Afgan Niazi stated for the record, “It is a fact that restrictions in liquor have resulted in a surge in the use of deadly drugs in Pakistan.” But the problem precisely is that alcohol is not just a drug.

It is a symbol of the West, a tool of Satan that denatures the true believer; it is also associated with sexual laxity, the mingling of men and women, and, one might say, the bar itself—a free public place quite distinct from the mosque or the bazaar, the two forms of public space that Muslim cities otherwise accommodate. Islamic radicals are right to hate and fear it. In bars, people leave their inhibitions behind.

A 2006 article in
Der Spiegel
put it bluntly: “The front line of the struggle against fundamentalism in Pakistan isn’t in the mountainous border regions. It’s in the country’s permit rooms. Alcohol is sold there—and customers dream of the West.”

Nowhere in Pakistan is this more evident than in the one place where it’s legal to have a nip of Satanic distillate: the Murree Brewery in Rawalpindi. The brewery, for years the only one in Pakistan, was founded in 1860 by the British to produce beer for the troops stationed in Rawalpindi. Murree is high in the hills, and in the age before refrigeration, its location was ideal. With the coming of cooling technologies around 1910, the British moved it down to the hotter plains. Rawalpindi, meanwhile, became the headquarters of the Pakistan Army as well—and a sprawling, dangerous city filled with radicals. In December 2009 five suicide attackers stormed a mosque used by the Pakistan Army and shot dead thirty-seven retired and serving officers inside it. The Taliban claimed responsibility. To put it mildly, it’s a bad neighborhood to be making beer and flavored vodka.

The Bhandara family, who are Parsis, took ownership of the brewery in 1961, when they bought majority shares in it. The present owner is Isphanyar, whose celebrated father Minoo ran the brewery for decades; Minoo, who died in 2008, was the brother of the noted novelist Bapsi Sidhwa, a remarkable writer afflicted by polio who wrote a beautiful book called
The Crow Eaters
, which I read years ago.

They are a cultured, literary family, and I supposed it was
because they were Parsis that they were allowed to run a plant that produces a bewildering variety of drink. Aside from all the vodkas and gins, they malt their own whisky as well as turning out Pakistan’s most famous beer, Murree. The beer’s logo is known everywhere, even though only 5 percent of the population can drink it: “Drink and make Murree!”

Isphanyar is one of those youngish Pakistani go-getters who never seem to be able to sit still for a moment, as if everything needs to be done instantly in case—for some mysterious reason—it’s too late. I met him in his office at the brewery, where he sat restlessly behind a huge desk, blinking, pressing buzzers and bells, and casting a watchful eye on the video security monitors. He wore a ring on each hand, a pink-striped shirt, and a Rolex. The walls were hung with regimental British Raj calendars with vignettes of mounted Hussars, and the desk itself was dotted with garish little beer mats showing Pheasants of Pakistan. A small desk sign read “Don’t Quit.”

In wall cases stood rows of Murree products: Kinoo Orange Vodka, Citrus and Strawberry Gin, Vat No. 1 Whisky, clear rum, and beers. There were also the fruit juices and fruit malts that Murree sells to Muslims, foremost among them a thing called Bigg Apple. When Isphanyar spoke rapidly on the phone, his Urdu was mixed with urgently crisp English words: “maximize,” “incentivize,” “target,” and then “look after him!” From time to time he paused to sweep a deodorant stick into his armpits and laughed a little nervously. He was handsome, quick, and on edge.

I asked him if running a brewery in the world epicenter of Islamic extremism bothered him. Or worse.

“Bothered?” he asked.

“Well, is it perilous for you?”

“All I can say is, we try to keep a low profile. I don’t want my children to be kidnapped.”

He pressed another buzzer. There was a whiff of Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory, of delirious energy. “Strawberry juice?” he whispered into the intercom. “To Peshawar?”

He twiddled a pen and looked momentarily distracted as underlings came in and out, and I then observed that it was strange that a brewery in Pakistan could not sell anything to the vast bulk of the population; nor could it export. But this seemed self-evident to him.

“We cannot very well put ‘Made in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan’ on our bottles of vodka. But between you and me, the non-Muslims in this country are not the big drinkers. It’s one of the ironies of Pakistan.” He smiled cattily, and we were served a shot of Murree Whisky. To my surprise, it was excellent.

“What do you think?” he asked eagerly.

“It’s very fine. Twenty-one years?”

“Our best. I will say, by the way, that it is
widely enjoyed
inside the country.”

I had noticed that the brewery lies at the end of an unmarked track along an unmarked slip road, as invisible as such a large facility can be. It was protected by high walls and the usual armed guards. Ex-president Pervez Musharraf’s house was nearby. It was like a town within a town, its dark red British brick, mostly from the 1940s, lending it a somber elegance of line. The air was thick with the sweetish smells of the whisky malting plant. As he led me outside, Isphanyar reflected on the
volatility of the society to which he is, in effect, the leading supplier of a religiously outlawed intoxicant.

“The Muslim attitude is getting harder. Liquor, you see, is associated with a Western lifestyle, so it has become a flash point of some kind. Muslim hostility to the Western way of life finds its focus in alcohol. Hatred is directed at alcohol because it’s a symbol of corruption. But at the same time the extremists tolerate beheadings, drugs, heroin, and kidnapping, and they grow poppies. It’s bewildering, ah very. Do you not find it bewildering?”

“Very bewildering.”

“We are most bewildered, I must say.”

I was then taken around the malting and bottling plant. It’s a self-contained production line: Baudin malt from Western Australia, Chinese bottling machines, Spanish labeling machines, cellars of Latin American oak casks that would not be out of place in Islay or Jerez. It was curious to watch the Muslim workers operating the machines as rows of Nip bottles of Vat No. 1 came pouring out. What was going through their minds? The foreman showing me around reminded me, as we strolled past whitewashed whisky casks, some of them dated 1987, that everything produced here had to be consumed inside the country. It was, to say the least, an enormous paradox. Five percent of 160 million is a fair number of drinkers, but I wondered if it could account for all these casks.

A little later in the day I went to a tasting of new vodkas that Murree is developing. The development meeting was attended by six staff members headed by Muhammad Javed, Murree’s general manager, and each man gave the vodkas a score on a
piece of paper. I joined in. Some of them were highly refined, with a soft “fruit” and a sense of serious purpose. Serious vodka, then, for a nation of serious drinkers? Javed explained that they were trying to develop vodkas even though their most popular drink was whisky. Vat No. 1 accounted for 40 percent of their total sales because it was relatively cheap. A bottle of twenty-one-year, on the other hand, cost about 2,500 rupees, in a country where the daily minimum wage was 230 rupees. Yet they couldn’t make enough of it. Especially, he pointed out, when you considered that the government levied enormous taxes on it and they couldn’t sell to the public except through permit rooms.

“Of course,” he added, nodding with finite mischief to the others, “we all know that non-Muslims buy it for Muslims. A thriving trade.”

My mouth rinsed with vodka, and quite tipsy, I staggered across the courtyard to visit Retired Major Sabih ur-Rehman, who was, as his card explained, Special Assistant to Chief Executive.

Rehman once participated in a study by the customs department that determined that about $10 million of drink was being confiscated every year, suggesting the presence of an enormous alcoholic black market. For every bottle confiscated, he told me, there were probably three in circulation. The study put the value of the alcoholic black market in Pakistan at about $30 million. This, he added, was driven by non-Muslims selling to Muslims. A bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label cost about 1,200 rupees in an airport duty-free, but its black market value was closer to 5,000.

“Moreover,” he went on, “the biggest bars in the world are the
bars of Islamabad households, I can assure you. The bootleggers who deliver to your house are almost never prosecuted. The police protect them. Very powerful people run this.”

He recalled that when he was in the army, they had bars called “wet clubs,” though he wasn’t sure if they still existed. Either way, he was sure that Pakistan was awash with booze, even if no one could admit it.

“I think people are drinking more, even if some figures show official consumption going down. We don’t have alcoholism here per se. What we have is something else: it’s that alcohol has glamour. It’s desirable because it’s forbidden fruit. That’s the logic of human nature. By the way, did you try our Pineapple Vodka?”

What a shame, he implied, that they couldn’t export it to the West.

“And before you leave, I’ll give you a bottle of our whisky and some other things. Take it to a non-Muslim party if you’re ever invited.”

“Is it legal?”

His head jiggled, and he went all sly.

“Ah, legal—that I cannot say.”