Where the Indus is Young (13 page)

After a lunch of tea and chapattis we set off to explore an inviting side-valley above the village. The snow was a miracle of pure brilliance, stretching softly away on every side in unflawed billows, and at one stage Rachel had to be given a pick-a-back lest she disappear into a drift. Often we turned to marvel at the immense height of the mountains along whose ankles we had been crawling in the Gorge. We also noticed a wonderful cloud-formation: one slender length of diaphanous vapour coiling unbroken from the mouth of the Gorge for as far as one could see towards Ronda. It was at eye-level, so the blue-brown-black mountain mass against which we viewed it seemed to be wearing a silver belt.

Back in our room, we had a meal of chapattis and harsh dahl curry. I have long since realised that during winter in Baltistan privacy is unattainable; the Baltis are attracted by heat as wasps by jam. Seven men, cloaked in blankets, are now sitting on our
charpoys
, stretching their hands towards the heat, coughing incessantly and frequently spitting or blowing their noses on to the floor. (‘People have different customs here,’ commented Rachel.) They watch my pen as though hypnotised and are, I must confess, irritating me slightly. Yet to turn them out, in this temperature and with fuel so dear, would be unforgivable.

One of our visitors was a Skardu youth who introduced himself as ‘a government officer’ and spoke a version of English. He had a neat, almost pretty little face, and wore a cheap-smart leather jacket with a London label which he proudly showed me. ‘My bust friend is smuggler,’ he explained. ‘He know Europe well. He have many friends of Europe. He work London–Karachi–London. Drugs to London, Scotch to Karachi. He is very rich man and my bust friend. Can I be of service to you?’

‘No thank you,’ I said firmly, just as the door opened to admit Hamad Hussain’s senior colleague. This tall, slim, unsmiling character had long, oiled, ebony moustaches, a livid scar on his left temple and a general air of having strayed from the cast of some
opera bouffe
dealing in handsome villains. He did not greet us but squeezed himself on to a charpoy as the Skardu youth asked me, ‘Do you like chess?’

Feeling vaguely surprised that the conversation should have taken such an elevated turn, I replied regretfully, ‘I’m afraid not; it’s too highbrow for me.’

‘You think it is bad habit?’ pursued the youth.

‘Of course not!’ I said. ‘I’m told it’s very good for the brain – it’s just that I’ve never been able to cope with it myself.’

‘But here you can try!’ exclaimed the youth. Then he leant across the stove and said something in Balti to the policeman, who at once produced what looked like a pellet of cow-dung. Holding this up between thumb and forefinger, and addressing me for the first time, the Head Constable said, ‘I give you, you give me Rs.50.’

I took the pellet to examine it, and Rachel and I felt it and smelt it: it was odourless. ‘What is it?’ I asked.

‘Chess,’ replied the youth. ‘My bust friend sell this much for Rs.500 in London, but here it is cheap.’

I handed his property back to the Head Constable and caused a gale of incredulous laughter by informing the company that in my country people are gaoled for selling ‘chess’. Then, having failed to do business, the policeman sombrely rolled a joint which he shared impartially with all his friends.

We were charged an outrageous Rs.25 for our cell in the
police-station
and the atmosphere generated this morning by the jostle of men around me indicated that argument would be ill-received.

It was snowing lightly as we left Katchura and we were the only moving objects on a landscape innocent of even a bird’s footprint. Overnight every angle had been rounded and every sharpness blunted, and now every tiny sound of nature was muffled. Clouds full of the radiance of unfallen snow hid the high peaks and one could stare at the sun through veils of gently drifting flakes, while a curiously diffused light glinted hesitantly on the sweep of the Indus, far below.

Our track, having descended to the base of the mountains, ran just above the valley floor – an unbroken expanse of glittering crystals. When we paused to rest on clumps of thyme, two slowly moving dots appeared, far away on the track towards Skardu. The first jeep to draw level with us stopped and the moment the driver unmuffled his face we recognised our taciturn friend, Mohammad, on his way back (he hoped) to Gilgit. Then the second vehicle stopped and Rachel squealed with joy on recognising Mazhar, on his way back (he hoped) to Thowar. He was accompanied by his senior medical officer, who also got out of the jeep and, as we shook hands, asked smilingly, ‘Do you remember?’

I studied his cheerful, slightly plump face, but had to say ‘No.’

His smile widened. ‘Chilas!’ he exclaimed. Incredibly, this was the man who, as a just-qualified army doctor, tended me so effectively in June 1963, after my heatstroke collapse in the furnace-like depths of the lower Indus Gorge. When Mazhar had told him about the Irishwoman with the child and the horse he had immediately declared, ‘It can only be the same one – unless all Irishwomen are mad!’

Soon after, the track left the base of the mountains to run between a succession of little hamlets and neat apricot and apple orchards where the trees had been carefully pruned – a sure sign of government agricultural advisers in the background. At one point we were joined by two fellow-travellers. The man wore a
threadbare
beige blanket and had a type of face often seen here –
blunt-featured
, kindly, not very bright. He was leading a frisky, woolly young dzo who plainly did not approve of the rope tied round her long, sharp horns. His small son followed, tramping through ice, snow and slush in pale blue broken plastic sandals on otherwise bare feet. Our first Balti dog brought up the rear – a black, heavily built, shaggy creature, with a square head. When a third jeep noisily approached us the dzo knocked her owner flat and went careering off over the snowy waste at a speed altogether inconsistent with her bulk. The dog promptly gave chase, followed by his humans, and as far as we were concerned the entire party was lost to sight forever.

By this time a windsock was visible, hanging motionless and unlikely against the valley’s eastern rampart of blue, cloud-enmeshed mountains. Then we saw Skardu’s squalid ‘airport’, a landing-strip nine miles from the town, surrounded by broken-down bits of
road-building
machinery, rusty jeep skeletons, barbed wire enclosures containing petrol-barrels, an army camp and supply depot, and sundry other disagreeable phenomena recalling travellers to the 1970s. (Oddly, between Gilgit and here one comes to accept jeeps – not to regard them as vile mechanical intrusions on the landscape. I suppose this is because of their daring feats in the Gorge, which earn one’s grudging respect.)

The eleven miles from Katchura had taken us over six hours and both Hallam and I were flagging for lack of adequate food, while Rachel was stiff with cold, having been in the saddle all day because of conditions underfoot.

Our hotel is new, like most buildings around the airstrip, but not offensive because constructed of local materials in the local style. It is opposite the enormous Military Supply Depot for Baltistan, so our arrival at once attracted the attention of several junior army officers who have proved most helpful, though the Pakistani Army is strictly forbidden, throughout the Northern Areas, to fraternise with foreigners. One Pathan lieutenant produced a bucket of pulse for Hallam and another told me not to order an evening meal because at six o’clock he would bring us mutton stew from the Mess. Hearing the words ‘mutton stew’ Rachel and I could scarcely control our salivary glands and sure enough at five minutes past six our friend reappeared, followed by his batman bearing a laden tray. We could now
smell
the mutton stew – but alas! the proprietor barred the doorway and began a tirade of abuse in Urdu, with Balti asides to his cronies who were sitting near us by the stove. I could gather approximately what was being said: that the military were a lot of idle, interfering intruders, that his
khana
was as good as anything produced in their rotten Officers’ Mess, that when he had a chance to make money on a foreigner they had no business to queer his pitch, that he and his friends would beat up the lieutenant and his servant if they didn’t go away fast, taking their tray with
them. (The proprietor would need a lot of help to beat up anybody; he is a mere wisp of a man, with a leathery face lined more by
ill-temper
than by age.) I felt very sorry for our friend, who had been put in a most humiliating position, especially for a Pathan. To help him save face I pretended to notice nothing and sat with head industriously bowed over notebook. Rachel of course was
aching
for mutton stew but when I fiercely whispered ‘Tact!’ she remained silent. This is a codeword meaning ‘Be quiet now and I’ll explain later’. It is invaluable on the many occasions when if she said anything it would be the wrong thing. I must say I admired her stoicism this evening. The poor child hasn’t had a decent meal for weeks and had been looking forward to her mutton stew with pathetic eagerness. Yet when it was removed from under her very nose, and I had explained why, she accepted the inevitable – in this case yet another fistful of dried apricots – and went to bed without a word of complaint.

I was relieved that our young friend had not forced the issue, as he must have been tempted to do. This incident was a symptom of how bad relations are between down-country regiments and the locals. There is as little in common between these northern mountain peoples and the Pakistanis as there was between the East and West Pakistanis.

Apart from the kitchen, this hotel has only one room, and I now see that we are to have the pleasure of the proprietor’s company all night. Half an hour ago our four fellow-guests put down their charpoys, which had been leaning against the wall, and lay two on each wrapped in their own blankets. They, too, have hacking coughs; and one of them, whose charpoy stands six inches from mine, is snoring like a defective bath-pipe. Normally I detest sharing a bedroom but in these parts one somehow doesn’t mind. Probably this is because each person wraps himself up so thoroughly that he is effectively isolated within his own private cocoon, from which he is unlikely even to peep before dawn.

My own bedding-down ritual is quite complicated. First I spread my astronaut’s blanket on the charpoy (or bed or floor). Then I unroll my silk-lined, Japanese high-altitude sleeping-bag and insert
it into my bulkier, quilted sleeping-bag, before spreading both on the blanket. Then I remove my long, very heavy, lined Parka jacket, which I have been wearing all day, and spread that over the flea-bags, before folding the top half of the astronaut’s blanket over the lot. Finally I remove my boots, but not my woollen socks, and put on my husky bootees; these match my husky jacket and pants, which are never removed. (By now I have quite forgotten which sweaters and slacks I am wearing beneath them.) Then I gently wriggle into bed, with book and torch, taking great care not to dislocate the various layers of the structure. Having zipped up one fleabag and buttoned the other only a small ventilation hole remains open and the temperature can – and does – drop to 40º below freezing without my noticing.

Were all capitals like this, I might not have such an aversion to urban life. Yet we are seeing a Skardu that has been much ‘developed’ over the past few years.

The Skardu Valley is some 7,500 feet above sea-level, twenty miles long from north-west to south-east and two to five miles wide. Through it the Indus has carved a bed fifty to seventy feet deep and in places the stream is 500 feet wide. Below its confluence with the Shigar it divides into several branches, creating many sandy islets. The encircling mountains rise abruptly from the valley floor to heights of 18,000 feet, and this morning all these craggy, glistening peaks gradually became visible as the dispersing clouds eddied vaguely around their shoulders, leaving the summits free.

We approached Skardu over a fissured plain criss-crossed with frozen irrigation channels and planted with fruit-trees. From afar we could see a long line of low wooden buildings on a ledge dominated by the strange Rock of Skardu – ‘like a ship out of the water turned upside down,’ to quote Rachel. But it would have to be a very big ship, for the Rock is more than two miles long and 1,300 feet high. On its far side the Shigar joins the Indus,
which from most parts of the town is invisible and, at this season, inaudible.

We took a short cut away from the jeep-track and climbed steeply into the Old Bazaar, where people stared at us as though we had stepped out of a spacecraft. This is Skardu’s main bazaar but in
midwinter
many traders hibernate; half the little stalls were closed and the rest carried very meagre stocks. Abbas Kazmi’s name is known to everyone here, so despite a predictable dearth of English-speakers and a certain surliness in the atmosphere – possibly owing to this being the start of Muharram – it was easy to find him. But even Hallam’s surefootedness was tested on the thick ice and packed snow of the town’s often-used paths.

Abbas Kazmi’s rambling bungalow was built by his father in 1949 when the family left Srinagar. From the edge of a steep bluff it overlooks the new cantonment area, a new mosque and the Chasma Bazaar, beyond which the eastern end of the Rock half hides the mouth of the Shigar valley. Behind the house is a secluded garden where Hallam was fed while we were being entertained in a large bed-sitter, furnished only with a charpoy, a small table and a
goat-hair
carpet on the floor near the stove.

When we arrived Abbas Kazmi happened to be entertaining Kalbay Abbas, the friend in whose house we are now installed. Kalbay does not in fact own it but is renting it from a local farmer named Sadiq Ali, and it is vacant merely because he found it intolerably primitive during winter. Some weeks ago he moved out to the Rest House but he is retaining this hovel for use next summer. A tall, handsome, assured young man, he has a quick brain and a nice sense of humour. His family came originally from Shigar but has now settled in Pindi; Kalbay works in his father’s engineering contractor business, spending much of his time in Baltistan. A past pupil of the Irish nuns at Murree, he speaks English more fluently and colloquially than anyone else we have met since leaving Islamabad and I found it a great relief to be able to talk to another adult at my normal pace in my normal idiom.

For lunch we had unleavened wheat-flour bread and curried spinach, our first green vegetable (or indeed vegetable of any hue) for over three weeks. Spinach grows abundantly here during summer
and is dried for winter use. Then came cups of salted butter tea, poured from an antique engraved silver pot, eighteen inches high, into which two red-hot wood embers had been dropped just before the brew was served. When Rachel’s expression unwittingly betrayed her opinion of this concoction a pot of ‘normal’ was at once prepared for the
bungo
– a delightful word, meaning girl-child.

After lunch Abbas Kazmi took Rachel to our new home, at the southern edge of Skardu, by a short cut impassable to horses, while Kalbay Abbas guided Hallam and me. The track was so difficult that I could scarcely spare a glance for my surroundings: I only know they were snow-covered, and that this ‘capital’ seems to be a collection of scattered groups of farmhouses rather than a town.

Where we rejoined the jeep track a long, level expanse of snow lay on our left, at the foot of a boulder-strewn hill, behind a
Connemara-type
wall. On our right half a dozen dwellings stood at right angles to the track and then we came to a new bazaar stall, not yet in use. Beyond this, an eight-foot wall ran beside the track for fifty yards, with a rickety wooden door up two steps halfway down its length. Kalbay Abbas gestured towards the door. ‘Home sweet home,’ he explained. ‘You needn’t
say
it’s OK if it isn’t.’

Hallam had to be unloaded on the track; as usual he made a formal protest about the steps but then went up and through the narrow door most meekly. Just inside one turns left for the latrine – a roofless, three-sided stone cubicle with a hole in the ground – and right for the ‘hall-door’. Off the dark hallway are an unfurnished kitchen and a living-room-cum-bedroom with two tape charpoys and two huge wooden chests belonging to Kalbay Abbas. These have now been converted into our table, although their raised edges and lack of height make them less than ideal for my main purpose. This room is about ten feet by twelve, with an untended mud floor which sends up clouds of dust however gently one walks. A low ceiling of mulberry beams and planks supports a flat mud roof covered in brushwood to break the weight of the snow. A large hole has been left in the middle of the ceiling for a stove-pipe and two panes of the glazed window are missing. The mud walls were once thinly white-washed but now are filthy and defaced. There is a large empty wall-cupboard and when
we arrived a niche near the window was also empty but for an Everyman edition of Charlotte Yonge’s
The Dove in the Eagle’s Nest.
Eng. Lit. gets around … This niche makes an ideal bookshelf and when I had given Miss Yonge some company (but would she approve of Simone de Beauvoir?) I felt that I had marked out our own bit of Skardu territory.

As we were debating where to stable Hallam, our landlord Sadiq Ali arrived and suggested the kitchen. So I coaxed our
ghora
in, tethered him to a rafter and here we all are, very cosy and snug, our oil-stove boiling a kettle for
chai
, the window blocked with an old exercise book lent by Rachel and the chimney-hole also papered over. Outside the window is a snow-filled orchard of apricot saplings and beyond that a mighty display of mountains, less than two miles away. I fetch water from a stream near our neighbours’ houses: it is unfrozen at only one point, where housewives repeatedly break the ice. We shall continue to use candles. In theory Skardu is electrified but in practice the current flows only rarely and weakly despite – or because of – the many wires that drape the town. These run from tree to tree like tropical creepers, at just the level to strangle or otherwise dispose of unwary riders. Indisputably this is an endearing capital.

The mod con I miss most is newsprint – as a household aid, rather than as an intellectual stimulant. Newspapers are neither demanded nor supplied here and only when without them does one realise how varied are their domestic uses. An equally conspicuous but more convenient lack is insect life. In summer this room must vibrate under the tread of its flea and bed-bug population, but mercifully all such creatures have been atrophied by the intense nocturnal cold and will reappear only towards the end of March.

In Skardu one remembers that Baltistan has a history, something easily forgotten while wandering through the isolation of the Indus Gorge. There it is hard to relate this land to the rest of the world, either in the past or the present but approaching Skardu the traveller notices if he looks hard enough – it blends very well with its surroundings – a fortress which vividly recalls distant wars. At
the eastern end of the Rock, some 300 feet above the valley floor, a natural shelf supports this unexpected building, described by de Fillipi as ‘so imposing as to be out of all proportion to the wretched little town at its feet which it was intended to defend’. It was designed by Ali Sher Khan, a famous king of Skardu who between 1590 and 1610 conquered Ladak, forcing the king to marry his daughter, and also Khapalu, in the Shyok Valley. From that date until 1947 the histories of Baltistan and Ladak are interwoven. During the post-Partition troubles, and the 1966 conflict, the people of Skardu continued to take refuge in their fortress, disregarding the fact that not even Ali Sher Khan’s cunning could outwit Indian Air Force bombers. But luckily those bombers devoted all their attention to putting the airstrip out of action.

Balti is a language without a script, nor do the people have many reliable oral traditions about their own past. In Thowar our Head Constable friend assured me that ‘before the conversion to Islam, 1200 years ago [
sic
], all Baltis were Hindus or Sikhs’. There is a hazy racial recollection of the language once having had a script and presumably this dates from Buddhist times. Then the Tibetan script would have been used, at least by the lamas and probably by all educated lay-folk.

The first known mention of Baltistan occurs in the Chinese annals, which refer to a Chinese military expedition aiding Ladak against Tibet in
AD
747. Ladak and Baltistan are called Big and Little Poliu. At about this time Baltistan is believed to have come under Tibetan rule and cultural influence; and so far as we know the Baltis remained subject to the Tibetans until their conversion to Islam in the early fifteenth century. Fosco Maraini is interesting on the linguistic link: ‘Balti as spoken today is an archaic form of Tibetan, the words being still pronounced as, in Tibet itself, they are nowadays only written. Rice, for instance, is in Balti
bras
, and in the Tibetan script it is written as
bras
. But … today Lhasa knows rice as
dren
! … Hundreds of such examples come to mind. Balti grammar and syntax too reveal archaic features.’

The next specific mention of Baltistan in the history books records the marvellous travels of Sultan Said, a Mongol Khan of Kashgar,
who achieved the almost impossible by taking an army of 5,000 men across the 19,000-foot Karakoram Pass in the spring of 1531. For over two years the Sultan and his merry men roamed through Ladak and Baltistan, living on what they could pillage. Then Sultan Said died, while his son Iskander was attempting the conquest of Lhasa. During this attempt the Kashgar army was reduced, by altitude, cold and hunger, to twenty-seven men.

Research can do little to illumine Baltistan’s past because those few records which once existed were destroyed comparatively recently. When the Sikhs took Skardu in 1840 they burned an ancient chronicle of the Makhpons, or Buddhist kings, and Vigne mentions hearing of the destruction of another famous manuscript during the burning of Skardu castle in the reign of Zufar Khan.

The Englishman G. T. Vigne spent long periods in Skardu during the 1830s and wrote the first description of the valley. His host, Ahmet Shah, was a direct descendant of Ali Sher Khan and the last independent Raja of Skardu. At one time each Balti oasis had its own hereditary chief whose family usually intermarried with that of the Raja of Skardu and who normally allied himself with his overlord against a common enemy, though on domestic issues he might oppose the Skardu line. Most such dynasties were of non-Balti extraction, being the descendants of soldiers of fortune or conquerors’ right-hand-men. Many came from Hunza or Nagar, where the people are much more enterprising and less docile than the Baltis, who seem never to have produced a leader of their own.

De Fillipi succinctly describes the final destruction of Balti
independence
, if one can call it that.