Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples

  It was not long after this that Rana’s father sold his land in the village in order to go into business. The business failed almost immediately; everything was lost. And Rana discovered then that the respect he had grown to enjoy in the village as his father’s son was no longer there; even close family became distant. He wanted not to see people. He felt that his dream of power over people was wrong.

  His father pulled him out of this gloom. He insisted that Rana should do some higher training. Rana’s father had always believed in education for its own sake. He used to tell Rana when Rana was a child, “I will kill you or throw you out of the house if you don’t go to school.” Another thing he used to say was, “Illiteracy is death. Literacy is life.”

  He suggested now that Rana should go to a law school. Out of the ruin of his fortune he found five hundred rupees a month for the school fees. Gradually, in the study of law, Rana found a kind of philosophical solace. It introduced him to another idea of power.

  He spoke of this when he came with a friend to see me, some days after our visit to the courts. He said, “The more I learnt about the law the more I felt that all power doesn’t lie with the policeman. Anybody who is a man of means, and well educated, and with an awareness of his rights, can be a stable man, a man who can face any kind of consequences.”

  His law studies lasted three years. Near the end of that time he became involved with a girl, and after the law examinations he thought he should spend a little time away from his family. He went to Islamabad and the mountain places, Murree, Kaghan, Naran. The girl didn’t marry him. She married someone with money. He didn’t hold it against her; it still made him proud that she had liked him. And again it was his father who came and pulled him out of his melancholy. He found Rana in one of the mountain places and said, “Enough is enough. Come back and file your papers for an advocate’s license.”

  And now Rana, who had learned about the law, began to learn about the legal life. In his eyes he had made himself an educated, sensitive person; he expected people to respect him for that, to respect his sensibilities. He found, when he began to do his six-month probation, that there was no respect at all for him. His seniors treated him like a clerk or office messenger, a peon. He changed his firm. The senior in the new firm said, “I will pay you fifteen hundred rupees in the beginning. After fifteen days I will pay you two thousand. And after four or six months money will become immaterial.” Rana didn’t even get the fifteen hundred starting pay. It wasn’t that the senior didn’t like Rana; he liked Rana very much; he just didn’t think he should pay him.

  Rana said, “Money became immaterial in the other way.”

  Sohail, the friend who had come with Rana, said, “The problem with Rana is that he’s not a yes-man.”

  Rana said, “Now I am living like a yes-man. Eighty percent I am a yes-man now.” But he smiled. He was out of office hours, and not in his lawyer’s black suit; he was more at ease. He could make little jokes.

  Seniors were one thing. There were also the clerks to whom you had to give little tips before they did what, according to the law, they had to do. Rana’s senior said, “This is part of the job”; but Rana didn’t agree. Then there were clients. They wanted lawyers with experience or a reputation. The better clients wanted lawyers who could speak better English than Rana could; in Pakistan everything to do with the law was in English. And after all of this there were the judges. Rana didn’t think they cared as they should about words and the meaning of words; they cared about personalities.

  The first time Rana appeared in court on his own was over a petition for bail. The law, Rana thought, was that when injuries were not on the vital parts, and not grievous, bail should be granted. He stated his case. The judge said, “Young man, have you finished?” Rana said, “Yes, sir.” The judge said, “I will give a decision after a few minutes.” Rana turned and made to step down from the dais. The judge said sharply, “Listen to me.” Rana turned and looked at the judge. The judge said, “I have dismissed your petition.”

  Rana went back in a gloom to his office. He talked with friends about giving up this branch of the profession. It didn’t make him feel any better when the next day a senior from the firm went before the same judge and the petition for bail was granted.

  When as a boy he had thought of power he had thought of exercising it. Now he saw power from the other side, from below. One day he was in the district courts. Two young boys, ten and twelve, and their mother were charged with drug trafficking. The mother was crying. Rana went and talked to her. She told him that the policeman who had brought the charge against her and her sons had been pestering her to sleep with him. Rana believed her.

  Sohail said, “There are two kinds of people who are living well in Pakistan. People with names, and people with money. Everybody else are like insects, worms. They have no power. No approach. Powers are in limited hands, and money is also in limited hands.”

  The day came when Rana thought he could take no more. He wanted to leave Pakistan, get away. He thought—with a curious willful ignoring of immigration laws—that he would go to England, do a job there, improve his English, learn more about the law. When he went to the British consulate to get a visa the man at the counter didn’t let him finish his story. He threw Rana’s passport back at him. Rana remembered the insult; telling the story, he acted out the official’s throwing gesture. But he could do nothing about it. He had to stay where he was, and stick it out in the law.

  Sometimes now he told his father that he was going to give the law just one more year. Then his father would say, “You have spent a lot of time on the law. You better stay in, because at least you are earning something.”

  He was living now on his nerves. There were all the strains of the profession and then there were the difficulties of daily life.

  Once there was a lot of transport in Lahore, Sohail said. There were nice Volvo buses. Then they—the unknown “they,” who were responsible for so much—stole the air-conditioning systems and the carpets and the cushions. Then they began stealing parts of the engines. Now the depot was full of useless buses. And there were only minibuses on the roads. These buses had only fifteen seats, and there would be twenty or thirty people at the bus stop.

  Rana said, “Sometimes I wait for an hour. How can you blame people if they want to take the law in their own hands? If they want to take the Kalashnikov. There are some basic requirements for life—you give people a chance to have their edibles, to travel in an easy way, to have other opportunities.”

  Sohail said, “The people don’t know about their rights.”

  Rana closed his eyes and nodded. There were ten in his family. He was the eldest son. Once, for the sake of his own security and the security of his family, he had dreamed of power over people. Now he talked of their rights.

  I asked about his mother.

  “She is a simple woman. From the village.” It had been an arranged marriage, a Rajput caste affair. “She just tells me to wait. And wait.”

  It was one of the grand lawyers of Lahore who suggested that I should go to the Hira Mandi, the Diamond Market, the area of the singing and dancing girls, the prostitutes’ area. The lawyer’s office had something of the formality of the higher courts. Whenever the lawyer entered the outer office all the clerks and assistants stood up and fixed their eyes on him. This regard for rank and personality in the law was what Rana hadn’t expected, and suffered from; but it worked the other way with me. I knew at once from everything that surrounded this lawyer, and from what I saw in people’s eyes, that the lawyer was a man of weight. The lawyer had a very good guide to the Diamond Market for me. One of his clients, he said, knew the area well. And the client was there, in the inner office: a big man in a loose peach-colored long-tailed shirt.

  The dancing and singing began late. My guide was to come to the hotel at eleven that evening. He came fifteen minutes after that. He was fatter than he appeared seated in the lawyer’s office. He had a muscular man with him, an
d when we got to the van in the hotel drive there were two other men inside it, a dark pockmarked man with a baseball cap and another muscular man, with designer stubble, in a red-and-blue striped jersey.

  The Diamond Market was in the old walled city, some way beyond the end of the Mall, and at the back of the Shah Jahan Mosque. It was strange—just at the end of a short van ride—to see the girls in the lighted rooms, with the men passing in the dark streets all the time, with rubble and dust all around, and food shops and sweetshops.

  My guide in the long-tailed shirt walked with authority. People knew him. It was his area; the lawyer was right. The man in the red-and-blue jersey said, “He is terrorist of this area.” When my guide, in the peach-colored long shirt, greeted someone, the man in the jersey said of the man greeted, “He is small terrorist.”

  So it went on, past the lighted rooms, with the musicians seated on the floor, the girls in groups or singly, with careful, worrying, blank expressions. Always above the lighted rooms were balconies, sometimes with girls, sometimes with young men. The guide said, “Their agents.” He offered everything that was going: sweets, food, the girls themselves. Always, with this, glimpses of derelict people, lepers, men withered away to almost nothing.

  They wanted me to try a milk sweet. They took the thing they had in mind from a display in front of a shop; there was no objection, only compliance and a smile. I tried it with them, nervously. And then there was a meal in a famous restaurant or eating house. It was quite a big place. Chicken and goat simmered in pots outside. A table and chairs were wiped down for us in an inner room. As in ancient Rome—where a famous floor mosaic was of food scraps thrown down—they threw bones on the floor when they had finished chewing them. The big man in the long shirt used bits of naan bread to scoop up the liquid from the chicken-and-goat stew. He went then, as though demonstrating his power, to get some more from the pots outside.

  When he came back I asked, “How many terrorists in this area?” His friend, in the striped jersey, winked at me and said, “Only one.” The big man talked of his time in London, in Whitechapel. He had got to know two African or black terrorists there, he said.

  At the end they washed their hands at a tap over a sink and wiped their fingers dry on a towel. The big man pointed to the photograph of the girl on the calendar next to the sink. “You like her? You want to f— her?” Food had made him expansive. “On me. You f—. I have the money.” He slapped his side.

  We walked again, past the hypnotic lighted rooms. It was hard not to be worried or frightened, with all the stories of the kidnapping and torture of women and girls.

  For the first time that evening there was a police jeep, moving cautiously in the narrow lane.

  The big man said, “The police are rubbish.”

  They all agreed.

  The big man said, “They come at twelve-thirty, when everything closes down.”

  He was in trouble with the police. He was on a murder charge and had spent a year in jail before being released on bail. That was why that morning he had been in the lawyer’s office.

  He said, “Justice is rubbish. Law is rubbish. Law is only for the poor, not for the rich.”

  We went up the steps to the lobby of a movie house. The lobby was empty; the cinema looked closed. The big man showed the still photographs on the display boards, and his friend in the jersey said, “All these girls are pros.” Again as though they were being offered to me. I said I was embarrassed. The friend—a sudden, unexpected fellow feeling arising between us—said, “I know very well what you mean.”

  We went back to the van. An absolute derelict had been watching it. He came out of the darkness and, shriveled, skin and bone, hardly a man, asked for money, which, wordlessly, but without disregard, the men gave.

  The big man said, “Last round.”

  We drove slowly down and up and down the narrow lanes again. Rich men came and took away the girls, they said. Right at the end of our last round, pointing to a dark thin man in a dark shalwar-kameez, drugged-looking, pulling at a cigarette, the big man said, “A broker. Those three.” He meant the girls in the lighted room. The dark man was standing in the dark street just in front of the room.

  The big man said, “Now where do you want to go?” I said, “Back to the hotel.” They were all disappointed.

  In the old days I would have grown dizzy with excitement here. Up to my mid-thirties I had been attracted to prostitutes and sought them out. My memories of those times were not really of pleasure, however; they were more of the enervation that came after the dizziness. The men in the van might have thought that I was pretending—prostitutes in Pakistan had a recognized place in lower-middle-class and upper-class life: there would have been no dishonor for me—but I now had no brothel urge. My ideas of sexual satisfaction had changed.

  The big man picked up a bottle-shaped cutout that was standing against the windscreen. It was of Nawaz Sharif, the opposition leader, broad-waisted in long shirt and unbuttoned waistcoat. The big man said, “He is my leader.” The cut-out figure was the leader, in fact, of all the men in the van. I was, to my surprise, among politicians of a sort.

  Politics and sexual repression and cruelty and captive women and music and grime and lepers wasting away and exposed food: many ideas and sensations were in conflict in this pleasure area. Everything was to be distrusted; everything canceled out.

  The big man wasn’t lying, I learned later. He was as important as he said he was. He had done the things that important men in this kind of area did, and some people wanted to get him. We might easily have been fired on that evening, from one of those dark upper windows.

  3

  RANA IN HIS VILLAGE

  ON FRIDAY, THE SABBATH—it had been declared the sabbath only in 1977, as part of a political auction in Islamic pledges between a prime minister and his challengers, in which it could be said the prime minister had both lost and won: he had been deposed soon afterwards and tried and hanged, but the Friday sabbath had stayed—on Friday, when Rana didn’t have to put on his lawyer’s black suit and black tie, he took me to his father’s ancestral village.

  His father had no land there now. But the village was full of relations, and Rana had arranged for an uncle to receive us. Five uncles of Rana still owned all the land. They had the same grandfather; they were brothers or cousins. There were four or five hundred houses in the village, Rana said. Each house had from eight to ten people, and at one time most of those people would have worked the land for the landowners. Now a few had gone abroad, to Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and other places; and a few had started businesses of their own, small poultry farms, little shops, an ice factory. Life there still followed the old pattern. Everybody got up before sunrise, whatever the season and the weather. They worked until noon. The field workers took their food in the fields; they didn’t return home until the end of the working day.

  It was this old and beautiful way that Rana wanted me to see. He made his own arrangements for the car. It was a friend’s car, and the friend was the driver. The friend was shorter and stouter than Rana. He was as young as Rana, but things were already moving for him. He had his own business in a small town. He made and exported garments, still in a small way, but he had dreams. They made him talkative, until we hit the bad roads and the drive became a trial.

  The way out led for some time past a tree-lined canal, and then we were on the very flat plain of the Punjab. It was the area of Raiwind, Rana said; every summer religious scholars met here. They were more than scholars; they were missionaries. I remembered the gathering in 1979: like an immense fairground in the flat land: the roads and glinting cars seen from far and diminishing in the distance; the hummocked spread of tents; the waterlogged ground as springy as a mattress, breaking at every footfall into minute cracks that sealed up again as soon as the foot was lifted; and then, in the enclosed space of the tents, the accentuated perspective view of tent poles leaning this way and that and going back and back, smaller and smaller; a great r
estless seated crowd in the aqueous covered light; with shifting and very white gashes above, where the tent covers didn’t absolutely meet, and the sky showed.

  The Raiwind gathering that year had come at a time when the country was having its first taste of religious terror, under General Zia. He had hanged Mr. Bhutto, the Friday sabbath man; he had gone then to Mecca to do the little pilgrimage, not the full one, but he had still come back with a hundred million dollars of Saudi money. Government offices in Pakistan were required to stop for all the prescribed prayers; Islamic whipping vans were being sent out to deal with the wicked. People were cowed. Some of them felt they couldn’t be good enough; they felt they had to do more and more; and all around Raiwind, even after the ecstasies of the missionary tents, people could be seen on the roadside saying more prayers.

  The land—on this Friday morning, when we were driving to Rana’s village—was so flat and the air so clear that people could be seen from very far away, two or three villages at once: very small figures, some playing cricket on this holiday morning, some running or walking: the sharpness of the detail, and the small size of the figures, giving the eye a kind of pleasure. The houses were of clay brick and were the color of the earth. From time to time there were the fat, tapering chimneys of brick kilns, with disordered or broken-into brick piles around them.

  There was a shortcut, Rana said. If we could find out where it was we would get to the village in an hour. He couldn’t remember where the shortcut was, and he didn’t know what condition it would be in after the floods. We began to ask. Rana was right. There was a shortcut, and two or three people told us that the floods hadn’t done it too much harm. But the shortcut, when we came to it, was nothing like a real road. It was full of ruts and wide puddles, and at every village there was a jam. The shops at these village intersections were set far back on their plots; on the trampled, muddy space in front of the shops goods were displayed. This illusion of extra space encouraged people to make wide maneuvers and added to the confusion. Once for about ten minutes we couldn’t move at all, because there was such a tangle of horse-drawn tongas, carts, cars, bicycles, buses.