That the mullah was unreliable, and not a moral man in any recognizable way, was not important. He was not offering himself as a guide. It was his business as a mullah to keep the converted people on their toes, and when there was need to charge them up, to fix their minds on hell and heaven, and to tell them that when the time came only Allah would be their judge. This was an aspect of the religious state—the state created for converts alone, where religion was not a matter of private conscience—that the poet Iqbal had never considered: that such a state could always be manipulated, easy to undermine, full of simple roguery.
There was something else that Iqbal had never considered: that in the new state the nature of history would alter, and with that altering of the historical sense, the intellectual life of the country would inevitably be diminished. The mullahs would always hold the ring, would limit inquiry. All the history of the ancient land would cease to matter. In the school history books, or the school “civics” books, the history of Pakistan would become only an aspect of the history of Islam. The Muslim invaders, and especially the Arabs, would become the heroes of the Pakistan story. The local people would be hardly there, in their own land, or would be there only as ciphers swept aside by the agents of the faith.
It is a dreadful mangling of history. It is a convert’s view; that is all that can be said for it. History has become a kind of neurosis. Too much has to be ignored or angled; there is too much fantasy. This fantasy isn’t in the books alone; it affects people’s lives.
Salman, talking of this neurosis, said, “Islam doesn’t show on my face. We have nearly all, subcontinental Muslims, invented Arab ancestors for ourselves. Most of us are sayeds, descendants of Mohammed through his daughter Fatima and cousin and son-in-law Ali. There are others—like my family—who have invented a man called Salim al-Rai. And yet others who have invented a man called Qutub Shah. Everybody has got an ancestor who came from Arabia or Central Asia. I am convinced my ancestors would have been medium to low-caste Hindus, and despite their conversion they would not have been in the mainstream of Muslims. If you read Ibn Battuta and earlier travelers you can sense the condescending attitude of the Arab travelers to the converts. They would give the Arab name of someone, and then say, ‘But he’s an Indian.’
“This invention of Arab ancestry soon became complete. It had been adopted by all families. If you hear people talking you would believe that this great and wonderful land was nothing but wild jungle, that no human beings lived here. All of this was magnified at the time of partition, this sense of not belonging to the land, but belonging to the religion. Only one people in Pakistan have reverence for their land, and that’s the Sindhis.”
This was what lay all around Salman’s serene childhood. These fantasies and illusions, which to some extent were also his when he was a child, were to become his subject when he became a writer. They took time to discover; they needed the adult eye; they required him to stand a little outside himself.
But even while he was still an adolescent Salman began to have intimations of being somewhat apart. Just a few months after he had gone along with that schoolboy demonstration about The Warrior Prophet (feeling all the time that it was unjustified), and in that little afternoon jihad had helped to break up a couple of minibuses, something happened that unsettled him.
It was Ramadan, the fasting month. He had been told, and he believed, that if he stayed up praying on one particular night during the last ten days of Ramadan, he would be cleansed of all his sins; he would become a new man. They told him he would feel lighter; that was impressed on him. That year the big night was the night of the twenty-seventh. He and his brother and his sister and the rest of the family stayed up praying. In the morning he didn’t feel any different. He had been looking forward to a great feeling of lightness. He was disappointed. But he didn’t have the courage to tell anyone in the family.
His disappointment, and the worry about it, might have been greater at this particular time because, after a decade and a half of success, his father’s civil engineering business had begun to fail. The actual work was holding up, but Salman’s father had begun to make a series of misjudgments about people. Salman was still at school; his father’s business troubles would have worried him.
Two or three years later—Salman’s father’s business going down all the time—there was another incident, this time at the end of Ramadan. Id is the great festival at the end of Ramadan, and the Id prayers are always in a congregation. Salman’s father had taken the car to go to the mosque he always went to, and Salman and his brother were going on foot to look for a mosque in the neighborhood. Salman said to his brother, “What a waste of time.”
The brother said, “Especially when you don’t even believe in it.”
Salman said, “What? You too?”
The brother said, “Our elder sister doesn’t believe either. Don’t you know?”
Salman had a high regard for his brother’s intellect. The worry he had felt about losing his faith dropped away. He didn’t feel he was letting down the people who had died in the riots in Jalandhar in 1947.
All three children of the family had lost religion. But, as his business had gone down, Salman’s father had grown more devout and more intolerant. One of the festivals the family had celebrated when Salman was a child was the Basant, or Spring Festival. Now Salman’s father banned it as un-Islamic, something from the Hindu and pagan past. There were great quarrels with his daughter when she came from Karachi, where she lived. She was not as quiet as Salman and his brother. She spoke her mind, and the arguments could become quite heated. One day, when Salman’s father’s brother was also present, Salman’s father said, “Let her be. She’s an apostate. Don’t get into these arguments with her.” And he walked away in anger. The house would have been full of strains.
Salman’s father wanted Salman to be an engineer. But Salman’s mathematics were bad, and just before his twentieth birthday he joined the army. He had developed an interest in guns. He had no religious faith now, but he was the complete Pakistani soldier. He was passionate about going to war with India, though there had been the Bangladesh defeat just the year before.
“It was in my mind that we—or I, personally—had to get even for the murder of my grandparents and my two aunts. It must have been with me always, but this was a very cold feeling. Like a seasoned murderer going in for his hundredth kill. I wasn’t excited or emotional about it. It was just something I had to do. I didn’t talk about my grandparents, but I was very vocal about going back to war with India. This was with my army companions. Not at home.”
After two or three years this feeling left him. He also fell out of love with the army. He couldn’t find people to talk to, and he was rebuked for talking about books and trying to impress. Three years later he was able to leave the army. He joined a multinational company in Karachi. The job came through an army friend whose uncle was the number two in the company.
So Salman went to Karachi, the mohajir city. Life was not easy. He lived in the beginning as a paying guest in a family; after that there was a shabby little rented room with a kitchen. He moved up the ladder slowly. He had a friend in the company. One day when they were talking Salman mentioned the Reader’s Digest. The friend laughed. Salman said he wanted to learn. The friend was pleased; he began to guide Salman, and Salman looked back on this as the start of his education.
After five years he married, and then, like his father, he gave up the security of his job and became self-employed. He did so at a bad time. Karachi had grown and grown since independence; it had received immigrants from India and from all parts of Pakistan; and now the Sindhi-Punjabi-mohajir tensions were about to turn nasty.
In January 1987, less than four years after he had married, Salman and his wife lost all their money. A friend had told them that at their stage in life they should be thinking of the future and making some investments. They had put their money in different investment companies; they had been careful, as they thou
ght, to spread the risks; but one day all the companies just vanished. The friend had persuaded them to invest in a company run by missionary mullahs. These mullahs were not militant; they wanted only to make Muslims good, to bring strayers back into the fold, and to win fresh converts. The friend said to Salman and his wife, “You may not have faith, but this is the only company that’s truly reliable.” That was where most of Salman’s money and his wife’s money went.
This tragedy was matched by the tragedy of the streets. “Things were getting bad in Karachi and Sindh during this time. Between 1987 and 1989 this terrible thing began to happen in Karachi. A solitary pedestrian at night would be approached from behind by a motorcyclist and stabbed in the back. There must have been fifty or a hundred-odd cases. They would happen once every week or so. Just an isolated incident somewhere. I do not recall reading anywhere that any one stabber had been apprehended. I was getting more and more upset about it.
“In July 1987 this incident happened. I had to drive my wife to the airport at two in the morning. On the way back I ran out of petrol. I knew there wasn’t enough when I started, but I thought I would buy at one of the many points. This was a city that never really slept. But every single petrol station was closed for fear of armed robberies. I took my wife to the airport. My petrol was now very low. On the way back, about two kilometers from home, the car stopped. It would have been just after two in the morning. So I parked the car and started walking.
“I have never felt such a raging fear—it was surging inside me. I still very distinctly remember looking at the walls at the side of the road to see which one was easier to jump over, and escape, in case I was attacked. And then I heard this motorcyclist coming up from far behind. Put-put-put. I was utterly and completely terrified. And in this scramble of thoughts the only thing I remember was this desire to escape, to go over a wall. I don’t know what kept me there. And the put-put-put came nearer. I looked back. He was a lone rider. The attackers were always two. So I knew he wasn’t one. But still the fear was real. I stopped walking. And he came put-put-put. He said, ‘What are you doing on the street at this time? Don’t you know it’s dangerous?’ I told him. He asked where I was going. When I told him he said, ‘Get on, I will drive you home.’ He was an Urdu-speaking man. I laughed and asked him, ‘You said it’s dangerous. What are you doing on the street?’ He said, ‘I’m on the way to the Indian consulate, to be first in line for the visa.’ Just after two in the morning. That is what people had to do. He must have had relations in India. He was going visiting. He wasn’t getting away from the danger.”
Salman and his wife had been playing with the idea of leaving Karachi and going back to Lahore. This experience decided him. Later that morning he telephoned his wife and said, “We really have to get away.”
“It wasn’t really fear. Fear for my own life. It was the sorrow of living in an unjust, cruel society. Everything was collapsing. It’s as though those poor people who died in Jalandhar died in vain. Why should my aunts and grandparents have to pay with their lives—for nothing? There was no bitterness. Just a sense of the unfairness in it all.”
About six months after the motorcycle incident, people who were suffering in Karachi, like Salman, organized a peace rally. There were about five hundred at the rally. They were people who had lost hope. It was wintertime, very lovely and pleasant in Karachi. The people in the rally smiled and nodded at one another. Many had tears in their eyes.
“There was an immense feeling of brotherhood, of belonging. No slogans. It was just a walk for peace in Karachi. And all along I had this lump in my throat and I thought I would break out crying. Everybody knew that we were all partners in this grief, for whatever was happening to that city. Everybody used to have this feeling for that city. It never went to sleep. And people used to say—the Punjabis and the Pathans—that it was a kind-hearted city, especially good to its poorer inhabitants.”
That year, in the first week of September, there was a massacre of some three hundred people in the city of Hyderabad, the second city of Sindh. Unidentified gunmen opened up, and in ten or fifteen minutes killed those three hundred. It was part of the mohajir war. Sometimes the mohajirs did the killing, sometimes the army. Salman met some friends that day. They said to him, “You look sick. Has someone died?” He said, “No, no. No one’s died.”
On that day Salman and his wife decided to leave Karachi. It took them three months to wind up their affairs.
It wasn’t easy for Salman to make a living. The restricted intellectual needs of the country offered him few openings as a writer, didn’t encourage him to grow. He was poorly rewarded for what he did.
He had become a kind of wanderer. He found solace now in wilderness. The country at least offered him that; there were great tracts of desert and mountain where a man might feel no one had been before.
He carried the old torment with him: the first four days of independence in 1947, from the fourteenth of August to the eighteenth, and the empty courtyard house in Jalandhar with blood on the walls.
He had not been to India, and he was beginning to think he should go there. There was a journey he wished to make. He wanted the journey to start on the eleventh of August, and he wanted it to start in the Himalayan hill station of Solan. From Solan on the eleventh of August, 1947, his aunt (who was to be murdered within a week) had written to her husband that it was getting very dangerous in Solan; he was to come at once and take her back to Jalandhar. He went and brought her down in the train. He said later (he was one of the survivors) that the hatred and tension in the railway coach was something they could feel. But they got without trouble to the house in Jalandhar on the fourteenth of August.
That was the journey Salman wanted to do again one year, within those dates, if he could get an Indian visa. “To mark the beginning of this thing.”
7
FROM THE NORTH
RAHIMULLAH WAS A PATHAN of the Yusufzai clan, and he carried the clan name as his surname. A Pathan clan was descended from a remote ancestor; the Yusufzai, as the name suggests, were the sons of Yusuf. Some Yusufzai families had full family trees, but Rahimullah could trace his family back only three generations. His grandfather, he said, would know more.
The past went back only as far as people’s memories; people didn’t have the means of assessing or fixing the past before family memory. Time here was like a river; it was hard to mark any precise point in the flow. People didn’t always know how old they were. Rahimullah gave 1953 as the year of his birth; but on his birth certificate the year was 1954. As for Rahimullah’s young servant, small and dark and smiling, with nice strong teeth and a very full head of wavy black hair, he could be eighteen or nineteen or twenty; no one could now tell.
Rahimullah’s father was born in 1918 (as his son said) to a poor farming family. Shortly after he was born both his father and his mother died (possibly in an epidemic, though Rahimullah didn’t say); so the boy was literally an orphan. He made a living as a shepherd, looking after other people’s cattle. At the same time, up to the age of thirteen or fourteen, he got some schooling; he got as far as the eighth class. When he was of age he joined the British Indian army as a sepoy. He was tall, over six feet, and fair, with blue eyes. In the Second World War he saw service in Egypt and Libya. In 1953 he was in the Pakistani army contingent that took part in Queen Elizabeth’s coronation. He retired from the Pakistan army as a subedar, a junior commissioned officer, in the military transport section.
It had been a long and good career. But then, unexpectedly, it went wrong. He was not long back in his village when he was recalled because of the Bangladesh situation. He was sent to the port of Chittagong in Bangladesh as part of the reserve. The war was lost; Bangladesh seceded; the Pakistan army in Bangladesh laid down its arms. So, at the very end of his army career, in his retirement, Rahimullah’s father became a prisoner of war. For a long time his family didn’t know whether he was alive or dead. At last one day there was a letter from him from the p
risoner of war camp in Rampur in India.
When, two years or so later, he came back to his village, Rahimullah’s father took up social work. He got people to start a bus service; he campaigned for electricity to be brought to the village; he set up the first flour mill; he got people to build their own approach roads; and he had the village well cleaned. At the Friday prayers in the mosque he took his chador round to collect money for various causes. Some members of his family objected. They said, “You are asking for alms. This is below your status.” He said, “No, no. I am doing God’s work.” But it must have been held against him, because when the time came and he stood for the local elections, he lost; another member of the family won.
Rahimullah’s father would have liked his son to be an officer in the army, and he did all that he could, with his limited means, to educate him in proper schools: up to the sixth class in the English-medium cantonment school in Peshawar, then for two years in a Catholic convent school in Jhelum, then for three years in a British-built military boarding college. But at the end, big man though he had become, and a basketball player, Rahimullah didn’t pass the medical test: his eyesight wasn’t good enough.