Among the Believers (32 page)

But my attitude at that moment was not like Masood’s. The Afghan encampment had taken me back to the earliest geography lessons of my childhood, to the drawings in my
Homes Far Away
textbook: men creating homes, warmth, shelter in extreme conditions: the bow-and-arrow Africans in their stockades, protected against the nighttime dangers of the forest; the Kirghiz in their tents in the limitless Steppes; the Eskimos in their igloos in the land of ice.

And the girls in the tent were so pretty: a peasant or nomadic longing stirred within me. In the desert of Sind, at the shrine of that saint, beside the Indus, the talk of
murshid
and
murid
had brought to mind Tolstoy’s and Lermontov’s tales of the Caucasus. And here, beside one of the cold rivers that fed the Indus (green water turning muddy, transported in a lined canal to Karachi on its tropical, salty swamp nearly a thousand miles away), I felt taken back to a beginning: that life of animals and tents and the daily march. But what to me was the impulse of the moment was for them a way of life. I would move on, do other things; they would continue as I saw them. And those girls, pretty as they were, with their lovely skin, were really far away, shut off in their own tribal fantasies, beauties now, well fed, conscious of their rising price, but soon to be wives and workers.

All afternoon we passed them, noted their tenderness to their animals,
greater than their tenderness to themselves: those faces so lined and burnt, so old though young. Not many had the complexions and health of the girls in that encampment. Once I saw a man carrying a goat; once I saw a goat wrapped in a blanket and carried on a donkey’s back. One woman walked with one shoe on, the other off, and on her head. It was a style, the shoe on the head: later we saw women with both shoes on their heads, the heels fitted one into the other to form a little arch. Shoes were worn when the ground was pebbly; when the ground was smooth or soft with dust it was better to walk barefooted. The ankles of the walkers were black with grime.

High up, at Shogran, it was overcast and cool, cold when it began to drizzle. The pines were immensely tall, and in places the land fell away so sharply from the road that it wasn’t easy to look down to the roots of the pines. On the safer side of the twisting road there was peasant destruction: the barks of the great pines had been hacked away, for kindling. Kindling was scarce here, where there was so little flat land and so little vegetation, only pines growing in the thin drift of soil around rocks.

At dusk we were beside the river again. In a wide grassy clearing on the low bank, many camps had been set up. Fires burnt; tea was being prepared,
roti
being made; and here and there, for this evening meal, pieces of dried meat were being cut up. Camels (feeding before people) chewed their fodder. The camels of one camp were chewing holly branches. Just below the bank, on the rocks at the water’s edge, in the dark all colours reduced to grey and white, were the ponies and other baggage animals, free at the end of their day.

The Afghans spread thick woollen rugs on the grass. I had noticed these rugs before. They were of undyed raw wool, dark-brown, with simple patterns in violent colours; and they smelled of sheep or goats, the Afghan smell, the smell that these nomads carried around with them. I was attracted to one rug; and at once Masood and the jeep driver—purely for pleasure, as it seemed—began to bargain for me. The old man, the head of the camp, friendlier than our earlier kohl-eyed dandy, asked for four hundred rupees. The jeep driver said it was too much. But we sat down with the other men of the camp and drank cups of sweet tea.

Masood then led me away, leaving the jeep driver to complete the
business. We looked at the baggage animals chewing at their leaves and branches; we walked among the tents and the cooking fires; we walked among the donkeys at the edge of the rocky riverbed. When we got back, the deal had been made: three hundred rupees.

Everybody was happy. Hands were shaken all round; and the jeep driver, triumphant, took up the rug as though he had really been bargaining for himself. But I must have been affected by the altitude. When I looked at the rug in Rawalpindi later, I was astonished not only by its great size—at dusk, beside the river, I had thought it smallish—but also by the oddity of its pattern and colours, like the dots and wavering scrawls of an inflamed mind, work from the asylum. And perhaps to live that nomadic life is to be touched in the head in some way.

The road climbed again. Even in the darkness the river showed white, breaking over rocks. The rocks grew larger; they grew enormous; once or twice the road passed below overhangs of rock. In the flat-roofed, multilevel houses on the hillsides there were yellow lights. Lights alone marked the houses, defined interiors; and gave a feeling of bareness and solitude.

There was no solitude on the road. Sometimes people had camped just below it; in one place a man appeared to be asleep on the rock walling that shored up the road. Once we passed a whole camp spread out beside the road: twig fires, tents, sheep settled down for the night and looking in the darkness like the smooth rocks at the edge of the riverbed. The camp dogs, the thick-furred dogs of the region, barked and raced after us.

Ever since the light had gone, the jeep driver had been playing Indian film songs on his cassette player. Sad, sweet songs of love and loss and longing accompanied us through the dark valley; and always it was a woman who lamented.

Untranslatable, that magical second line, with its unexpected conceit, that world
(duniya)
of longing
(intizar-ki)
awakened
(jagga-gé)
in the lover’s eyes
(ankho)
. It was the line that had kept the song alive for forty
years; whenever the line came around again on the tape the driver’s boy sang it.

People were still on the march, though the night was now advanced; there seemed to be no set hours for marching and camping. Once we slowed down for a group chasing a bull that, all alone, had broken away from the caravan and was running back hard the way it had come.

Then we appeared to lose the road. We got out of the jeep. It was very dark. The driver sent his boy ahead to prospect, and then went to prospect himself. He came back, and drove the jeep on slowly, leaving us where we were. We lost the jeep’s lights. The boy, returning, led us forward with the help of a flashlight. He offered me his little hand: his touch was unexpectedly gentle. We seemed to be walking over mud and rocks. We saw the jeep’s lights again. In the blackness it was hard to assess distance. The lights of the jeep seemed far away, as though the driver had gone some way before finding the road again. But then, seconds later, the jeep was just there, a few steps ahead.

It seemed we had been walking over mud and rocks. But later, on the way back, in daylight, I saw that a glacier had come down and cut the road. The snow hung over the stone retaining wall of the road. The snow on its surface was old and dirty; but below that seemingly solid snow there was, at the end of the Himalayan summer, a great white cavern, and out of that dripping cavern there flowed a torrent.

We were now among glaciers and torrents. The chilling sound of water was everywhere.

The rest house at Naran was lit up, but no one answered. At Balakot, when we were bargaining for the jeep, the jeep driver had said there was a government hotel that charged one hundred twenty-five rupees for a room. Now he said the charge was over two hundred. Since I was calculating for four rooms—myself, Masood, the car driver who had brought us from Rawalpindi to Balakot (and had since been silent and self-effacing), the driver of the jeep with his boy—my heart sank. But Masood, who, with his anxiety about infections, also had something
like a hypochondria about money, about being overcharged, Masood said that he had made it clear that the jeep driver and his boy had to make their own arrangements. But it wasn’t to the government place that the jeep driver took us. He took us to the Park Hotel, whose bright, crude signboards we had seen at various places on the road.

The Park was a long, low building set well back from the road; it had a dimly lit verandah. The driver blew the horn, and a man in a blanket came out from a smaller building at the side of the plot. It was cold, had been cold for some time; but there was no warm room in the hotel to go to. The man with the blanket showed us a bedroom: two wood-framed beds, wall lights. He and Masood bargained, and Masood took me out from the cold bedroom to the freezing verandah to tell me that if an extra bed were placed in the room, I would be charged seventy-five rupees. So, from being a traveller with a little caravan, faced with a bill of a hundred dollars for the night, I had become part of a dormitory and liable only to a charge of seven dollars and fifty cents. I said I would sleep alone; I said I was a bad sleeper. Masood talked with the smiling hotel man, and it was agreed that the extra room would add twenty-five rupees to the bill.

I asked for a fire in my room. The hotel man smiled and said it wasn’t possible. The chimney didn’t work; the room would be full of smoke if he lit a fire. That explained the comparative cleanliness of the fireplace. I asked for hot tea. Yes, that would come, with the dinner. What about the dinner? What did I want?

Did they have eggs? No, there were no eggs. I thought of the clear river and said, “Trout?” Masood, translating for me, repeated the English word: “Trout?” The hotel man swung his head in affirmation and said, “Trout.” And Masood, still translating, said there was trout.

Masood said, “Forty rupees for the permit.”

“Permit? Do you have to have a permit for everything?” The word had made me think of the trouble I had had in Rawalpindi in posting books and changing traveller’s cheques.

Masood said, huffily, “No.”

It was too cold to talk any more about permits. I had looked forward to the cold. But now it was like pain; and the room seemed to grow icier every minute. I had no woollen shirt or pullover with me. I decided to put on a second shirt below my safari shirt. When they saw me stripping they left the room and went out to the verandah. The door
remained open; it was a freezing kind of half-privacy. I would have preferred the company, even a little help. My fingers were too numb to manage the buttons easily; and all around there was the very cold sound of tumbling water.

When, double-shirted, I went out to the verandah, the hotel man had four limp trout to show: he clearly hadn’t had far to go. The jeep driver and his khaki-shawled boy now left us. As Masood had said, they had made their own arrangements; some warm mud-roofed peasant house no doubt awaited them.

Masood and I (and our own silent driver) went to the kitchen, for the warmth. It was in the smaller building at the side of the plot. And though we had arrived only minutes before, though the negotiations had only just been completed and the four trout had only just been bought, there was a veritable staff at work in the kitchen on our dinner, and a wood fire was burning below a baking iron, and a man in a long-tailed blue shin was flattening balls of dough between his hands for the
roti
, the tail of his shirt jumping with every festive gesture, and the trout had been filleted and sliced and spiced and laid out on a low wooden table.

I stood before the fire, in the way of the cooks. Masood sat on a cane-bottomed chair in front of the low table. We both constantly moved to close the kitchen door; the staff, as regularly, going in or coming out, left it open. Nothing was so important as the fire: not the state of the table on which the blue-shirted man was dusting the dough balls in flour, not the quality of the water in the red plastic bucket, not the chipped low table on which the filleted trout lay.

The cook, always brisk, and satisfied now with his
roti
, used a knife to scrape off old charred fat from the round baking iron. He threw oil on the iron, withdrew the blazing wood to moderate the heat, put the fillets on the iron, put an aluminium pot-lid on the fillets, bent down to pick up an old brick from the blackened floor, and put the brick on the pot lid.

Masood said, “Shall we eat the dinner right here?”

He spoke my thoughts. And that was where we ate.

A big, grand-looking man came in, with a fur cap and a slate-blue shawl. He wasn’t a villager or a man of the mountains. I thought he might have been a landowner or someone connected with the hotel; or a policeman, someone from an intelligence department, come to have a look at the strangers. He said he was a “compounder,” a chemist or
druggist. He had a shop in Balakot, and a shop here in Naran. I said, “So you have two shops?” He said, “I have one shop.” The Naran shop was open in summer (officially, that was still the season); the Balakot shop was open in the winter.

There was, in addition to the trout, a dish of meat for Masood and our silent driver (self-effacing even in the matter of food: he was anxious to appear to be eating less than Masood or myself). Hunger and cold made Masood forget himself, forget his anxiety about infections. He asked for water, with his meat. The kitchen boy, who had been staring at us all the time, leaning against the fireplace platform, dipped a glass into the red plastic bucket, handed the dripping glass to Masood, and Masood drank to the end.

The compounder went away. He had had little to say, after he had told us what he did and where he lived and had found out who we were and what languages we spoke. The blue-shirted cook pulled out the wood from the fireplace. The flames were beaten out; the embers darkened fast. The kitchen was no longer open to us; we had to go out into the cold again. But the food had warmed us. It seemed less cold in the yard, less cold in the room. But Masood had been touched by the solitude and desolation of the valley. He stayed in my room to talk of himself and his anxieties.