Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (Vintage International) (59 page)

The army watched all the routes. Shahbaz was closely blockaded in his liberated area. Extraordinarily—after all the planning for a guerrilla war in the countryside—food had to be smuggled in from the cities.

Shahbaz was still game, still excited, in spite of the failure and tragedy all around him, still seeing the revolution as part of his personal development. He said, “It was an intensely creative time.”

Wheat was what they most needed. Shopkeeping in Baluchistan had been something the Hindus did once upon a time, but after partition they had been run out of all the towns. Tribals had taken over, and they were relatives or distant relatives of the insurgents. They organized camel trains. These camel trains, sometimes with guerrilla escorts, had to pass through various army checkpoints. There were disasters, especially in winter, the time of the army offensives. Guerrillas would be taken in by the army; shopkeepers would be taken in; precious food would be lost. There were times when Shahbaz and his people were eating one meal every two days. They traveled with bits of bread in their pockets; that kept them going.

The army moved up one winter to the mountains where Shahbaz and his group were. They had to get out fast. They moved at night, to avoid being spotted by the army helicopters. They were moving with a lot of food, reserve stocks. They couldn’t lose that. For a whole day Shahbaz and his group hid in a nomadic settlement. They were fed and looked after, and in the night they moved out. The army at this stage wasn’t using helicopters alone; they were also using trackers, army scouts and local Baluchi trackers. These trackers led the soldiers to the nomadic settlement. They asked questions. “Who was here last night? Who made all those tracks outside, coming up to your houses?” Everybody in the settlement was killed, sixteen people.

Shahbaz was disturbed for weeks after he heard. The Baluchis with him were more stoical; they comforted him.

Shahbaz said, “Because nomadic life is hard, they have a great capacity for absorbing calamities. I learnt that stoicism and patience from them.”

Three years later—the interlocking wheels of all the various Greek tragedies and revenge tragedies of Pakistan grinding away—Mr. Bhutto,
who had unleashed the army against the Baluchis, was deposed by a general and tried and hanged. This general declared an amnesty, and the war in Baluchistan was over.

Shahbaz was now in Afghanistan with the other refugees. He had walked there over the mountains from Baluchistan. There were two camps for the refugees in the south of Afghanistan. The clan chief who had led the refugees to Afghanistan was still there, still a man of influence. The revolutionary movement also had various flats in Kabul. For the many weeks that Shahbaz was in Afghanistan he moved between the refugee camps and the flats in Kabul.

It was in Kabul that Shahbaz met the South African again, after six years. The revolutionaries, those who had survived or were still interested, were meeting in Kabul (especially safe for them, with the Russian occupation) to talk about the future of the movement. Shahbaz and some of the others also wanted to talk to the South African about what he had been doing in Europe for six years, and about the money he had raised.

There were tremendous arguments, “huge fights.” At the end Shahbaz and the South African were not talking to one another. The South African began to say that Shahbaz and the others were traitors; they had betrayed the revolution and should be killed. Shahbaz was shocked. He was even more shocked when the clan chief—in whom they had once seen a future Mao or Ho Chi Minh—called him and said he could no longer guarantee Shahbaz’s safety: the South African would now be trying to poison Shahbaz. Shahbaz thought it better to leave the Baluchi to deal with the South African. He went back to the mountains. This was how Shahbaz said goodbye to the two men he had most admired.

The movement had now broken up. The Baluchis didn’t want to have anything more to do with outsiders. They were not interested in revolution now; they had become separatists. The South African finally went back to London. That was where after a while Shahbaz went, too, returning to Kabul from the mountains to take a plane. From London he got in touch with his parents, who had felt betrayed by him, and made it up with them.

He was deaf in one ear because of the war. He had lost all his teeth. He had had hepatitis, and couldn’t drink alcohol now. He had annual bouts of malaria.

He said, “I have no regrets. That was and always will be the most creative, stimulating part of my life. Where I was most energized, and where I learnt so much. I was disappointed by the end result, but that doesn’t make me bitter.”

The angle was unexpected. Didn’t he feel now—time having passed, and leaving aside his parents and the Baluchis—that he had misused his privilege and betrayed himself intellectually?

“No. I came to maturity when all this was going on.”

“All this?”

“Guerrilla wars all over the third world.”

It was his idea of education. It was the strangely colonial idea of his generation in Pakistan, born though they were after independence. Education wasn’t something you developed in yourself, to meet your own needs. It was something you traveled to, without fear of prejudice now, and when you got to where you were going you simply surrendered to the flow.

As a Marxist he thought he had been unconventional. He hadn’t wished to impose the standard Marxist kit on the Baluchis. He thought that there was much about the tribal culture that was good and positive and should be preserved, like the legal system, and the common ownership of pasture land. Now the whole tribal structure had been destroyed. There was no longer traditional law; there was no access to the courts; and there were now two to three hundred blood feuds among the leading families. So things in Baluchistan were now much worse than they were in 1970, when he had gone there from Karachi, by train and bus and on foot, carrying revolution.

This was the story Shahbaz told over many hours. Stories told in this way can have elisions and jumps, but as I read my notes over the next day or two I felt that certain things were missing. There was no sense of the passing of time, though Shahbaz had spent ten years in Baluchistan and Afghanistan. There was no reference to water, no true sense of a landscape. And the tribesmen were not there. They were the people to whom Marxism was being taken; they were the people who were being ravaged; but they were not there, not even as costume figures. Only the Baluchi clan chief and the South African and the Christian boy with the big laugh were there.

Shahbaz was surprised by what I had said about the tribesmen. It hadn’t occurred to him, and he had no explanation. The tribesmen had been present to him while he spoke. “I see them—the tribesmen—all the time. But my description may have been one-sided.”

About the passing of time he said, “It was ten years. Hard to encapsulate. People here find it difficult to relate to the passing of time. Time passes slowly for many people and they find it difficult to pinpoint. People are not
used to rapid changes and that affects their attitude to time. Lives have changed—dramatically—but it has been a very slow, cumbersome process. I don’t think it’s Islam. People don’t have the mechanism to remember when the dish reached their village or when they saw their first naked girl on MTV.”

What he said about water was puzzling, considering his silence about it: “Everything was dominated by water. The search for water was the most important thing in the world. The tribesmen knew where the water was, but not in what quantity, or how clear it was, and whether it could support a hundred men and the animals with them. Or whether there would be springs or rivers or pools. So we sent scouts ahead to find out. And sometimes at five the scouts would come back and say the water wasn’t good enough or wasn’t enough, and so we had to walk on into the night. It was also like this for the military. The extremes of temperature were enormous.”

The experiences and the emotions were there, but they had not come out in the earlier account. It was as though, in this story of revolution, he had wished to strip people down to their Marxist essentials. (In some such way the Islamic zealot wanted converted people to be the faith alone, without distorting history and traditions.) He had seen the tribesmen not as men but as tribesmen, units, and the clan chief as a leader rather than as a man with affections and human attributes.

He had been just as hard on himself; he had left out much of his physical suffering, which had been very great. His eardrum had been punctured by an explosion at the very beginning; and his ears had bled for many months. He had been tormented by hepatitis; every bout lasted two months, and it made the long marches “killing.” Hepatitis came from the bad water; the tribesmen were less susceptible than he was. (This was probably why he had never talked about water the first time.) There were no fruit juices to help with the hepatitis; the food was mainly bread and meat, sometimes lentils, and sometimes damaging things like milk and clarified butter.

All of this he had left out as inessential, with the faces and costumes of the tribespeople, and the tents, and the camels, and the baggage, and the landscape.

He said, “It was a very personal account. I very rarely speak about these experiences.” Later he said, “I didn’t talk about my own suffering because the people I was with were suffering more.”

That vision of suffering, though repressed, was there. It came out now, when he talked of what had happened afterwards.

The clan leader he had admired had quarreled with the
sardar,
or chief of the tribe. The sardar had not wanted to “take the movement forward,” and the tribe was now badly divided. The clan leader had gone back to his own area, and he was hard up. His people were hard up.

Shahbaz said, “You should remember that the people have remained totally impoverished because of the loss of their flocks. Thousands of them have come down to Sindh and Punjab to look for work for daily wages. So the economic life of the tribe, and other tribes as well, has been destroyed.” The sardars blocked development. “They are greedy. They want commissions. The sardar’s own economic life has been destroyed. No flocks of his own, no gifts of sheep from his followers. So the sardar depends now on government handouts.”

Afghanistan, with the Russian occupation, had been a safe place for Baluchi refugees during the insurgency. But that war in Afghanistan had turned out to be calamitous for the Baluchi people. A million Afghan refugees had been settled in Baluchistan, and they had been like locusts. They had come with their own very big flocks, and they appeared to repeople the land. They cut down the trees and their flocks grazed on the best pasture. The Baluchis could do nothing. They had become a minority in their own territory.

“Those refugees were Pathans. So the Pathans today are in a much stronger position than the Baluch in Baluchistan. The Pathans brought with them their fundamentalist trend.
Madrassas
[Koranic schools] and so on—totally alien to the Baluch culture. This happened after the war. Friends still keep coming here and talking about how bad it’s become.”

And still he didn’t feel responsible. Still he thought of himself as a carrier of the truth.

“The ideology was supplied by the 1968 movement. But the urge was a local urge, to do something for my country, especially after the loss of Bangladesh. Today the people who think they have the answer are the fundamentalists.”

5