Deep Field (6 page)

Islamabad, I realised, was the cantonment to the thriving city of Rawalpindi. Built as the model city of the new state it had, in fact, replicated a much older version of imperial rule equally marked by the social and administrative separateness of the new (military) ruling elites.

A few weeks later, and after a few more visits to Rawalpindi, I sought to impress a young Austrian diplomat with my knowledge of the swirling chaos of Rawalpindi and to entice her away from ordered and highly fortified mini-Switzerland of Islamabad’s diplomatic enclave, I suggested a date in ’pindi with exaggerated promises of adventure and the ‘real Pakistan’. Leaving behind the world of red number plates, expat-only embassy clubs, and official cars marked with ceremonial swords strapped to their bonnets, we took a local bus in forty-five degree heat into the heart of Pakistan’s other capital and immediately got lost in the maze of ancient streets and covered bazaars. I had attempted to make an effort and had recently bought some local clothes—a lightly decorated linen shalwar kameez—and hoped to blend in, or at least not to stand out too badly. The sun was intense and my misguided resistance to sunscreen and hats had led my colleagues at the office to call me gulabi sahib (pink sir) rather than gora sahib (white sir), which Europeans were usually called, on account of my regular sunburn. Trying to impress with my sense of local style and to offset the disadvantages of pale skin, I donned my new finery and set foot tentatively into the crowded bus with my date. The response was electric—our fellow passengers erupted into applause, slapped me on the back, offered congratulations and, as the bus lurched down the street an itinerant imam offered to convert me to Islam on the spot. Slowly it dawned on me that I had bought not an ordinary shalwar kameez but a marriage suit and the other passengers had come to the conclusion that we were traveling to Rawalpindi to tie the knot!

In ’pindi itself, the response on the street was equally cheerful and my attempt to blend in suddenly became a mock-nuptial procession with cheering, well wishes, invitations to tea and the imam in tow, determined not to let pass his opportunity to save souls. This was too much for the Austrian who was immediately ill-at-ease amid the crowds, stares, ribald humour, and momentary celebrity caused by my sartorial confusion. We briefly took refuge in an abandoned Hindu temple next a street vendor selling cool, freshly crushed pomegranate juice and contemplated our next move. Knowing that the covered Rajah Bazaar was nearby where there were likely to be more women and she would feel less exposed, I suggested that we plunge into the arrhythmic mesh of side streets and make for the bazaar. It was a fatal move. If we had been lost before, within moments we had become dreadfully entangled, not in the cool of the bazaar itself looking at exotic fabrics and making memorable tourist purchases, but in the depths of the Rawalpini meat-market. It was fascinatingly awful—street after narrow street was lined with carts and hole-in-the-wall butcheries choking with diesel fumes, flies, dust and the smell of meat turning progressively more rancid in the midday sun. The dirt paths were splattered and puddled with blood and off-cuts and around us were the convulsing bodies of newly slaughtered animals. Promising that I knew the way out, I led her around a corner only to come face-to-face with a dead end and another grim series of shops whose great meat-hooks prominently displayed their treasured wares: bulls testicles swinging sickeningly in the smog-filled afternoon breeze.

Used to the hyper-cleanliness of Vienna supermarkets, my companion was deeply unimpressed and, as a vegetarian, was understandably incensed. She had by now come to the realisation that my claims to know ’pindi’s complex geography, made in the safety of the Islamabad’s diplomatic enclave, may not have been altogether accurate. To the amazement of the onlookers who had moments before been wishing us a happy wedding, an argument erupted with each of us claiming the other had been misled. And there, in my wedding attire covered in blood, sweat, flies and pollution, I realised that I had inadvertently found myself in the polar opposite of the sanitised cantonment world of Islamabad. While my date may have ended in disaster, my Pakistan journey had started exhilaratingly.

‘LET’S GO SOMEWHERE
really proletarian for lunch today,’ said Imran, rubbing his hands with delight as he emerged from his office—a glorified compression chamber of ancient newspapers and harsh cigarette smoke sweetened with hashish. I smiled wanly as my early enthusiasm for these ‘proletarian lunches’ of dhal and chapattis, or sometimes just cigarettes and the occasional joint, had worn away under successive bouts of food poisoning. Grimacing and bracing myself for another nauseating round of inedible street food, I dutifully followed Imran out of the quiet and chilly comfort of the highly air-conditioned office and out onto the street. Even going out onto the street in the full heat of the summer (at least 45 degrees with high humidity) defied both the weather and the accepted conventions of the Pakistani middle class. These lunches, for all their gastrointestinal cost, had become vital in my political education in Pakistan.

My daily work as a would-be analyst of Pakistani affairs involved reading the newspapers from cover to cover in the morning and going out to extended lunches with gossipy, well-connected friends from the office or the coterie of analysts and purveyors of political intrigue, who seemed to fill every corner of Islamabad. This was followed by more reading about Pakistan’s political complexities in the afternoon. In the evenings, over al fresco dinners at the Kabul Restaurant, we would hatch yet more exotic conspiracies before buying up pirated DVDs and heading back to the minute flat I shared with another apprentice analyst to watch, spellbound, as the great Bollywood screen sirens Aishwarya Rai and Madhuri Dixit wove their majestic way through historical melodramas set in the Muslim north of the subcontinent before Partition. It was, if nothing else, an extremely intense crash course in subcontinental politics, culture and history of the most intoxicating kind—an excitement only heightened by the fact that I was able to spend a reasonable amount of time out by myself travelling in Peshawar, Karachi and Lahore, where I had the opportunity to meet and interview many of the main protagonists from the political, military, diplomatic and NGO worlds.

Being effectively a local institution, rather than the embodiment of a big international NGO, we had much greater freedom. There was no security and no restrictions, and I was free to do more or less as I pleased. The other huge advantage was that, in an expatriate world in which there is often a tendency towards self-aggrandisement and complaint about local people and conditions, I worked in an organisation staffed and run by some of brightest Pakistanis of their generation. These were people who had studied and taught at the world’s leading universities, each of them fluent in half a dozen European and Asian languages, and who casually reminisced about addressing congresses and parliaments and dining with presidents and foreign ministers. They did so on the basis of extensive field work in extremely demanding conditions so as to advocate the cause of peace. Theirs was a deep sophistication and when, later on, I was lucky enough to work with what I now realise was one of the finest European NGOs around, my reaction was to find my new colleagues personally and intellectually boorish by comparison, as evenings of discussion and historical melodrama were replaced with the consumption of beer and a chewing tobacco beloved of Scandinavians, called snus. (As these evenings progressed, my interlocutors found their ability to communicate impaired by a small teabag of tobacco that was stuffed under the upper lip. This left a brown stain down the front right incisor tooth; like cultish mafia tattoo, it was the clear and unambiguous mark of the Scandinavian aid worker.) In Pakistan, after being a very small and largely ineffectual cog in a very large Australian bank, I suddenly felt that I’d made it to the centre of the universe in which everything was urgent and new and stimulating.

We referred to our office as ‘Sweden’—a homage to a character in the brilliant novel
Moth Smoke
by Pakistani writer Mohsin Hamid. In it, an inspirational teacher at Lahore University, Professor Perfect, outlines a climatic political economy of Pakistan. The separation between the elite and the masses previously exhibited in the cantonments and in the civil lines of Islamabad had evolved into the invisible apartheid of climate control. While the masses sweated it out in the stifling humidity of the streets, the urban elites lived in an arctic luxury closely approximating, according to Professor Perfect, the climate of Sweden—sharing literally nothing in common with the rest of the population, not even the temperature. Going out for a daily ‘proletarian lunch’ therefore became an act of rebellion against the prevailing order. Imran’s car (itself a mass grave of dead flies and the dying garlands of jasmine flowers bought from children on the street) sped us away to obscure roadside shacks where charcoal braziers reheated thick clumps of dhal garnished with enormous quantities of chilli and small rocks. In one particularly bohemian establishment, located under a nearby juniper tree, no food was ever forthcoming, but the sheltered location provided an opportunity for what in Pakistan passed for a liquid lunch—foul-smelling joints that suppressed hunger and fuelled ever more elaborate and incomprehensible political conspiracy theories.

But mainly the conversations returned again and again to cricket. In true irony, only in Pakistan, a nominally dry Muslim country, was Australian cricketer David Boon a celebrity and whose world record of the number of tinnies consumed on the flight from Sydney to London (fifty-two) widely known. ‘How is the “keg on legs”?’ asked Imran in our first meeting, lighting up yet another acrid Chesterfield cigarette, clearly fancying himself as a sort of subcontinental version of the ocker batsman.

Imran was in the older tradition of Pakistani radical—a figure who might have been more at home in the heady days of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto rather than Benazir or the succession of conservative generals who held power following her father’s execution. Imran’s was a populist and socialist tradition, entirely secular (although not totally indifferent to Sufi traditions as long as they were accompanied by music and marijuana), whose equal dislike of both the increasingly conservative religion of the Urdu-speaking middle class, from which he came, and the Sweden-dwelling upper orders whose education he shared, put him at odds with much of contemporary Pakistan. In the exclusive Islamabad clubs and receptions he would embarrass his hosts by speaking in Urdu—which was simply not done by the upper orders, for whom knowledge of English, and in some cases Persian, was paramount. At the same time he had a horror of the growing religious conservatism at the heart of daily life.

Since Imran was a child, the relative secularism of early Pakistan had begun to change and even common expressions were being given increasingly religious overtones. To say ‘goodbye’, it was becoming frowned upon to use the traditional Urdu expression
khuda hafiz
, borrowed from the Persian, meaning ‘God protect you’ but without specifying whose or which god was being referred to, thus creating room for religious plurality. Instead, the new term
Allah hafiz
had been introduced during the 1980s by the deeply religious military ruler Zia ul Haq who, with CIA support, was sponsoring a nascent Taliban (then styled as ‘freedom fighters’) against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. This new term was religiously specific and was emblematic, for Imran, of Pakistan’s turn away from its Indo-Persian cosmopolitan traditions towards a stricter and more conservative religious public culture.

In its urban design and planning, Islamabad had started as a secular representation of the new republic but even this was beginning to change. At some intersections day labourers lined the streets and were hired and fed by Islamic organisations seeking influence through welfare, in a deeply corrupt state where this was never likely to be provided. Beards lengthened, and the daily line-ups took place increasingly close to the main shopping centres and playgrounds of the capital’s more westernised consumer classes, gradually influencing the tone and public culture. Around Jinnah Super Market, one of the main dining and shopping precincts in Islamabad, bearded men lined up every Friday on an unclaimed patch of land near the shops to pray. Soon they were doing this daily, and before long a concrete base was constructed to accommodate them. Clearly this was the first step in the construction of a new mosque in the centre of the market, casting a shadow of sobriety and puritanism over the place where the city’s fashionable men and women gathered on hot evenings. Unspoken and unchallenged, this subtle religious encroachment into a secular materialist world advertising mobile phones, soft drinks, music, DVDs, colourful and fashionable clothes, offering opportunities for men and women to walk, talk, shop and eat together suggested a broader struggle for competing visions of the future of Pakistan.

Western observers had consistently seen the army as the guarantee of a pro-capitalist secular social order against perceptions of increasing religious radicalism, although here too concerns existed about the extent of religious infiltration of the rank and file. When I asked Imran about this, he rolled his eyes. Among the more bizarre activities of the international diplomatic corps and would-be spies was the annual ‘beard count’ during the military parades on independence day. Here, trained analysts scrutinised the country’s armed forces for facial hair, carefully noting its frequency, length and, if possible, the degree to which it was ‘Islamic’ in cut, in a foolhardy effort to gauge the religious and political sympathies of Pakistan’s dominant political institution: the army. After much comparison, the follicular analysis (or beard count) usually came up with the same figure: 15 per cent.