Stranger to History (13 page)
For my father, the events of 1979 brought in a time of both uncertainty and possibility. Bhutto’s daughter, Benazir, had entered politics and Zia had to be fought. For a man of thirty-six, touched by unusual idealism, the trouble in my father’s country had also come with a ripening of purpose. His biography of Bhutto, begun before Bhutto’s death, was in many ways a political entry-point.
My parents’ affair lasted little more than a week, when my father left Delhi for Lahore, where he already had a wife and three small children. A month later, my mother discovered she was pregnant. The scandal of it was too great to assess. My mother was from an old Sikh family, still carrying the pain of Partition. For her then, to become pregnant out of marriage by a visiting Pakistani was at the time, and still today, incalculable scandal. In a week when she was considering an abortion, my father called unexpectedly from the Club Marbella in Dubai. She told him what had happened.
‘What are you going to do?’ he asked.
‘What do you think I’m going to do?’ she replied.
My father asked her what could be done to change her mind. She replied that they would have to at least pretend to be married, and over the course of their conversation, they came to a tenuous agreement to continue their relationship for as long as they could.
The months that followed were defined by secrecy. My parents met again in April, in Pakistan; they went to Dubai; they spent a summer in London, full of bright evenings and the bustle of people in pubs and open-air restaurants; and, all the time, their relationship and my mother’s pregnancy were kept from her parents and from my father’s family in Pakistan. It was this pact of secrecy that made their relationship possible, and it was from this period that one of the two objects I linked with my father as I grew up came into my mother’s possession: a copy of his biography of Bhutto. The inscription, dated ‘17/5/80’, read: ‘With love and love, Salmaan Taseer.’ The other was a browning silver frame with two pictures of him. In one he’s holding me as a baby and in the other he’s at a Mughal monument, dressed in white, wearing large seventies sunglasses.
News of my mother’s pregnancy was kept from my maternal grandparents until weeks before I was born, in November that year, when my mother’s sister presented it to them as a
fait
accompli
. They were conservative and old-fashioned and the news would have come as a terrible jolt. But they showed immeasurable bigness of heart when they were told. And with my grandfather, of course, there was the nostalgia for his Punjab. Though it was unsaid, there would have been some secret pleasure in his murmuring, ‘I always thought one of you would go back to that side.’ Despite the scandal, despite the shock it caused, despite the fact that there was something malicious and teasing in the way the news was kept from them, their first instinct was to get on a plane to London to help with the baby.
It was their first time in Europe and they never went again. They used the trip as an excuse to travel in Europe and always presented it to me, with their many photographs, as something they were grateful to me for giving them the opportunity to do. In Spain my grandfather, with his pointed moustache and turban, was mistaken everywhere for Salvador Dalí.
They returned with me to India in the spring, and that April, they held a reception for my parents in Delhi, publicly acknowledging and legitimising their relationship in front of their friends and family. A few weeks later, events in the Bhutto family intervened. A Pakistan International Airlines flight had been hijacked and forced to land in Kabul. Bhutto’s son, Murtaza, was involved in the hijacking. The BBC interviewed my father, who was by then aligned with Benazir Bhutto – herself under arrest – in the fight against Zia. My father was in Pakistan and told the interviewer that, while Murtaza had only hijacked a plane, Zia had hijacked all of Pakistan. Within hours, my father’s house in Lahore was surrounded and a warrant had been issued for his arrest. It was no longer safe for him to be in Pakistan. He managed to escape the country and get to Dubai, where my mother joined him, leaving me with my grandparents.
The hijacking brought my father into the long fight against General Zia, and soon after, our small, makeshift family felt the first tremors.
I
left Syria in the aftermath of the cartoon riots and took a car and driver south to Saudi Arabia. The Kingdom’s border was a vast complex of warehouses, a mosque with a white minaret and a high shelter with square pillars, also white, which cast strips of welcome shade on the blinding tarmac. The flat, arid land was dotted with barbed-wire fences and tall, stooped steel lights. The glare seemed to suck the colour out of the landscape, and the painted yellow and black paving stones that ran round the square pillars stood out as the only shred of colour. A mid-morning quiet prevailed. Since Syria, the land had turned to desert. Almost everyone was now in full Arab dress, the women heavily veiled, and the Levant’s racial mixtures had faded. It was more than a border: it was the ancient boundary between the classical world and Arabia. Visible beyond a narrow stretch of brilliant sea was Egypt.
But for a few men in white robes and pickup trucks – familiar with the routine, arms outstretched with papers – there was hardly anyone at the border. Our SUV drove up to the immigration window as if it were a tolbooth. A man, with a boyish face and a light beard, looked hard at my passport, then glanced at me. Saudi Arabia was a closed kingdom and I was lucky to have the visa. The immigration official seemed impressed and called a colleague to take a look.
‘Riyadh?’ The colleague smiled.
‘No, Jeddah,’ I said, smiling back.
He stamped an inky black oval with a little car and the Kingdom’s sword-and-palms crest into my passport and waved us through.
‘Saudiya,’ the driver whispered, as the SUV rolled out of the shade of the border.
My first view of the Kingdom was a hard, arid mountain on whose gritty surface the words ‘La-il-la, il-allah’ – there is no God but God – were written in huge white chalky letters. Soon after a sign read ‘Makkah 1171 km’.
Jeddah was the historical gateway city to Mecca. I waited for Hani in a square in its old city. I hardly knew him, but a mutual friend had put us in touch, and when he heard of my plans to go to Mecca, he offered to take me. He also arranged a guide for old Jeddah. ‘You don’t have to touch the stone,’ the old guide advised, after I told him of my purpose that evening. ‘People push and shove, but it is enough to salute the rock.’
Around us the maroon and black rugs of the Grand Mosque in Mecca hung outside shops. Jeddah’s old city lacked the bustle of markets in other places. The afternoon pall that I now associated with the Kingdom in general prevailed here too. There was also the conspicuous absence of Saudis and women. The men carrying boxes or wheeling carts were Pakistanis in grubby
salwar kameez
. The only woman I saw was a large African, covered, but for her face, entirely in black. She sat in the shade of a
neem
in the middle of the square. Her head was in her hand, and her elbow rested on her knee. She was dusty and her stricken expression spoke of destitution. The complete, virtually enforced absence of women made her, with no male escort and exposed to the gaze of all the men who walked past, seem still more wretched and alone.
A breeze from the sea made its way through the square. Among the tall old buildings and the semblance of trade, it was possible for the first time to think of old Arabia in the Kingdom, and of Jeddah as it had been before the discovery of oil, a major Arabian port and the gateway to the holy city.
The guide said I would enter the mosque from the southeast gate. But first I had to announce my intention to complete the
umrah
, an off-season pilgrimage to Mecca, and to wear the pilgrim’s clothes. For this, I was meeting Hani within the hour.
Like many young Saudis, he appeared in his national dress, an off-white robe without the scarf. He was well-built and handsome, with a prominent jaw and cheekbones. His slightly gapped teeth gave him a fierceness unsuited to his warm, friendly nature. He had just finished work at a bank and said that we had to make a few stops before we prepared for Mecca.
The first was at his family house, which, like many, was in a compound where different members of the family also had their houses – low bungalows, spread out over a big lawn. Hani’s grandfather’s bungalow was a dim, spacious place with a sparsely furnished drawing room, and large windows, overlooking the garden. It had the decorum that elderly people’s houses sometimes do, of old upholstery, furniture and framed photographs. No one was at home and the reason we stopped there was so that Hani could pray. I wouldn’t have thought this about him, this strict adherence to the hours of prayer. Earlier, he had produced two neatly rolled joints from his pocket.
The prayer stop made me a little unsure. We were going to Mecca, but we hadn’t discussed my religious credentials, and it would have felt strange for me to join him as if I, too, kept the hours of prayer. Besides, I was still unsure of my co-ordination, especially without the security of other worshippers. So I wandered into Hani’s grandfather’s study, a comfortable, well-lit room of dark wood and leather, its walls covered with books, many on politics, energy and religion. Through a crack in the door, I caught sight of Hani, his large frame and classically Arab features, kneeling and submitting, muttering the prayers. His ease as he prayed, his comfort with the faith’s liturgical language, set against my own unfamiliarity and the impending pilgrimage, gave me a pang of exclusion.
The pilgrim’s clothes, a stack of white towels, were already in the car. When Hani had finished praying, we drove to his friend Kareem’s house to put them on. It was turning out to be a cool February night.
Kareem was unusually good-looking, in a pale, wolfish way, with light eyes and hair. He had a cynical manner and a mocking smile. The house’s high walls were painted a reddish-orange colour. It was modelled on a Spanish
hacienda
with stone arches and a swimming-pool. Kareem’s little brother was at home and sauntered past in shorts and a sports jersey. The house had all the comforts of life in the Kingdom – flat, wide-screen televisions, large refrigerators, low, comfortable sofas. We made our way through a den of sorts into Kareem’s room, which seemed unchanged from his childhood.
‘Should we have a last cigarette?’ Kareem asked.
The state we would be assuming was called
ihram
, which literally meant ‘prohibiting’. Once we were in it, it was unlawful to do a whole list of things, of which I thought, mistakenly, that smoking was one. As I finished one of Kareem’s Marlboro Lights, I had a strange feeling of adolescence. I don’t know if it was Kareem’s pre-college room or the pleasure of a stolen cigarette or, in a deeper sense, the fraternal connection the faith inspired. There was some current of macho comradeship and familiarity that I’m sure I didn’t exude, but felt obliged to slip into when I was with Muslims. That fraternal feeling, whatever it was, was amplified now by the generosity of the two men I hardly knew, who had opened their houses to me and were taking me to Mecca.
This feeling of adolescence was reflected in my awkwardness. I felt a fraud: for not being versed in the meaning of the prayer and rites we were about to perform, but also for being curious, rather than believing. I had a fear of being exposed, which turned out to be well-founded. A few moments later, after we had washed ritually – faces, part of the scalp, hands to the elbows and feet to the ankles – in Kareem’s bathroom, we dressed in the pilgrim’s clothes, two seamless white garments to be worn with nothing else. One was tied round the waist, the other thrown loosely over the left shoulder. It was important that the right shoulder was exposed as this followed the Prophet’s own example. The problem was that, from another far more adolescent experience in Goa, I had a tattoo of Shiva, the Hindu god of destruction, on my right arm. Kareem and Hani looked at it in shock, and then with some amusement. Tattooing was not only forbidden in Islam – ‘Muhammad forbade the custom of the idolaters of Arabia to prick the hands of their women and to rub the punctures over with wood, indigo, and other colours’, Mishkat, Book 12, Chapter 1, Part 1 – but to have a tattoo of a Hindu god would spoil more than a few pilgrimages and possibly land me in trouble with the religious establishment. It was decided that I would make the pilgrimage with the second white garment wrapped round both shoulders, closer to the example of an old woman in a shawl than the Prophet.
When we were dressed, we prayed together, announcing our intention to make the visit to Mecca. I fell into an easy rhythm in which I paid no attention to my movements in relation to the others’. I took as long as I wanted for the submission, which I liked, and though I had no prayers to say, I enjoyed the privacy so soon after the anxiety the tattoo had caused. By the time I sat back on my legs and felt the ligaments at the top of my feet stretch painfully, my breathing changed and I was aware of a new undeclared ease that had formed between the three of us.