My Pakistan Diary: Retracing the Conquerors’ Steps

"it was in the month of Shaban 910 AH (January 1501 AD), the sun being in Aquarius that we rode out of Kabul for Hindustan. We took the road of Badam Chashma and Jagdalik and reached Adinapur in six marches. Till that time I had never seen a hot country or the Hindustan border land. In Ningrahar

another world came to view, other grasses, other trees, other animals, other birds and other manners and customs of clan and horde. We were amazed.." (Babur)

Whenever we have a visitor to Ottawa, one of the must-show places is the Canadian Museum of Civilization, across the river in Hull. And my favourite item there for any subcontinental visitor is the children’s museum in it - a specially imported bus from Pakistan. It’s a Peshawar-bound bus painted with cheerful, riotous colours. I always fancied myself traveling in such a bus. So, I was quite excited when I got a chance to ride on one of these Peshawar-bound bases.

Almost all trucks and buses in Pakistan are madly decorated with shining trims, wood carvings, calligraphy and gaudy portraits of women and animals. We boarded one such bus from a rudimentary bus station off G.T. Road at Hasan Abdal. A gentle conductor helped us board the bus with our considerable luggage. Inside, men were seated on one side and women on the other. My wife and I were allowed to sit together but when I sat on the window side, the conductor asked me to exchange the aisle side with my wife, ostensibly to “protect” her from the potential unwelcome touch of any male passenger passing up and down the bus aisle. The bus was full of Pashto-speaking passengers and they seemed to love to talk to each other in their language.

The bus started to travel along the famous G.T. Road. This was more like the G.T. Road in India but without the high density traffic and fewer dhabas/stores/shops than those thatt line the other side of the border in India. This part of Panjab seems to be less developed than the part up to Taxila. Indeed, the socio-economic scene changes as you move westward along the G.T. Road from Islamabad to Peshawar. People look less prosperous, wear less expensive clothes, and women seem more protected – chunni changes into chadar and chadar into veil as one moves towards Peshawar. There were a few women in the bus and they were all clad in a full burqa. Across the aisle from me were a mother and a girl child of 7-8 years who was glancing towards us two strangers, especially the woman without the veil sitting next to me. Earlier during the day, we had purchased a sac of oranges from the roadside near Taxila, and still had a few left with us. I offered some to the little girl; she looked at her mother who nodded her consent. Her eyes lit up and I wished I knew some Pashto so I could make some conversation with her. She had a small chunni-scarf around her neck. Sometimes later, the conductor came to her and said something to her in Pashto, the child expertly turned the scarf into a hijab and suddenly started looking much older than her age.

I started talking to the conductor and told him how I found the wild decorations of commercial vehicles in Pakistan something unique about the country. He liked the compliment and said, with a certain amount of pride, that Peshawar was the central place for this type of art work in Pakistan. I told him that I was looking for a suitable place to stay in Peshawar and had been advised to ask a taxi driver to look in the university area. He warned that it was important to have a trustworthy driver and that he would find us one when we reached Peshawar bus stand.

We reached Peshawar in the evening. My wife was tired and wanted to get into a hotel right away and rest. The taxi driver suggested that we see a couple of hotels close to the bus stand. We did, and looked at one or two before settling into one. This hotel had certainly seen better days and the ground floor had now been converted into a commercial retail space. We were not happy with it but decided to take it anyway. It had wide hallways and a nice rooftop open air restaurant with musical entertainment. But it hadn’t kept pace with time. The windows were obstructed by a wall and didn’t provide with any view whatsoever. But the price was right; a ‘deluxe’ air-conditioned room cost Rs. 600 per day including tax. While my wife rested in the room, I went down to chat with the owner of the hotel, an English speaking Pashtoon. We spoke in Urdu and he asked me if I was a Muhajir. I told him that I was a Panjabi; he wondered why I didn’t have the Panjabi accent, and I explained how I grew up in Delhi and acquired the ‘muhajir’ accent.

We started talking about the hotel business in Peshawar. He lamented the loss of business following 9/11 and hoped that the Indo-Pak peace talks would succeed and lead to reopening of the trade traffic between India and Afghanistan. I told him of my desire to make a trip to the Khyber Pass. He phoned a guide who presented himself in the hotel while we were still talking. The guide seemed quite professional and well-educated. We negotiated a comprehensive deal with him to arrange for the vehicle, make necessary arrangements and take us to the Afghanistan border.

Next morning, I hired an auto-rikshaw to make a trip to the fabled Qissakhwani bazaar. When we reached there, the young driver asked me where I would like to be dropped off. I needed to exchange some dollars and told him to drop me off where the money exchangers sat. Upon reaching there, I gave him 30 rupees, the fare he had asked for. But now, he declined to take the money, saying that I was a guest. I insisted on paying, using the Urdu expression that if the horse got friendly with grass, what would he eat? After exchanging money I took a stroll around the bazaar. At a dry fruit shop I enquired the price of dry apricots –khumaani; it was 100 rupees for a kilo, compared with more than 300 rupees in Lahore. I bought a kilo despite my wife having warned me against not having any room to put more stuff in. I walked towards the electronics market and started looking at a digital alarm clock-calculator and asked the vendor ‘how much’? “200 rupees”, he said. I did not need the clock and offered him 75 rupees. He kept coming down but I refused to budge. "Okay, take it for 50 rupees", he said and I was stuck with a clock that I didn’t want. I started looking around for a digital camera and kept being referred to from one shop to the other but nobody had one. The last one to be referred to had just sold one but added, "Come back tomorrow and I will have one for you". It looks like that the Qissakhwani bazaar still has to catch up with the other famous smugglers’ den, named after a famous Pathan, the Abdul Ghaffar Khan market of Karol Bagh, Delhi.

I returned to the hotel and, after a light lunch, waited for Aitjaz Manzoor, our guide for the Khyber trip. We passed by one of Peshawar’s oldest monuments, Fort Bala Hissar, generally attributed to Babur but said to be much older and mentioned by the Chinese Hieun Tsang in his travel accounts; we next passed by its newest monument, a huge replica of the Chagai Hills, the site of Pakistan’s nuclear explosions. Our first stop was the office of the Political Agent, a relic of the British Raj. There, Aitjaz presented our application with photocopies of our passports to seek the political agent’s authorization to travel through the tribal agency area. The bearded officer at the agency looked at the passport, saw my Hindu name and the place of birth and looked at me with an incredulous look; a Hindu born in Jehlum was probably a novelty for him. Still, we got the permission within minutes. I presumed that Aitjaz had made prior “arrangements” with the officials.

Aitjaz walked out of the office and across the compound into an adjacent barrack from where he emerged with a young man in a smart uniform of shalwar-kameez and a beret, carrying a Kalashnikov. He was to be our security guard for the trip – a mandatory condition for foreigners, for which we were charged a nominal fee of a few hundred rupees.

We passed through Karkhaana Bazaar, another famous bazaar on the outskirts of Peshawar run by the Afghan refugees. It was Friday and the bazaar was closed. We entered the agency area after showing our entry permits and passed by a large kutchi abaadi settlement. This was the temporary settlement for the Afghan refugees who came to Pakistan during the many years of turbulence there. A few of the dwellings seemed to have been deliberately burnt. Aitjaz told us the reason: The Americans were providing refugees with an incentive of $300 to return to Afghanistan. It seems that many people were taking the incentive to go to Afghanistan and returned soon thereafter to claim the incentive again. The Americans now insist on burning the house of anyone who leaves after receiving the incentive.

It was a beautiful day, which made the scenery more enjoyable. The route to Kabul is quite scenic and similar to hilly roads elsewhere on the subcontinent. But the hills are quite stark and barren and the scenery is rocky, harsh, though still awesome and dotted with historical sites, stupas and remains of a once-flourishing Buddhist civilization.

A few miles on the road to Khyber we passed by an imposing mud fort at Jumrood, built in the early 19th century. This was built by a Sikh, Hari Singh Nalwa who died and was cremated here. While all conquerors through this Pass in the recorded history traveled Eastward, Hari Singh was an exception. He was the fierce general of Maharaja Hari Singh who defeated the Hazara tribals of Afghanistan and expanded the Sikh rule up to Kabul. If the North West Frontier Province is a part of Pakistan today, the credit for it goes to Hari Singh Nalwa. There are still a thousand or so Sikhs living in the Agency. According to Aitjaz, although they adhere to their religion strictly, they are indistinguishable from the locals in terms of their language, dress and culture, including the Pathan code of honour.

The highway passes through settlements that seem to be quite oblivious to modern development. The houses here, even large ones, are built of mud. One could see large holes in the walls in these houses, which are meant to serve as fortresses to fire at the enemy during a fight. The Pakistani police are not allowed in this area and the only ones with any authority are the Khasadars, like the one accompanying us. These too are a relic of the British Raj. The British leased the Pass from the tribals and used the taxes collected from its use to pay the Khasadars. The Pakistan government has inherited the system; the Khasadars are paid by the government but they receive no pensions or other benefits available to government servants.

While the Pakistan government does not interfere in local affairs, which are run by the tribal chiefs, it uses what is known as The Black Law, another hangover from the British period, to control the area. Under the black law of the Frontier Crimes Regulations (FCR), the whole tribe is responsible for a crime committed by an individual of the tribe. So, if the government cannot find a culprit, his brother, father and, indeed, anyone from the tribe can be held in jail for any length of time until the wanted man is surrendered.

I asked Aitjaz about the law and order situation in the area. According to him, the law and order situation there was quite good. Since a murder there used to lead to scores of other murders in revenge killings, the tribal chiefs have come together and agreed to a prohibitively large compensation for the victim’s family by the murderer, a sum which is beyond the capacity of most people and has resulted in a virtual elimination of murders from the area. Smuggling however is rampant and goes unchecked. A car that costs Rs 20 lakhs elsewhere in Pakistan can be had here for less than half that price.

I observed that, unlike in Peshawar, women in the tribal areas did not seem to use the burqa. Aitjaz said that it was because the Pathans had a tremendous respect for women and don’t look at them even when their faces are not covered. He went on to narrate a story about the introduction of trains in this area - the track runs from Peshawar to Landi Kotal but it is not used these days. According to the legend, when the first train was introduced by the British, they were afraid of attacks by the Pathans; so they had a woman ride the train in the first bogey and the train reached its destination safely; but on the return journey, they left the woman in the same bogey which was now the last bogey; so the whole train was massacred, except for the last bogey.

I had never been able to find the difference between Pathans and Pashtoons. I put the question to Aitjaz. He replied that there was no distinction; the British used the term Pashtoons for the tribes that supported them and Pathans for those that fought them.

The houses in this region lack electricity or telephones. I was told that this is because of the opposition of the locals who are afraid that the government would use these modern facilities to control them. Many of these houses are quite large and belong to rich people who run the trucking industry in Pakistan and who also own large, modern houses in Karachi and other cities. But they maintain these old houses to stay connected with the land of their ancestors.

The journey through Khyber takes about an hour. We stopped near a mile or so before the Torkham border at a chowky of the Khyber Rifles. Our permit did not allow us to go beyond this point. We were told that this was because of the presence of the American troops at the border who did not want people too many people to notice them. We got down and watched the border from a distance. Aitjaz pointed out that Afghanistan was on the other side of the mountain range. This was the area, according to him, from where the Mujahideen launched the attacks that led to the end of the Soviet empire.

We started chatting with Aitjaz and a couple of other people who had come to that place. They all complained how trade and commerce had dwindled following the September 11 attack in New York. In the old days, Aitjaz had a job almost every day. Now, he hardly gets two or three tourists during a month; he is able to supplement this work by serving as an interpreter for the occasional visiting foreign journalist covering the conflict in Afghanistan. The tourists here generally came from Japan, Korea, Germany and other parts of Europe. Pakistanis themselves, especially Muslims, almost never come to visit this place, according to him. Aitjaz was of the view that if the Indo-Pak talks succeeded and commerce between India and Afghanistan was resumed, the real estate prices here would jump ten-fold within no time and the place will be dotted with hotels and truck stops.

There is no love lost in this area for Americans and a lot of love and support for the Taliban. According to Aitjaz, Americans do not hate Muslims, they only hate Pashtoons because “we” support the Taliban. He thought that the Americans had a “use and kick” philosophy; after they succeeded in Afghanistan and Iraq, they would also shove their ‘danda’ into Pakistan. We started chatting about the political parties in this area. The National Awami Party (NAP) is the most popular party of the region and even commanded the loyalty of the area migrants to Karachi, according to him. They are the only ones who conduct their campaign in Pashto; the leaders of all other parties give speeches in Urdu. I asked him that if it were so, why did the NAP lose the elections last year to the MMA? His answer was that it was because they were the most uncompromising towards the Americans. “Janab, they will vote for you also if you are against America”, he quipped.

The afternoon shadows began to lengthen. It was time to head back to Peshawar.


Next: A Rich Heritage Neglected.