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- Herausgeber: Eland Publishing
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
The Narrow Smile is a portrait of the Pathan and their highland home on either side of the Pakistan-Afghan frontier. Peter Mayne grew up in India, and later spent four years on the Northwest Frontier during the Second World War. He delighted in the company of these fierce but hospitable highlanders, who were as hard as the mountains that assured their independence but democratic to the point that no man admitted the right of another to lead him. In 1953, Mayne took a long journey to see what had become of his old friends in the high, flower-filled valleys on the roof of the world. But peace had always been a relative concept on this frontier, where Afghanistan was now eyeing Pashtun lands in a new iteration of the Great Game. Mayne's misadventures are sometimes serious, often very funny, and at all times compassionate.
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The Narrow Smile
A Journey Back to the North-West Frontier
PETER MAYNE
For T. B. C. C.
Your eyes are two loaded revolvers And your narrow smile has destroyed me.
Pashto Song
Contents
Author’s Journey
PART ONE
CAMERA OBSCURA
Chapter 1
‘He looks quite usual. Much the same as anyone else here, as far as I can see. Perhaps he’s a little more … sunburnt than most of us, and more handsome, too. He’s being a great success, incidentally. Why did you hiss at me like that over the telephone, Peter?’
‘I wanted to explain about him, that’s why. He was standing right beside me, so I had to hiss.’ Daphne waved a hand impatiently. ‘But why the need to hiss at all? That’s what I meant.’
‘Because … Well …’
Some new guests were arriving and she had to leave me. The house would soon be full at this rate – a little Hampstead house, nineteenth-century, with some fine furniture and a number of good and carefully chosen pictures. The guests seemed to be mostly people connected in one way or another with painting or books – like our host and hostess. They might be expected to take most things in their stride – even Chainak Khan. Yet I was doubtful, because I knew him and his people too well, I suppose. There was no opportunity to explain things further to Daphne at the moment, however, and anyway Chainak Khan was safely her guest now, and it was true that he was being a success. I could see him through the archway into the next room, leaning up against a book-case, his eyes half closed, talking and purring.
Graham came round with a jug of some mixed drink. ‘Your friend seems to be a great success,’ he said. ‘Thank you for bringing him. Are you ready for some more of this?’
I held out my glass. ‘Thank you for letting me bring him. I ran into him yesterday. I had no idea he was in England, even.’
‘What’s he doing here?’
‘Nothing in particular. He says he’s come to have a look at the British in their own country.’
‘And what does he think of us, now that he’s seen?’
‘He says that in any case we’re nicer in England than we had seemed to him in his country.’
‘That’s a mercy,’ Graham said, and passed on to the next empty glass. It was in a girl’s hand, an arm-chair away.
Yet I did worry a little, because I felt responsible. Chainak was so unpredictable, away from his own homelands: moreover he had the power to charm strangers and liked to use it. The girl in the arm-chair whose glass Graham had just filled turned to me and asked: ‘Where did you find him? I hear you’re responsible.’
I was coming in for a lot of reflected glory and it was not, after all, disagreeable.
‘I didn’t just find him. I’ve known him and his family for years,’ I said.
‘Where does he come from, then?’
‘The nearest big town’s Peshawar.’
She searched her brain. ‘That’s India, isn’t it? No. Pakistan, now. Sorry. Is that right?’
‘Quite right. Pakistan. The far north. The North-West Frontier, in fact.’
‘I see. Kipling.’
‘And Hollywood Bengal Lancers – but probably that was before your time.’
‘I remember. A Paythan.’
‘Well, yes … Pathān, anyway. That’s what they’re called by people who aren’t.’
‘And what are they called by people who are?’ she demanded, but went on, without waiting for an answer: ‘Paythan. A man’s handsome by nature, whatever the pronunciation.’ She gave Chainak an appreciative look through the archway. He was very handsome, but much more Tartar than is usual with the Pathans: Genghiz Khan in his youth, you might think: spruced up and done into an English suit, with a Karakul cap. He was talking nineteen to the dozen in his deceptively fluent English. God knew where he had picked it up. Not in school, certainly. He had never been to school, except to the little Islamic school in his village where he had learnt the rudiments of the Holy Qoran. He had had to leave in a hurry when he killed his cousin, so that he had had no schooling after the age of ten. I didn’t tell the girl this, but it was more than likely that Chainak was telling the group of which he was at present the centre. I could imagine him telling them, as he had told me years before when I first met him. He had only recently returned to his village at that time, after a ten- or twelve-year absence in India. The little cousin’s father, Chainak’s uncle, had himself died meantime, and Chainak had grown big enough to defend himself. So he had come back at last. ‘I did it with my slate,’ he had told me: ‘bong … On his head. And then I ran away.’ When he tells the story now, he generally adds: ‘Mr. Vincent Sheean has written the story of me and my cousin. You know Mr. Vincent Sheean? He is an American. But as a matter of fact the cousin didn’t die. He and me are excellent friends now.’
Graham’s gin and cider – if that is what it was – was as deceptively fluent as Chainak’s English. It just flowed over the tongue and no one guessed what it might be doing inside, in the hidden recesses of the mind, so smooth, so honey-smooth.
‘Graham tells me you’re just off to the East,’ the girl was saying.
I said yes, I was making a trip to Pakistan, but only for a few months. I added that Chainak had promised to help me brush up the language during the week or so that remained before I left. It needed brushing up too. I hadn’t spoken it for years.
‘Hindustani?’
‘No. It’s called Pashto.’
‘Oh.’
People are either bored or impressed if anyone claims to speak an outlandish language. This one was bored, and I can’t really blame her.
‘He looks like a prince,’ she said. ‘Is he?’
‘The Pathans are inclined to look like princes – but none of them are. They’re mostly peasants. Sturdy individualists. They don’t even have leaders in the proper sense of the word, let alone princes.’
‘Sturdy, anyway. Let’s go over and join them, shall we?’
I took her over to the group where Chainak was in the middle of saying: ‘All right. I will tell you.’ Then he saw us coming and broke off for a moment to say, ‘Hullo, Peter. I am telling them about that ridiculous man who threatened me.’ It was obvious that he liked the look of the girl with me, and he gave her a glance I’ve seen him use before. He knows exactly the effect he can make, given favourable circumstances. He made a little space for her beside him, up against the book-case. ‘I’m telling these ladies and this gentleman a story of London,’ he went on. ‘Peter knows it’s true.’
‘I don’t know that it’s true. I wasn’t there. But it has a true sound.’
‘Isn’t that enough?’ asked the man in the group.
‘Not at all enough!’ Chainak remarked firmly. ‘This story is true like on the Holy Qoran – or, for you Christians, like on your Bible. It is about me and a man meeting in a street of South Kensington. Nobody had told me that South Kensington is a dangerous place at night. The man said something, and I replied something polite, and then he said something about girls – and I said about last buses and how to get home after, and he said not at all necessary, and I thought a bit and then said, “After all, no, thank you for your trouble,” and he became annoyed – because I expect he thought he was now losing the prize – and suddenly he pulled something dark from his pocket in that small and empty street which he had explained as a short cut to some other place, and he said fiercely: “Come on! You’d better hand over your wallet!” Very fierce. But he was quite little and soft-looking – like a fierce mouse.’
Chainak was making his eyes flash. His audience obviously wished to believe him and I suspect that they did. I believe the story myself. He does not play tricks with the truth, as a rule: at least I have never caught him out.
‘What did you do?’ the man asked.
‘I? I said like this. I said: “Young man. Murder to you is a fairy’s tale. Amongst my people we are forced to kill each other because of …” What is it, Peter? What is the expression? Oh yes, because of our rudimentary social system. So I said: “We are quite accustomed to it, as a matter of fact.”’
He had hardened his voice, no doubt reproducing the tone he had used at this strange encounter, his eyes closing like slits, which emphasized the Tartar look I have already commented upon. His lips curled up from his teeth as he continued:
‘I said: “If you are not gone while I count to seven, I will murder you.” And I made some motions with my hands.’ Chainak looked down at his hands contemplatively.
‘And then?’
‘That’s the end of the story, I think,’ Chainak said.
‘He went away?’
‘Of course.’
People looked at each other, wondering whether to believe after all.
‘I am learning Cockney,’ Chainak remarked in a new voice, the story being finished. ‘And also Scotch.’
‘How nice,’ one of the girls said. ‘What can you say in Cockney?’
‘Oh, many things. I shall have to think – and then I shall put something Cockney into the conversation, shall I?’
‘Yes. That would be very pleasant. And Scotch?’
‘About Scotch I don’t have to think, because so far I have only learnt one sentence and that is “durrrty buggerrr’.”
‘Interesting,’ the girl commented, unmoved: and the man put in: ‘You shouldn’t say “Scotch”, you know. You should say “Scots”.’
‘He shouldn’t say “durrrty buggerrr” either, I think.’
‘I have a friend that I meet in a pub. He is Scotch and he is always saying it. He is from the Venice of the North. Have you been there, Peter?’
‘You mean Edinburgh? Yes. But it is the Athens of the North. Not Venice.’
He turned to the girl beside him. ‘Athens. Very well. My Scotch friend says that they have built their Athens in Edinburgh.’
‘Dear Auld Reekie,’ she said, smiling.
‘You are confusing everything for me. What is Auld Reekie?’
‘Auld Reekie? Edinburgh. Smoke-smelly, it means, I think. The Scotch cover their Parthenon with wisps of it.’
Chainak was confused again. ‘What do they cover it with, did you say?’
‘Wisps of smelly smoke.’
The other man in the group laughed and broke in: ‘Parthenon is Greek for “House of the Virgin”. But the one in Edinburgh doesn’t look very much like the real one in Greece, to be honest. Probably the climate was wrong, and Sir Walter Scott. But it was brave of them to try.’
‘Ah. Virgins,’ Chainak said. ‘We people very much appreciate virgins. You don’t seem to have many in London, if I may say so.’
‘The virgins are not for the visitors – that’s the explanation.’
‘I’m told that until recently all your women were kept locked up. Is that true?’ One of the girls was busily changing the subject.
‘Not in the least true. How could they do their work in the fields if they were kept locked up? Or bring the water? Of course they work in the house too and if ever we take them to Peshawar – Peshawar is our big city, like London for you – they put on their burqa – the burqa is the big white cotton thing, covering everything from the head to the feet – they put these things on so that those miserable city-men shall not be able to see them. Because our women are modest, you see.’
‘But I have read that the women of Pakistan are all coming out of seclusion to take their part in the life of the nation.’
‘Oh, I see. But you are talking about something quite different. I am talking about our Pathan women – not about the down-country townspeople, and the rich nawabs and their women. Our Pathan women prefer to remain chattels, like God intended.’
With a slight edge to her patience the girl started to explain about the position of women in the modern world, and Chainak listened politely. When she had made her point, he said:
‘I see now. The sexes are the same in spite of what my eyes tell me. And if other men look at my wife and she looks at them, I may shoot neither her nor them. Is that what you mean? On the contrary it is my duty to shoot. My wife is for having my babies: that’s what God has given her breasts and a womb for – and also strong arms for working in the fields. Only in time of fighting she can come and mix with outside men – who are then too busy shooting to look at her in that way. At such times she can bring food and ammunition to me and the other men, too: yes, and she can shoot. Straight – t-hung! … in the heart. If you were a Pathan woman, madam,’ he went on irritably, ‘your husband would beat you on the wedding-night, and you would have to defend your stomach – but if he could get your belt off, then you’d be finished. It would be shameful if you screamed or cried. All the other ladies would be listening outside the room, laughing together and saying: “Listen! She’s having a bad time.” In due course they would be allowed to enter the room so that they could report to everyone that … nature had had its way. It’s just plain nature. London, and all this …’ he finished up, with a sweeping gesture of his arm, ‘is not nature at all.’
The girl had the grace to laugh and agreed that all this was not really nature. Unfortunately Pathans do not share the polite western convention about giving in so that talk may remain on a pleasant, friendly level. Chainak must have decided to give her one more smack, just to point the moral. He said: ‘And so, madam, if you do not care about nature, you had better not go to bed with a Pathan.’
There was silence for a moment – for a little longer, perhaps, than was quite comfortable. Chainak was unaware of it.
‘What we Pathans lack, of course,’ he resumed meditatively, ‘is education – though it is spreading more and more now. I told you how I had had to run away? Well, that was a pity. I have done my best to learn something from people I have met, of course, but I lack schooling, and schooling is good. I must tell you that I find many things in London that would be good for my people, too. I like, for example, your policemen, and I frequently have conversations with them. They are kind to the public – though sometimes, I am told, this is not so. But as a rule they are kind, and behave like servants of the public, which is what they are. With us this is not the case. I will explain some day, if we meet again. Red peppers up the rectum, and other things. They have learnt all sorts of tricks, our police, but the real Pathan does not torture his prisoners. Sometimes it may be necessary to cut off a finger to send to the prisoner’s relatives, if they are slow with the ransom-money for example. But such a thing would only happen when the prisoner is mean and refuses to write the proper letter to his relatives, explaining the need to be generous. Such prisoners are always rich, naturally – that is why they have become prisoners. In these cases he must pay for his meanness by losing a finger, and then another, if need be. But there is less kidnapping now that the Hindus have gone.’ He paused, thinking about this side effect of partition, I dare say. It wasn’t very common, but some of the Hindus were rich, and it was always a possibility to be considered. He went on: ‘Now, with enemies, it is a different thing. We always kill the enemy prisoner before we allow the women to insult the body. You notice the difference? Shall I tell you how the women insult the bodies?’
I felt it might be better to stop short of these details. So I said:
‘We’ve got an early start tomorrow, Chainak. It’s getting late.’
In fact we were making for North Wales on the following day. I wanted him to see something of Britain other than a big city, and North Wales in spring, with its rhododendrons and azaleas, would be a good counterblast to London. I was going in any case, because I had friends I wanted to see before leaving for the East. And apart from all else I thought that if Chainak really got going he might say something that his audience would be quite unable to stomach, even though they would try to hide the fact. He would enjoy shocking them directly he discovered that he could. However the girl with the militant feminist views had questions she was determined to put to him.
‘Don’t take him away,’ she said to me. ‘Just a few more minutes. Listen, Mr. Chainak Khan…’
‘You may call me Chainak.’
‘All right. Listen, Chainak. I’d like to know about marriages. Do the parents arrange everything in your country? Does the bridegroom have any say in the matter, or the bride? Can they meet and get to know each other before they are married?’
‘But I told you! The girls don’t go about veiled in our villages. You can see them there. I had seen my wife often. She was from a house in the same village. A sort of cousin’s house. I had often looked at her from behind trees. If I had been living in the village when we were both children, then I could also have talked to her before. But she was big by the time I came back to the village and I had not known her before because she is several years younger than me. So I could only look at her secretly. I also sent her written messages, but she could not read. She was very beautiful. I was pleased to marry her.’
‘I suppose it is possible that marriage like that can be happy.’
‘Naturally. The wives love the husbands, and the husbands love the wives if they are beautiful and while they are still young. Later the wives have the babies to love them, so everyone is contented. It becomes difficult for the wives if they don’t have any babies, as you can understand. Or if they only have girl-babies.’
‘And what if it is the husband’s fault that there are no babies?’ the girl asked him.
‘The husband’s fault …? Let’s stop talking about this, shall we? I shall now tell you something bad, because I find that I am telling you only the good things about us. The worst thing is the way we have to kill each other because of badi. How do you say badi, Peter? Blood-feud? Yes, because of blood-feud. In this way the blood-feud goes on from father to son, on and on – or brothers and cousins, any of the men in the family against any of the men in the other family with whom there is this feud. And in my family, for instance, there are now no men left except me and an old one who is too old for fighting, or even to work properly. Sometimes we have a truce, when we reap the crops, or when there is some bigger fight between our tribe and some other tribe. But I must say that it is a very bad thing indeed. You see I am a Pathan who has been away from his village for a long time and I have been able to see that in some things the habits of others are better than ours. This killing is very tiresome. Imagine! I have come to England on a visit, and now I must quickly go back because of this business of no men left. Two of my male relatives were killed a week ago, and I have this news now – by air-mail letter. Our enemies in the next village have got to a very strong position. They have gone ahead. I must do something about it, for the sake of the honour of our family, and for my own honour. The others would like to get me as well, because that would completely finish us, unless my wife gives me a son in time. I must go back and see, Insha’ Allah, that she has a son quick. I have a place booked in a ship in ten days from now.’
The tone of his voice, hitherto mocking, had become filled with a deep seriousness. I knew he meant what he was saying – but for the outside world it must lack reasonable plausibility, like a piece of fiction that doesn’t quite come off.
‘Well, well,’ said the other man in the group. ‘I have often wondered what Pathans might be. Now we know.’
‘I have talked too much, and not well,’ Chainak said quietly. ‘My people are better than me. If you want to know about us, you must come to our country and then you will know.’
* * *
The following week or ten days were, for me, filled with the anguish of having forgotten Pashto. It had slipped out of my head, leaving no apparent trace. Perhaps my struggles with Arabic during the several years that I had been away from the Pathans had been responsible, in part. Pashto, for all that it contains a good many Arabic words and has a script resembling Arabic but with certain additional letters, is completely dissimilar in its structure. It belongs to the Indo-European group of languages. All the time we were in Wales, Chainak refused to talk anything else to me. He told me endless stories, sang songs, infuriated the other people at Portmeirion with the unceasing gutturals of his language. Towards the end of our visit I was beginning to remember again. You can’t ever quite forget a language once you have really learnt it, after all. We played darts in Pashto, and, in particular, Chainak grew ecstatic over a Camera Obscura.
‘Hagha der mazedar shai dai!’ he exclaimed approvingly.
‘Yes, it is good. But I doubt if they make them any more. Edwardian children used to be taken to see them on the pier at Brighton.’
‘Speak in Pashto! I shan’t talk to you unless you reply in Pashto!’
‘How can I talk about Edwardians and piers in Pashto? You’ve never had either.’
‘What do you want to say about this Camera Ob … about this thing?’ he asked patiently, in Pashto.
‘I want to say … Look! Chainak, look! Jim’s come out on to the terrace. How close he seems!’
‘How innocent! It’s nice to be watching him when he doesn’t know.’
The Camera Obscura at Portmeirion is mounted on top of a solitary tower dominating the main block of hotel buildings and the terrace in front of them. All this is practically at the level of the estuary. Immediately behind the hotel block the cliffs rise precipitously. It is wonderfully beautiful. Concealed there, in the turret, and leaning over the concave table on which the Camera Obscura projects the image of whatever section of the surrounding landscape happens to be in the adjustable line of vision, we could see every detail of the terrace, two hundred yards away; Jim himself, in tweeds and a doggy sort of cap; his parrot circling in the mild spring air above his head, presumably screaming. It only stops screaming when it perches on Jim’s shoulder or a tree. Then there was an old woman, a guest at the hotel, we supposed, though we did not recognize her. A goggling child who watched the parrot. An immense mimosa that festoons itself along the hotel-front – and, behind, the cliffs rising sheer. Chainak was feverishly working the two handles that control the mechanism. The image on the sand-table went wheeling up into the air with the parrot – the cliffs, trees clinging to it, cottages clinging to it too, the campanile – and, always, the parrot circling and (presumably) screaming. Jim had been left far below.
‘If I had my sling …’
‘Your what …?’ I didn’t know the word, so he repeated it in English.
‘Sling. And a nice round stone. Pretty plump grey-and-pink bird. We don’t have that colour, do we? Only green.’
We looked up from the table into the shadows of the turret. The concave lens of the mechanism was turning slowly above us and, when I glanced down again, the parrot had disappeared from the image on the table.
‘It’s gone.’
‘There’s writing on this handle, Peter. Can you read it?’
I lit a match and read: ‘Barr and Stroud. 1918.’
‘Is that the name of the people who make it?’
‘I expect so.’
‘I would like to ask about one for me.’
‘We’ll find out from Jim. I dare say he’ll know.’
‘Come on. Let’s go and ask him. I must have one for the village. Can’t you imagine how useful? After all, we’ve got the bruj’ – bruj means watch-tower – ‘so all we’ll need is the looking-glass and this – this table-thing. It will be most convenient, I think.’
* * *
Back in London, on the eve of my departure for Pakistan, Chainak made me dial a telephone number, but it was not a success.
‘Is that Barr and Stroud? It is? May I speak to the gentleman concerned with Cameras Obscura, please?’ I waited while someone called to someone else, far away at the other end of the line. Chainak nodded encouragingly to me.
‘Don’t forget to say about how to fix “the loot”,’ he said.
The man was back on the line now.
‘What exactly do you want to know, sir?’
‘I wanted to inquire about Cameras Obscura. Do you still make them? You wouldn’t have a second-hand one, by any chance?’
‘I’m afraid not,’ the man said, ‘but I’ll make certain. Where would you want us to mount it? We shall need all the details, of course. The site, and so on.’
‘Well, actually,’ I admitted, ‘it’s not for me. I’m inquiring on behalf of a friend who’s only temporarily in London.’
‘Would it be for an amusement park? Or perhaps for the seaside?’
‘No. Not an amusement park. Nor for the seaside, really.’
‘You know,’ the man put in, in a chatty voice, ‘we haven’t had an inquiry for a Camera Obscura for longer than I can remember offhand. In the past there’d be an occasional inquiry, from proprietors of amusement parks and the like. But in recent years, I can’t recall …’
‘It isn’t exactly the same, in this case. It’s for a friend of mine who lives in the foothills, fairly open country to his south and east, but rising to the north of the village, and he thinks it would be a great convenience to him.’
‘Yes?’ the man said, to encourage me. I suppose there must have been a hint of uncertainty in my voice.
‘It’s for his watch-tower, as a matter of fact. He’s got a watchtower already, you see. So it ought to be quite an easy matter …’
‘I see.’
I turned to Chainak and reported.
‘Good,’ he said. ‘Now tell him about “the loot”.’
‘No. Wait a moment. We must jolly him along slowly to begin with. Leave it to me.’ I took my hand off the mouthpiece again and continued:
‘The position is this. We’ve been visiting Portmeirion recently … Hm? Portmeirion. North Wales. Surely you must know. Yes … No, certainly not! I suppose some people might call it strange, but I call it wonderful – yes … yes, the hotel. Many, many more than three stars – but that’s not the point. The thing is that they’ve got one of your 1918 models at Portmeirion and it would have done splendidly for my friend’s needs. Can you supply one like it, and for how much? What? But I thought I had told you. He needs it in order to avoid having to keep a man permanently on duty in the watchtower.’ I was getting to the point now, and rushed nervously ahead with what I was compelled to say: ‘There’s a shortage of men in the village at present, and my friend thought that if he had a Camera Obscura he could make his women sit round the observation-table, doing their household chores, grinding corn or whatever it was, and at the same time they could keep an eye on the table, and twiddle the knobs. The exact site? Does it really make all that difference? Well, there’s an orchard alongside the tower, and then a bit of land they plant with sugar-cane, and another village quite close by, and fields of maize. And, to the north, mountains. But actually it would be more for observing the other village than anything else.’
The man at the other end of the line was strangely silent. I even wondered if he had left the telephone. Chainak jogged my elbow and said:
‘Why don’t you ask him about fixing “the loot”?’ And then he said it in English for fear that I had not understood. He need not have bothered. I knew what it was all about. The Sten-gun, which he generally calls “the loot” because it was “taken” in Kashmir. But the conversation was already embarrassing enough without embarking upon this final complication before I must. Anyway, the man did not seem to have clearly understood thus far, yet.
‘Am I to understand, sir,’ the man now asked from the shocked incredulity of his desk, ‘that your friend wants the Camera Obscura for observing the neighbours?’
Chainak was getting impatient.
‘What does he say, what does he say? Give me the telephone, Peter!’
He tugged at the cord, and at my arm.
‘Let go, Chainak. You’ll ruin everything. You won’t know how to jolly …’
‘Give it to me!’
Chainak took it. I had done my best, and now stood back in a resigned sort of way.
‘I want,’ said Chainak in crystal English into the mouthpiece, but with a certain authority, ‘I want this Camera Ob … in order that my women can watch the neighbours carefully, as well as do their household work. Have you understood up to this? Good. Next. I want to know if you can arrange a place for the Sten-gun – which I have got – on top of the tower – which I have got too – in such a way that it will turn with the looking-glass and so that it can be fired at the neighbours, if necessary, when their picture comes on to the little table? Please tell me, without any more fussing, if this is possible for you. If it is not possible, then I shall waste no more time in placing my business elsewhere.’
Chainak looked round at me proudly. I could hear a little voice squeaking in the ear-piece.
‘Listen, Chainak. He’s saying something.’
Chainak returned his attention to the telephone.
‘Oh. Ah, yes. Yes? Please say that again. Slowly.’
The man said it again, and a black cloud came down over Chainak’s face. He paused for a second, considering his reply – but there was a click in the ear-piece that even I could hear, and so, by the grace of God, it was too late for replies.
Chainak was furious. ‘Peter! Peter! Please get the number again. I have something to say to that man.’
People outside Pathan-country don’t seem able to understand the Pathan point of view. That’s the trouble.
Chapter 2
Pathans … I was on the way back to their mountains. I had stayed in Karachi only as long as it took to renew old and happy contacts and had then started northwards, over the Sind desert that comes lapping up against the city like the surf of a tideless and exhausted sea.
I travelled in a sleepy old aeroplane, a Bristol Freighter fitted with a few seats. It was flying on a Royal Pakistan Air Force assignment, but they had been kind enough to take me as a passenger. Most of the space was monopolized by a dismantled glider and, alongside it, with their instructor, sat the young men who were to be taught to glide it. They were, I think, members of a University Officers’ Training Corps of some kind, and I saw that they were excited, and they kept looking with fondness and pride at the red-painted fuselage of their craft. I tried to read, but I couldn’t – the aeroplane was making too much noise, snoring its way through the air, grunting, seemingly only half awake. It was too early in the day for the bad flying conditions that must be expected when the sun really got going: as soon as the desert had had time to stoke up its furnaces, the hot air would rise and wait around for such as us, and toss us about as if we were a dead leaf. I could see nothing through my windows except a little rectangle of sand and scrub, perhaps as much as five hundred of the many thousands of square miles of identical sand and scrub. I had no wish to give them more than a glance. Unable to read, I sat and ruminated.
Four hours later we would reach Peshawar, someone had said, and I supposed it would prove to be true. Peshawar, with the forbidding defiles of the Khyber Pass to the west of it. Four hours, four years … It was already four years since I had last been in Pakistan. I had lived in Karachi at that period. Now I was that much older, and the aeroplane too. The pilot looked young, very young – a handsome brown face, hair black and glistening under his cap. I took him to be a Punjabi. He seemed alert enough, but would even he be able to keep the engines awake enough …?
No British in this aeroplane but me. Most of the British had left Pakistan in 1947, when independence came. But a fairly solid group of British business-men had stayed on in Karachi after partition (and were there still), and a nucleus of British officers of the old Government of India had accepted contracts under the new Government of Pakistan who were short of trained administrators and secretariat men. I had myself served Pakistan for the first two years of her existence. I still felt that I partly belonged to this country.
I remembered the excitement when ‘freedom’ became a reality. Throughout the provinces of Pakistan it could be felt, almost palpably, a tremendous enthusiasm in this same air. The future had hung suspended in it as if it were a crock of gold – heavy, frangible, and full of promise. Yet to much of the outside world Pakistan had seemed a threat, rather than a promise: and to the Hindus of India it was the negation of all they had longed and toiled for – it was the vivisection of the body of Hindustan.
What had mattered here, however, was the Pakistanis, with the new flags flying, the green and the white and the crescent moon, and the infant star it protected. Today, nearly six years later, much of the promise had been fulfilled, even if it had been accompanied by a bloody flux that would have destroyed a creature less determined to live and grow big.
It was good to be back. This time I was here with a motive strictly personal and limited: I had come to visit friends in the mountains that lurk like wolves on the borders of Pakistan and Afghanistan. Pathans. I had first been to their country before the war: and then, during the war, with a commission in the Royal Air Force, I had been seconded to the Government of India for work connected with ‘air’ aspects of Pathan country. For some years I had lived close to the tribesmen and, as far as the pattern of my personal life was concerned, I had had time to develop a deep love for them as people. I wanted to see them again, particularly certain of them whom I still thought of as friends.
Gigantic rocks showed themselves in my window now, away to the north. The beginnings of Baluchistan. We were getting on. There was a river below, its bed three times as wide as the channel winding its way down the length of it to the Arabian Sea. Mohenjadaro was somewhere down there too, with its Indus Valley civilization still part-buried under the debris of millennia: and the huge, grey rocks to the north, rapidly growing from cliffs to hills to mountains now, would be Bugti country, for me no more than fragments of map-knowledge. I had never been there, and all I could remember about the Bugtis was that they were a Baluchi tribe, of Biblical simplicity, and that from a nineteenth-century pioneer-administrator’s point of view they had had the one supreme merit – they bowed to the unquestioned authority of their chieftain. The benefits of nineteenth-century progress, as the great Sandeman well knew (though he was still a young man, and not great at all, when he first met the Bugtis), were more easily demonstrable to an audience of one, than to a whole tribe of doubting, suspicious and violent tribesmen. As it happened, the Bugtis placidly entered the British fold behind their tumandar,1 who had seen the light and decided that it would be better to offer his allegiance to the British in return for an allowance, than pay fief to his overlord, the Khan of Kelat. It does not happen like that with the tribal-region Pathans, who don’t care about chieftains or other people’s enlightenment.2
It was not long before the mountains of the ‘independent’ Pathans were visible through my window, tier upon tier towards the horizon. From this height Afghanistan was probably visible too, but there was too much cloud to be sure which range marked the frontier. On the map it is clear enough, boldly and definitively the Durand Line. It is a newish frontier in terms of politics, and not really a frontier at all in terms of any other science. It was drawn in 1893, and it ought to matter a lot, but when it comes to problems of everyday life in those mountains, it counts for less. The Pathan tribes who straddle it ignore it in their daily business. It is no more than a symbol. History has taught them to use politics and its symbols much as they use their rifles – to train on their opponents when it suits them, but otherwise to be slung over the shoulder and disregarded.
The term Pathan is the Indian mispronunciation of the name the Pathans give themselves – Pakhtūn.3 Who these people are is another matter. The Encyclopaedia Britannica admits how difficult it is to trace clear references to them earlier than the eleventh century A.D. Some modern historians in the East are less chicken-hearted: they say that the Pakhtun tribes of today are the direct descendants of a people mentioned by Herodotus in the fifth century before Christ – the Pakti.
The fact of the matter is that nobody really knows. Until the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries the Pakhtuns were known only to themselves – to the outside world they were a barbaric and violent people inhabiting the border country of what was, almost equally vaguely, called Afghanistan. They are sometimes referred to as Afghans, rather than Pakhtuns. No trained anthropologist ever studied them. It would be interesting to discover exactly what makes them fierce and ruthless, as well as something definite about their origins – but inquirers would meet with obstacles as frustrating to the science they profess as Pakhtun knives and rifles might be menacing to their lives. It is not permissible even to look at a Pakhtun woman, let alone talk to her: and a fundamental requirement of anthropological field-work is, naturally, the observation and questioning of the women. A number of distinguished men have come in contact with Pakhtuns and have written about them – but none has been an anthropologist.
So who are the Pakhtuns? How can we be sure, when even the historians differ amongst themselves so truculently? Still, from my point of view, the uncertainties do offer an advantage – that I can choose to believe what I choose to believe.
I choose to believe those who say that none of the Pakhtun tribes is indigenous to the country it now occupies. Broadly speaking the Pakhtuns inhabit the North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan and the tribal regions to north and west of the provincial administrative boundaries. There are important groups of them in the Southern and Eastern Provinces of Afghanistan, beyond the Durand Line. They spill over into Baluchistan.
There is evidence to show that they are extremely varied in origin. It is assumed that they came at various periods on the different waves of migration that have carried the people of Central Asia and Persia and the Middle East thousands of miles from their original homelands. There have been men to support the theory that the lost tribes of Israel are to be found amongst the Pakhtuns. But whatever the case, it seems unlikely that any of these tribes was other than weak when it first came – for no one, not being an aboriginal, could have settled here of his own free choice. It is hard, cruel country on the whole, despite its cultivable valleys.
There seems to have been no cartographer’s finality about tribal boundaries. The Pakhtuns were essentially nomadic peoples. There would be eternal inter-tribal fighting – over water, grazing grounds and the like. There would be mutual and continuing distrust. There would be a tendency for tribes occupying the valleys in relative ease, to grow relatively soft. Such a tribe, as it grew softer, would be raided by its tougher, highland neighbours. It might even be expelled from its cultivable valley in time, and take to the hills itself as the only available alternative. But whatever the case some convention had to be adopted to regulate inter-tribal affairs and to make possible the seasonal movements from summer- to winter-grazings in that country of extreme heat and cold. Fighting was all very well, but there had to be some limit. Indeed, in the course of time a rudimentary code was adopted, and it still holds today. It is called Pakhtunwali – the Pakhtun Code, and it has its heart in three categorical imperatives:
To give food and shelter to all who demand it.
To grant asylum to all in need of it.
To retaliate against any form of attack.
Pakhtunwali is not without nobility, even if it springs from violence and mistrust.
‘Ah, would that the Pakhtuns could agree amongst themselves! Would that some understanding were theirs!’ This was the lament of a Pashto poet of the seventeenth century. His name was Khushal Khan, and he was a member of the important Khattak tribe. He had personal reasons for lamenting, of course: he had been imprisoned by the Moghul Emperor Aurangzeb, and on his eventual escape, he did his utmost to organize the tribes in opposition to the man who had wronged him. Poor Khushal Khan, he failed, because the Pakhtun tribes did not unite in his time, any more than they do today, except in a cause that offered immediate concrete, certain and shareable reward. Khushal Khan’s cause had no such appeal for anyone except Khushal Khan himself. There is seldom concord even amongst the members of a Pakhtun family, so how could there be concord in the larger unit of the village, or the hamlet, or the section of the tribe – let alone within a tribe as a whole, or amongst the Pakhtuns as a whole? You cannot expect concord unless the individual advantage of each member of the unit is demonstrably the same. The Pakhtuns have no one to speak for them, since each man speaks for himself – no leaders, since no man admits the superiority of another man – and they all go their own ways in consequence. It is true that Khushal Khan Khattak had been a ‘leader’ of a sort – the sort that foreigners have tried to invent for the Pakhtuns. He had been subsidized by the Emperor Shah Jehan (Aurangzeb’s predecessor on the Moghul throne). To the extent that he had been able at that time to buy them with Moghul gold, Khushal Khan had had Pakhtun mercenaries to follow him. But later, as fugitive from a Moghul prison, with no gold at all, he could produce no claim to ‘leadership’ that even his son Behram cared to recognize. In fact Behram accepted Moghul money for taking up arms against his father.
It was not to be so very different two hundred years later, when the British reached Pakhtun country. The maliks, or headmen, through whom the British hoped to control Pakhtun country, were obeyed by the tribes they were supposed to represent only to the point where the British had power to enforce obedience, or that it suited individual pockets to obey. It was madness for Government to count upon undertakings given by maliks in the name of a Pakhtun tribe (as they could in the case of the Baluchi tribes, for example), and ridiculous to brand as disloyalty a Pakhtun’s failure to play the political game according to rules laid down by foreigners. The tribes play the political game instead of football, and with unorthodox brilliance.
From earliest recorded history invaders had come through the passes and defiles of Pakhtun country on their way to India, that prize for the greedy. They were content to get through as quickly as they could, of course. There was nothing worth taking in those barren hills, but the tribes ignored the fact that none of these invaders had seriously considered overrunning and subduing them: they recalled only that everyone had failed to do so. And with each successive failure, their almost paranoiac arrogance increased, till they came to believe themselves invincible.
It is obvious, of course, that the plainsman tribes were not invincible at all – some of them were encircled and subdued by the Sikhs in the early nineteenth century, and the rest by the British in the second half of the century. It should be equally obvious that the toughest and most formidable of the Pakhtuns can claim these distinctions solely because their mountains are difficult of access. It is these inaccessibles who have kept alive the tradition of invincibility. Does some special virtue lie hidden beneath the poverty which accompanies the ‘invincibility’ of the élite, I wonder? The élite themselves have come to think so, and their belief is tacitly shared by the Pathan plainsmen. So real is this feeling that I am tempted to reserve the term Pakhtun for the independent tribes of ‘invincibles’, and to let the term Pathan stand for those who, by the accident of geography, politics and the ambitions of empire-builders, have been encircled and subdued and who, as a result, are more prosperous than they have ever been before.
By the turn of the century it all looked quite nice on paper – a sort of Neapolitan ice-cream, three layers, each with its distinctive political colour, yet all of the same general ingredients. You had the British-administered North-West Frontier Province, peopled by Pathans. Next you had the ‘independent’ Pakhtun tribal regions, a ‘protectorate’ lying as a buffer between the N-W.F.P. and the Durand Line frontier of Afghanistan. And beyond the Durand Line you had Pakhtuns again, as triumphantly uncontrolled by Kabul as their brothers-in-Pakhtunwali were uncontrolled by the British. The situation had not changed basically by 1947, so far as the most important and intractable of the tribes were concerned – for example the Wazirs, the Mahsuds, the Afridis and the Mohmands on the British side of the fontier, and all the Afghanistan Pakhtuns on the far side of it.
In 1947, when Pakistan came into existence, the Pakhtuns still held their topographical trumps. Probably they were still uncertain of Pakistan’s strength and determination, but they were realists. They sent their emissaries to make polite speeches to the newcomer-Pakistanis and, in return, were promised the continuance of the allowances and benefits they had been receiving from the British. At the same time, because it was traditional for them to visit Kabul as well, members of the same tribes crossed the Durand Line to renew expressions of goodwill with the Afghan throne. Both Karachi and Kabul knew what the Pakhtuns meant by such protestations, though it would have been silly to expect either to publicize their knowledge. The Pakhtuns knew too. Their tribesmen returned to their mountains, bearing gifts from both sides, and they must have told themselves over their cups of green tea that the status quo had been satisfactorily assured.
1 A Baluchi chieftain.
2 There have been exceptions amongst the Pathans, all the same. For example, the Turis who inhabit the Kurram Valley. The Turis come into my narrative later.
3 There are regional variations in the way the letter of the vernacular script is pronounced. The more easterly tribes make the kh hard, as in the Scottish word ‘loch’: the westerly tribes soften it to sh, as in the English word ‘lush’. Pakhtūn – Pashtūn: Pekhāwar – Peshāwar. I shall stick to the most usual English rendering in each case. I shall write Pashto, for the language, for example, and then with complete disregard for consistency, Pakhtun, for the man who speaks that language.
Chapter 3
It was already the end of may, and Karachi had been unpleasantly hot. To make matters worse it was the Muslim month of fasting – Ramzan.4 Of course in a big (over a million), modern (fretwork concrete with bidonville undertones) city like Karachi, religious observance is apt to be less strict than in village communities, but feelings that varied between the self-conscious martyrdom of those who fasted, and the guilt of those who did not, had been sensible in the atmosphere, and the atmosphere itself had been charged with almost 100 per cent humidity, and I dislike Karachi anyway. So I had leapt at the opportunity of this lumbering flight to the north where it would be cooler, and drier, at present. The alternative to flying would be about forty hours in the train.
The Bristol Freighter behaved like the ageing but conscientious pack-animal it was. In spite of ‘fatigue’, it carried us up and over the spine of mountains that divides the Derajat from the Peshawar Vale, and exactly four hours from the take-off, it put its ears forward and stuck out its fore-legs to brake the force of the landing. The landing was as smooth as a mill-stream. I was relieved, and the Glider instructor crossed himself sketchily and sighed. He was a Pole, I think. Peshawar, and on time at that. We all smiled at each other as we taxied in to where a group of people was waiting.
It was possible that I would be met, but I was uncertain. I had telegraphed to my host, and I had also written to some other Pathan friends, so there might be someone there to welcome me. Everybody seemed to know everybody else, but I saw no one I recognized and stood around, a little lost perhaps. I watched them drag my luggage out of the open nose of the aircraft. A big suit-case, a little one, a bedroll, a typewriter, and a zip-bag which gaped permanently since the zipper lost a tooth. Then, a Pathan came up to ask me my name. I told him, and we both consulted a note he held in his hand. It was indeed addressed to me – by my host Nawabzada Muhammed Farid Khan, with instructions as to what I should do: rather confusing – luggage one way, me another, lunch alone because of the fast for Muslims, and how was I? Relieved and happy, as a matter of fact. It was a disturbing business, this return to what had once seemed home.
It all looked much the same on the surface, though one of the airstrips was new, and a new airport building, a little removed from the shack alongside the Air Force hangars that had served in the past. Peshawar is a small town, but it is the biggest in the North-West Frontier Province, and is strategically important. It deserved its expanding airport. It was evidently getting grander. But the air was the same as ever: shining and ice-coloured, like a pane of glass under the sun – itself cool to the touch, but carrying within itself the knowledge of heat beyond, yet dry and invigorating. Away to the north and west the foothills shimmered under their transparent veiling of heat. The silhouette of the mountains on the skyline was blurred, as the contours of an ageing face lose the sharp focus of youth. For anyone who knew where to look the deceptively easy entrance to the Khyber Pass could be seen in the west, not ten miles distant, hills sloping down smoothly to each side of it and in the centre a strange little tumulus.
The man with Muhammed Farid Khan’s note bustled about with authority. He was in the uniform of the Frontier Constabulary, exceedingly smart and business-like. Farid Khan commanded this admirable corps at the time. As his orderly and I started towards the barrier I became conscious of a big hand waving, a round face under a khulla and patkai,5 cotton trousers called partūg that fell in folds and closed in near the ankles, this big hand waving and a voice, all gutturals, shouting something I couldn’t yet hear. The gutturals ceased and the voice concentrated on my name:
‘Peter sahib, Peter sahib!’
‘Fateh!’
I put down the zip-bag and we embraced each other. Then he introduced me to his two companions, reminding me of their names which had slipped out of my mind, and people started pushing from behind in the blocked exit barrier.
‘I didn’t recognize you at first,’ Fateh said, looking me over. ‘How thin you are!’
‘You look different too. What’s the matter? You look sad.’
This is not the traditional way to greet an old friend, but Fateh is a privileged person for me, and I for him.
‘… and these?’ He indicated my jeans. They had seemed very appropriate to travel in, but if you looked closely they were not very elegant, of course. ‘People will think you are poor. Haven’t you got a suit?’
Farid Khan’s orderly nodded, in agreement with Fateh. Hadn’t I got a suit? But Fateh’s companions had got going with the conventions meanwhile.
‘May you not become tired. Welcome … in peace. Live in happiness …’ and I was replying: ‘Welcome … And you? Live in happiness …’
‘Live in happiness. Come at all times – in peace. May you never become old.’
During this exchange, which provides a convenient opportunity for deciding what you want to say next, we were all examining each other more carefully. Were we much changed? Had we become tired and old after all, in spite of these well-mannered protestations?
‘Do you mind moving on, please, sir?’ an official was saying in English.
‘Oh! I’m sorry.’ I picked up my zip-bag and Fateh snatched it from me and handed it to one of the others to carry.
It was Muhammed Farid Khan’s jeep, but Fateh treated it as if it were his own, motioning the others into the back, and me into the seat beside the driver. The orderly was dealing with my luggage. We set off. They wanted to stop at their favourite tea-shop, but presumably Farid Khan was waiting, and so I said no, we went through all the formulae of leave-taking and would probably have parted quite soon if the tea-shop proprietor had not come out to delay matters. And then a tonga-driver. A tonga is a two-wheeled dog-cart, plying for hire. Here in Peshawar they are proud of the ponies that draw them.
‘A new pony,’ the man said. ‘New this year. I take her out in the mornings. You’ll see the old one you used to know, this evening. Shall we go driving this evening? I offer you a drive without paying. I’ve got a new son, as well. I have two sons now.’
‘Perhaps not this evening. Some other evening. A new son? Only one more in all these years?’
‘Well … Two more daughters also.’
‘Never mind,’ I said. I had clambered back into the jeep.
‘May you meet good on your way,’ they said, and we shook hands all round, all over again, a double hand-clasp, after which you should carry your right hand to your heart.
I was happy once more, now. Such little unimportant things can make a man happy. It is enough, quite often, to see friendly faces again, to remember and be remembered. Roads that seemed friendly in the past, houses unchanged (except for the name-plates of their occupants), the trees in full elaborate leaf. We drove past the Company Bagh – in the towns dating from the nineteenth century there is always a Company Bagh, a public garden named after the British East India Company. On down roads set with rose bushes and pomegranates, trim grass verges well kept, peepul trees, neem trees, bungalows white under the sun – the same loving roads, but somehow empty. I wanted to see people moving, preferably friends, of course, but anyone would have done, and there was nobody about because it was midday, summer, and Ramzan. Even so, an impression of a deeper emptiness persisted. The jeep had a little pennant on its bonnet, flap-flapping. I suppose I was really only trying to cover up a vague, sudden feeling of distress when I changed the subject of my thoughts and said to the driver:
‘You shouldn’t use the little flag when the general sahib is not in the jeep, you know.’
‘Does it not please you, then? I thought it would please you, the little flag.’
* * *
Muhammed Farid Khan – the Border-Genail
