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  Among Muslims

  MEETINGS AT THE FRONTIERS OF PAKISTAN

  Kathleen Jamie

  FOR MY MOTHER, ISABEL

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Maps

  Prologue: In Fife

  1. Gilgit Going

  2. Shia Girls

  3. Karimabad Side

  4. Askole by Night

  5. In Baltistan

  Epilogue: Return to Gilgit

  Also by Kathleen Jamie

  Copyright

  Prologue: In Fife

  Ours is a small, rural Scottish town. There are shops, parks, a school, and a Victorian museum which displays, amongst other things, a two-headed weasel and a Zulu shield. Stolid stone houses, some painted a grudging cream or pale blue, line a long main street. There are no front gardens. It’s the kind of place where you acknowledge the people you pass. There is too much traffic, always going elsewhere.

  Because it was Guy Fawkes night, we were going to buy fireworks. The kids ran ahead, while I walked past six or seven houses, all with lace curtains, all with closed doors. When the doors are closed, the town can take on a dour, forbidding look. From The Tay View came a sudden male roar. Rangers must have been winning the football.

  The kids were excited about their fireworks. They were going to have friends over, and eat sausages.We’d left their dad building a bonfire at the top of our long garden. They danced on ahead toward the Post Office cum toyshop.

  Beyond the Co-Op the pavement widens out to accommodate a flowerbed and a couple of benches.And there, in a circle, cross-legged on the pavement, were a dozen Pakistani men.

  The impression was all of textile, of fabric. They were sitting on a brightly patterned cloth, they wore white turbans, green bandannas and beards, and baggy shalwar-kameez, with anoraks and leather blouson jackets against the Scottish cold. One had a fine brown blanket draped over his head and shoulders. Another, a little bright green mirror-work hat. The youngest was a doe-eyed lad of about twenty with a few wisps of beard, the eldest would be about fifty, a doughty, confident personage we came to know as Mahmood. I say cross-legged, but one of the men was kneeling, with his back to the road, swaying back and forth as he read aloud from the Qu’ran.

  Duncan came running back to me.

  ‘Mummy! Come on! Let’s get our fireworks!’

  ‘In a minute …’

  ‘No, Mummy, come on!’

  We bought the fireworks, and a paper, and some milk. The paper had a front-page picture of an Afghan woman in a pale blue burqa. These men could easily have been taken for Afghanis, maybe that’s why no one seemed quite sure what to do with them. No one seemed to have approached them, though a couple of women in tweed coats stood at the bus stop, talking in low voices.

  With a child in either hand, I made a move, and two of the men clambered to their feet.

  A-salaam aleikum, I said.

  Aleikum a-salaam!

  Since the war in Afghanistan I’d been thinking a great deal about Pakistan. The TV news carried nightly reports from Islamabad and Peshawar and Quetta. There were refugees and anti-US riots, and once, the BBC even suggested that the road into the Northern Areas, the Karakoram Highway, was in the hands of the Taliban, but I didn’t believe it.

  It was ten years since I’d last been there, and although we’d lost touch, I’d written a letter of concern to the women who had befriended me in the northern town of Gilgit, but they keep purdah, and it was all a long time ago, and I didn’t really expect a reply.

  All the men in the circle were looking at us. They smiled and nodded.

  ‘You’re from Pakistan! I’m pleased to meet you,’ I said, and held out my hand, but the man with the green bandanna backed off from it, smiling and bowing.

  The two tweedy women had ceased talking to watch.

  And that’s how come we went out for fireworks and came home with three Punjabi men in full fig. I was wearing my frump-at-home dark blue skirt, which reaches almost to my ankles, and, for once, was glad of it. I’d mustered my few words of Urdu: tea, house, husband; and three accepted.We made a jolly party, striding up the pavement, exchanging names, and fussing over the children. They made an enormous fuss over the children. The wind tugged their turbans and shirt-tails.

  We led the men through the green gate which leads into our yard, and I sent Duncan up through the garden to find his dad, while the rest of the party followed.

  The gardens are our town’s best kept secret. Behind the closed doors and the dour privacy of the street are plum orchards and apple orchards, sunlit lawns, bee-hives and vegetable plots, and views of the wide, blue Firth of Tay and the Carse of Gowrie to the north. Walls and fences are little more than a gesture, everyone just knows whose is whose, so the impression you have is of sunlit openness. The three Pakistani men stood under the plum trees and exclaimed. They turned, exclaiming about the sudden view of the river. I wanted to tell them that it was the same, that when I myself had been admitted through the austere green street-gates of Gilgit, I had found gardens and vegetable plots, family compounds, children, and an insistent hospitality.

  Phil came striding down. In his younger, mountaineering days, he too had spent time in Pakistan, but that was before we met. We often spoke about the place, and promised ourselves that one day, when the kids were much older, we’d go back.

  The men shook hands and exchanged names. The biggest, with the black beard, he was Mahmood.He was, he said, a miner, but that was disingenuous. His card, which he flourished from an inner pocket, named him as chief executive of five mineral-extraction businesses in the Punjab. The man called Nazir was thinner, he wore a parka over his shalwar-kameez.

  ‘He is the mayor of our town!’ said Mahmood.

  ‘Scotland must seem cold, after the Punjab,’ I said, but as if to concede that Scotland was cold would be to insult it, Nazir turned his head and smiled.

  ‘Not cold. Scotland is very fine. Scottish people very kind.’

  The third was an older man, who spoke little. He had a kindly, thin face and wore a fine woollen blanket like a shawl over his head and shoulders. I never learned his name.

  We ushered our three guests indoors. As they demurred and we fussed, I saw my house through new eyes.What did we have that they would recognise? A decent front room for visitors? No. They were shown into our cramped kitchen. An elegant matching tea set? Fat chance. The cooker hadn’t been cleaned for a week. There was much courtesy over chairs, but eventually the three men were seated and I began to make tea, which I knew they’d find insipid and bitter. Sugar. We needed sugar. We needed clean cups. Spoons, why are there never any spoons? I flapped the cat out of the kitchen.

  ‘You alright with cats?’ I asked Mahmood.

  ‘Cats, yes. Dogs’, he tilted his head. ‘Dogs, no.’

  They sat at the table. Phil and I stood. The children stared.We named the places in Pakistan we’d known, Phil and I. Rawalpindi, Islamabad, and especially, the mountainous Northern Areas … It was before the kids were born. The men fussed over the children, toyed politely with their tea, and with courtly gestures refused the shortbread we offered. Everyone was merry. But, we asked, why on earth they were here?

  They told us they were on a ‘Peace Walk’. They had started in Aberdeen, back in August, and were walking through all the small towns of Scotland, until, at length, they reached Glasgow. It would take, they said, four months. Four months? I glanced down at their shoes. I’d been chided in Gilgit for the unladylike state of my own, but theirs were not fit for four months’ walking in a Scottish winter.

  ‘Yes. It is at our own expense. Our purpose is to be here and say to Scottish peoples, we can be understanding. In every town we are making some talk, some communication. Muslim and Western, we are all the Children of Adam, you understand? In every town we arrive, and sit … as you saw.’

  And then?

  Mahmood gestured toward our ill-painted kitchen ceiling, and said something about Allah.

  ‘In every town the people have been most kind.We are in need of accommodation. Very simple place. Church hall, community hall …’

  I glanced at Phil.

  ‘Give us that again. You need somewhere to stay. What, ten, twelve of you?’

  ‘If you can help with this thing … otherwise it is no problem. We have a van … we can sleep on the …’

  ‘Not another word. We’ll see to it. Wait here, please. You are our guests.’

  Go to Pakistan, and those are the words you will hear. ‘You are our guest.’ That’s what people said to me, ten years ago when I did as these men had done, that is, I turned up in a small northern town and threw myself on people’s kindness. ‘You are our guest’ and ‘where is your husband?’

  In those days I had no husband. But now I did, and I conferred with him in the hall.We had to find them someplace.We had to find these men a place for the night; these peace-walkers with their strange garb and beards, their curious habit of sitting on the pavement, these men without women. I fell into a complete passion about it.What if people got the wrong end of the stick? What if they thought these men were Afghanis, and all Afghanis were Muslims were terrorists? All we got on the news was anthrax and bombs and bin Laden. People might take them for a Taliban invasion force. God knows what people might think, if all they knew of Muslims were TV pictures of men with beards and turbans and Kalashnikovs.

  ‘We’ll see to it,’ I said. ‘Please, wait here.’

  ‘You are very kind.’

  Nazir was fiddling
with his teaspoon, as though unsure where to put it.We possess but one saucer, and the cat drinks from that.

  As man of the house Phil would stay here and hold the fort. Being a woman, and possessed of the female arcane lore of who lives where and is related to whom, and who goes to what church if any, I went running down the street.

  As I did so, I understood for the first time some things I’d remembered fondly, even written a book about, but had never acutely understood. Things about honour, and danger. I understood at last what my host in Gilgit, Major Shah, had actually meant when he thumped his desk that distant, hot afternoon and roared, ‘I will find accommodation for you. IT IS MY HONOUR!’

  Well, it was my honour now. I went running down the street. We needed a church hall. We could rely on Christians, couldn’t we? Peace walk, stranger at the gate and all that.

  The woman who looks after the Ecumenical church hall was out. Geraniums crowded her windows. Next, I stopped in at the bakers, because the woman who works there belongs to one of the town’s old extended families. She’d have an idea what to do, but it was her day off. Her deputy wiped floury hands on a cloth and said: ‘Oh, I saw them! My daughter was scared! She thought they were going to bomb us or give us anthrax …’

  ‘Do you know who looks after the Kirk hall?’

  ‘No, but you’ll see all the churchy-folk in the morning. A’ wi’ their hats on.’

  The board of the Baptist church displayed a poster with a fluffy duckling and a notice about a Salvation choir. Of course it was shut. It was Saturday afternoon, after all. The community centre has doors like a castle, and they were firmly closed. I ran on, smiling and waving as I passed the remaining Pakistanis still sitting in their circle on the pavement. I knew the pharmacist, a likeable woman my own age, went to the Church of Scotland, maybe she could help. She stood in her white coat among the vitamins and lip salve, as I gabbled something about Pakistanis, and she said,

  ‘Oh, that’s who they are! We saw them. Oh, how interesting. I would like to have spoken to them, but I didn’t know how …’

  ‘One of them is a pharmacist, apparently …’

  ‘Oh, how interesting!’

  She gave me the name I needed, and an address, just round the corner. I ran on.

  The door was surrounded by a cotoneaster, the garden was flawless. A man I didn’t recognise glanced out of the window at my knock, then came to the door, and looked down on me as I stood on the step, and said my piece.

  He said, ‘We know. The Post Office called at lunch time. There’s nothing we can do. It’s not suitable. There’s communion tomorrow. Really, you’d think they’d have something organised.’

  I didn’t argue, merely closed the little black garden gate behind me. I didn’t argue that the whole point of the men’s mission was to have nothing ‘organised’. The point was to walk into a town, sit on the ground and see what panned out. To force a situation where we had to talk to each other, the ‘Children of Adam’, instead of blowing each other to bits.

  So much for the church halls.Who else? Who could accommodate twelve? Not for the first time I wished we had a huge house. A huge huge house. I went home by a back way, because I felt embarrassed to be seen yet again running up the main street, past the group waiting on the pavement, and their few bemused spectators. This was a fine pickle. What kind of impression would they have, these men, if they found the town was shut up and barred?

  I swung back into the kitchen. Only Phil was there. He sat alone at the table, reading the paper. The men were all gone.We had failed.

  ‘Gone? Naw, they’re not gone,’ said Phil, laughing. ‘They’re up in your garret, praying.’

  A pharmacist, a draper, a glass-merchant, the town’s provost, a businessman involved with minerals, a teacher of Arabic, a student of economics. ‘We are spending only our own money.’ We sat in a circle on the floor of a large room. The room belonged to a man called John. John was an artist, a man in his fifties. When the USA and UK began bombing Afghanistan, it was John who circulated e-mails and petitions of protest.He was new to town, and the ground floor of his house was a disused shop. He’d phoned us, just as I was explaining to our guests that we were experiencing some difficulty, and said,

  ‘I hear you’ve got a problem …’

  He offered the empty shop to the peace-walkers. There was no electricity, but there was water, plenty of floor space and an old lawnmower. The men were gracious, and they drove up their support van, a blue Transit stuffed with all their accoutrements. Then, to the frank astonishment of passers by, they filed back and forth into the empty shop with tin cook pots, kerosene stoves, bright mats, and sleeping bags. Their clothes billowed in the November wind.

  ‘This is kind of you, John,’ I said.

  He said, ‘I was just worried about them being out when the pubs were closing, you know? Just in case …’

  If I’d understood about honour, I also now understood about danger.

  No wonder my hosts in Gilgit had used the word. If we were worried about twelve men who could probably handle a couple of drunks, little wonder my Gilgiti hosts were so beside themselves with concern about me, a lone Western girl with a taste for being out after nightfall.

  We had our fireworks, in the dark garden. The wind had swung to a bitter north, and the bonfire crackled. There were eight adults, and as many kids. John came, but none of the Pakistanis, though we’d invited them. I don’t suppose they fancied sausages and wine. The word was out, though. John told us that, as he had walked up the street to our house, two wee boys had accosted him.

  ‘Mister,’ said one, ‘are you an Afghani?’

  ‘Does he look like an Afghani?’ said his pal.

  We had a good time with our friends and all the children, and of course we talked about the group of Pakistani men, who were sitting in the dark with their candles and kerosene stoves in a strange, foreign town, while, outside, rockets shrieked and banged.

  The following day, Sunday, we woke to the sound of the green gate opening, a shuffling in the yard and a nervous clatter of the letterbox. It was seven o’clock; the sun was not yet risen.

  ‘Please,’ said Mahmood with a bow. ‘We have come to pray.’

  ‘You better go up in the study again.’

  ‘First, wash.’

  ‘Of course. I’ll fetch towels.’

  ‘Hot water!’ They grinned.

  There was some urgency. The sun was rising, time was short. Mahmood washed in the bathroom, Nazir in the kitchen sink and the third man in the brown shawl filled a milk bottle with hot water and went to hunker in the yard. The spot he chose overlooked our neighbour’s door. Please God, I thought, Please Allah, don’t let the neighbour open his door at this moment. Because if he does, his three large dogs will come bounding out and leap up against the wall, just where this Muslim man is making his ablutions.

  They left their shoes in the hall and filed up the narrow attic stair to my study. I shut the door.

  ‘What way is Mecca, anyhow?’

  Phil yawned.

  ‘We discussed that yesterday. You know how the Cupar road curves south, out of town, past the petrol station? If it maintained that curve for a few thousand miles, you’d be there, apparently.’

  They wanted to leave by eleven, for the next leg of their walk, so we went to John’s house to see them off. But first, we wanted to talk. In John’s living-room, we sat in a circle on the floor.We spoke, for a short while, about the bombing of Afghanistan, about bin Laden, about the men’s extraordinary project. We’d assumed, of course, they’d been prompted by September 11th, but they had in fact been here since August, and the trip had been planned for a long time before that. I would like to have known more about their thinking and planning – why Scotland, why now? – but I didn’t want them to feel they were bring interrogated. The only time they seemed impatient was at the mention of Bin Laden.We asked them what they thought of him, and realised they’d been asked five hundred times before.