The Age of Kali (47 page)

That afternoon Imran was to have his portrait taken by the French photographer Alexandra Boulat. So after lunch he disappeared to shower and groom himself for his modelling session, leaving me in his flat on the first floor of the large house he shares with his father, his sisters and their families. Despite Jemima’s year in Lahore, she did not appear to have made much impact on Imran’s former bachelor pad: one half of the drawing room was dominated by a low teak table on which lay Imran’s large collection of tribal stabbing daggers, the other half by his outsized running machine. Only two large black and white pictures of Jemima’s parents and an unread copy of her father’s anti-European tract
The Trap
indicated that she had ever been there.

Imran’s bedside reading was almost endearingly austere:
Towards Understanding the Koran, The Road to Mecca
and
The Sayings of Nizam ud-Din Awliya
rubbed spines with
The Emergence of Islam
and
The Meaning of the Glorious Koran
. The only remotely racy title I could find was the
Encyclopédie de l’Amour en Islam
. All this formed a somewhat striking contrast to the stacks of Mills & Boons I had found a year or two earlier in Benazir’s Karachi bedroom.

On the coffee table, however, by Imran’s precious daggers, was one of my favourite biographies, Fawn Brodie’s wonderful life of Sir Richard Burton,
The Devil Drives
. Relieved to find something more exciting than
The Meaning of the Glorious Koran
to occupy me
while I waited for Imran to finish his epic shower, I opened the book, to discover that it belonged to Jemima. On the title page had been written a ‘To Do’ list in large, round, girly script. It read:

Such are the concerns of the rich and famous.

At that moment Imran finally emerged from the bathroom, wearing his best
salwar
. While the photographer re-arranged him in a chair, trying to persuade him to prop his head on his knuckles in the manner of Rodin’s
Thinker
, I asked him what Jemima thought of his entry in to politics.

‘She understood the dilemma I was facing,’ said Imran. ‘I never particularly wanted to go in to politics. But the country was quite literally on the verge of collapse. Every day, people would come to me and say, “You’ve got to do something.” Now I’m going to try to get Pakistan out of this mess. If I fail, at least I’ll know I’ve given it my best shot.’

But was Jemima not horrified by the dangers, I asked. I hardly needed to remind him that the life expectancy of senior politicians in South Asia was not very high. On the day he had announced that he was planning to stand for election, a bomb had exploded in his cancer hospital, timed to coincide with his arrival at the building. Had he not been detained and arrived late, he would now be dead.

‘Of course there is a danger,’ he replied. ‘Everyone in my party is worried I will be assassinated. If you take on the political mafia, this is something you must expect.’

Later I discovered from his friend Yusouf Salahuddin that many years before, when he was still a young cricketer, Imran had visited a renowned fortune-teller in Spain. She had told him that he would live to a happy old age. Only one thing troubled her. ‘Do not ever
go in to politics,’ she said, ‘for if you do, you will be killed.’ Imran at this stage had never for one minute considered entering politics. But according to Yusouf he had never forgotten the prophecy, and in due course it had made him hesitate for several years before he finally decided to go ahead and take the risk.

‘Then again, I could die this evening in a car crash,’ continued Imran. ‘Or tomorrow, from cancer. Anything can happen. It’s not really worth worrying about. Fear is the biggest barrier in anyone’s life. Fear makes you a small person. Faith gives you courage. In the end, you die when you die,’ he said, nonchalantly shrugging his shoulders. ‘There’s nothing to be done about it. Such things are in the hands of the Almighty.’

Postscript

In the event, Imran was not assassinated, but nor did he or any of his nominees win a single seat in the election. Indeed, the Tehrik-e-Insaaf was so disorganised that Imran discovered he was not even eligible to vote, as no one had bothered to register him. As the Pakistani pundits had predicted, the crowds at the rallies did not translate in to votes, and the better-organised political parties made electoral mincemeat of the Justice Movement.

When the votes had all been counted, Nawaz Sharif’s Muslim League stormed home to a stunning victory, with one of the largest majorities in Pakistan’s history – much to the bemusement of the British press, which by and large had presented the election as a two-horse contest between Imran and Benazir, and which had almost totally ignored Nawaz. A few months later, in the British general election, Imran’s failure was closely reproduced by his father-in-law Sir James Goldsmith, whose Referendum Party gained almost as much publicity as Imran’s Justice Movement, and to equally little effect.

The Tehrik-e-Insaaf remains in existence, albeit on the very margins of Pakistani politics. Despite the virtual meltdown of
Benazir’s PPP, the prospects for Imran’s political future remain fairly modest. His party has, however, succeeded in putting the issue of corruption in to the centre of Pakistani political debate, no small achievement in a country which has become so inured to the dishonesty and venality of its politicians that before Imran’s intervention, corruption was considered as much a part of everyday political life as addressing rallies or attending parliament.

PESHAWAR
,
1989

Violence is to the North-West Frontier what religion is to the Vatican. It is a
raison d’être
, a way of life, an obsession, a philosophy. Bandoliers hang over the people’s shoulders, grenades are tucked in to their pockets. Status symbols here are not Mercedes or Savile Row suits; in Peshawar you know you’ve arrived when you can drive to work in a captured Russian T-72 tank.

The pathological frame of mind of the frontier people is partly derived from the harshness of the landscape. It is hard, barren, dry country, drained of colour, warmth and softness. The mountainsides are grey and sheer, covered with sharp mica schist, the tedium relieved only at the valley bottoms with windbreaks of poplar and ashok. There is no snow here – it is too dry – but the winds from the snow peaks sweep down the slopes and the scarred valley sides and brush the streets clear of people. The sky is grey and the air is grey and the greyness seeps in to the ground and the stones and the buildings. The only colours are the red and yellow silk flags flying over the new graves in the graveyards. As you wander past, you can feel winter lying like a curled dragon across the land.

The people here are as cold and hard as the schist. Blank, stony faces with long, drawn features look out from blank forests of facial hair. The sub-zero temperature makes them withdraw in to themselves, both mentally and physically. They lift up their knees to their chins and wrap their heavy Kashmiri shawls around both. On top, their heads are covered with woollen rollmop caps. You see only the dark eyes peering out in to the cold. Eighty per cent are illiterate. Yet
they are proud. They sneer through their moustaches, eyes levelled straight, in contempt as much as in curiosity.

These people – the Pathans – have never been conquered, at least not since the time of Alexander the Great. They have seen off centuries of invaders – Persians, Arabs, Turks, Moghuls, Sikhs, British, Russians – and they retain the mixture of arrogance and suspicion that this history has produced in their character. History has also left them with a curious political status. Although most Pathans are technically within Pakistan, the writ of Pakistan law does not carry in to the heartland of their territories.

These segregated areas are in effect private tribal states, out of the control of the Pakistan government. They are an inheritance from the days of the Raj: the British were quite happy to let the Pathans act as a buffer zone on the edge of the Empire, and they did not try to extend their authority in to the hills. Where the British led, the modern Pakistani authorities have followed. Beyond the checkpoints on the edge of Peshawar, tribal law – based on the institutions of the tribal council and the blood feud – rules unchallenged and unchanged since its origins long before the birth of Christ.

The tribal areas are officially closed to all foreigners, as their safety cannot be guaranteed by the Pakistan government: kidnapping and murder are so frequent here that they are virtually cottage industries. To visit you have to smuggle yourself quietly across the tribal border, ideally in the company of some tribal elder. It is not difficult to do this, but it does require a little care and preparation.

In the shops in the bazaar in Darra Adam Khel, just over the border in the tribal territories, lines of high-explosive warheads sit in glass cupboards facing on to the street as innocently as jars of humbugs in
an English village store. The stacked mortar shells and the anti-tank ammunition are available over the counter, for cash, as if they were tins of Heinz baked beans. Nearby the belts of machine-gun bullets are hung up like strings of onions. Outside, left lying around in the streets like so much discarded gardening equipment, can be found heavy machine-guns, rocket-launchers and field-guns. There is a fantastic, almost surreal feel to the place: here we go round the arms bazaar, half a pound of tuppenny shells, five green gasmasks sitting on a wall.

Mohammed Rafiq, prop., Khyber Military Supplies, (Pvt) Ltd, is a serious man with thick black glasses, a pinstripe waistcoat and a tall Astrakhan hat. He serves cardamom tea in delicate porcelain bowls and moans about the end of the Afghan war.

‘Sahib, I am telling you the truth,’ he said, sipping at his bowl. ‘Five year ago we were selling forty or fifty Kalashnikovs a day, no problem. Now business is not good. Occasionally we are selling some anti-aircraft missiles, now and then an RPG [rocket-propelled grenade]. But the Afghan war is over. Now it is only our tribesmen who are buying.’

This thought appeared to depress Mohammed Rafiq. But his assistant Abdul Qadir was more optimistic.

‘Our tribesmen are still good customers,’ he said, wobbling his head from side to side in the Indian manner. ‘Everyone is still wanting many guns.’

Mohammed Rafiq nodded in agreement. ‘Our people are liking too much these arms. In the tribal areas you do not need permit, not even for tank.’

‘Take middle-rank man,’ said Abdul Qadir philosophically. ‘He does not have the comforts of life. But he has gun and pistol and rifle, maybe two: one Lee Enfield for tradition-sake, one Kalashnikov for killing people.’

‘If he is big man – a
malik –
he may have rocket-launcher and anti-aircraft gun. Too many gun. Is good business.’

‘And they actually use these guns?’ I asked.

‘Often they are using.’

‘On who?’

‘On each other.’

‘Oh yes,’ said the assistant proudly. ‘Our tribal people are having these enemies and they are having to kill them. All the people of the North-West Frontier are gunfighters.’

As we spoke, the wail of a muezzin pierced the air from a loudspeaker outside.

‘Excuse me,’ said Mohammed Rafiq. ‘This is the time of our prayer.’

The two partners got out strips of carpet from under a heavy machine-gun and laid them down behind the desk. Intoning their prayers, they began rising and falling so that all you could see was two Astrakhan hats bobbing up and down between the telephone and the stapler on the desk.

On the way back to Peshawar I called on Khan Abdul Wali Khan, once one of the great landlords and politicians of the area, now a frail and half-blind old man. We sat in his summer house in the middle of his irrigated garden, beneath great jungles of climbing bougainvillaea, looking out on his flowerbeds full of yellow narcissi, roses and chrysanthemums. There was a sound of birdsong and running water. The Khan poured jasmine tea and gestured at the bowls of walnuts, dates and raisins on the table. I told him what I had seen at the Darra arms bazaar.