Where the Indus is Young Read Online Free
Author: Dervla Murphy
latrine, it stank most abominably after the night’s rain. Having spent the previous winter in India, I caught myself constantly making odious comparisons – for instance, between the filth of many Muslim villagers and the scrupulous personal cleanliness of even the poorest-caste Hindu.
I spent that evening with the lively-minded Burkis, and as I was leaving Mrs Burki invited Rachel to play with her three children next day.
Back at the Waliahad the chowkidar in what used to be the sentry-box was still rapidly knitting, as he had been when I left five hours earlier. The men of Swat are keen knitters and at first one is slightly taken aback on seeing six-foot sentries standing with rifles over their shoulders and incessantly clicking needles in their huge hands. They turn out an endless number of sweaters, scarves, socks, caps and gloves for themselves and their families – an aspect of Pakistani life that Women’s Lib would surely applaud.
We woke next morning to a cloudless sky; thick frost sparkled on the burnt yellow lawn outside our window and a glorious glisten of new snow lay on the long, jagged line of the Himalayas, now clearly visible to the north. At nine o’clock I deposited Rachel on the Burkis, where I suspect she found the forceful Pathan young rather disconcerting after her malleable south Indian playmates of the previous winter. Then I spent a happy day climbing a mini-mountain, revisiting some of Swat’s Gandhara sites and gossiping around Mingora bazaar. Thirteen out of the fourteen English-speaking men with whom I discussed local politics were decisively pro-Wali and said so openly. I thought it an important point in favour of Mr Bhutto’s government that they felt free to criticise it thus to a total stranger.
An innovation called the Tourist Wagon Service has recently appeared on Pakistan’s roads. These fast minibuses, each seating eleven plus the driver, operate non-stop between cities and are used by the less poor Pakistanis rather than by tourists. Our tickets for the 112 mile journey to Peshawar cost Rs.16 (eighty pence), whereas the ordinary bus fare would have been Rs.4.50. As females we were entitled to the two roomy front seats beside the driver; in all Tourist Wagons these, and the back seat if necessary, form the Ladies’ Compartments.
When we left Mingora the valley looked superb in sparkling sunshine , with autumn colours still glowing on poplars, elms, birches and planes. Under a cloudless sky the Swat river was a gay ribbon of blue, tossed across the landscape, and hundreds of multi-coloured goats were grazing on the tawny mountainsides. We met three buses coming up the Malakand Pass on the wrong side, their roofs piled with a singing, waving overflow of passengers and their wheels inches from lethal drops as they swung around hairpin bends. Our driver seemed to keep his right hand permanently out of the window, in order to squeeze his bulbous rubber horn; no doubt he reckoned that negotiating such bends without a horn would be even more dangerous than steering with one hand.
In my first book, Full Tilt, I described Peshawar as being ‘like an English city with a few water-buffaloes and vultures and lizardsthrown in’. Those words were written the day I came over the Khyber Pass, after months of cycling through the remoter regions of Persia and Afghanistan. But in 1974, having come straight from the fleshpots of Karachi, Islamabad, Pindi and Saidu, I found this ‘Paris of the Pathans’ – Lowell Thomas’s phrase – a very special place. It seemed less a city in the modern sense than an agglomeration of medieval bazaars inhabited by attractive rough diamonds of many races. It is one of the three Pathan cities – the others are Kandahar and Jellala-bad , in Afghanistan – and since my first visit it has become one of the hippies’ main junctions.
In 1963 the great eastward Hippy Migration had not yet started and Full Tilt has frequently been accused of
I spent that evening with the lively-minded Burkis, and as I was leaving Mrs Burki invited Rachel to play with her three children next day.
Back at the Waliahad the chowkidar in what used to be the sentry-box was still rapidly knitting, as he had been when I left five hours earlier. The men of Swat are keen knitters and at first one is slightly taken aback on seeing six-foot sentries standing with rifles over their shoulders and incessantly clicking needles in their huge hands. They turn out an endless number of sweaters, scarves, socks, caps and gloves for themselves and their families – an aspect of Pakistani life that Women’s Lib would surely applaud.
We woke next morning to a cloudless sky; thick frost sparkled on the burnt yellow lawn outside our window and a glorious glisten of new snow lay on the long, jagged line of the Himalayas, now clearly visible to the north. At nine o’clock I deposited Rachel on the Burkis, where I suspect she found the forceful Pathan young rather disconcerting after her malleable south Indian playmates of the previous winter. Then I spent a happy day climbing a mini-mountain, revisiting some of Swat’s Gandhara sites and gossiping around Mingora bazaar. Thirteen out of the fourteen English-speaking men with whom I discussed local politics were decisively pro-Wali and said so openly. I thought it an important point in favour of Mr Bhutto’s government that they felt free to criticise it thus to a total stranger.
An innovation called the Tourist Wagon Service has recently appeared on Pakistan’s roads. These fast minibuses, each seating eleven plus the driver, operate non-stop between cities and are used by the less poor Pakistanis rather than by tourists. Our tickets for the 112 mile journey to Peshawar cost Rs.16 (eighty pence), whereas the ordinary bus fare would have been Rs.4.50. As females we were entitled to the two roomy front seats beside the driver; in all Tourist Wagons these, and the back seat if necessary, form the Ladies’ Compartments.
When we left Mingora the valley looked superb in sparkling sunshine , with autumn colours still glowing on poplars, elms, birches and planes. Under a cloudless sky the Swat river was a gay ribbon of blue, tossed across the landscape, and hundreds of multi-coloured goats were grazing on the tawny mountainsides. We met three buses coming up the Malakand Pass on the wrong side, their roofs piled with a singing, waving overflow of passengers and their wheels inches from lethal drops as they swung around hairpin bends. Our driver seemed to keep his right hand permanently out of the window, in order to squeeze his bulbous rubber horn; no doubt he reckoned that negotiating such bends without a horn would be even more dangerous than steering with one hand.
In my first book, Full Tilt, I described Peshawar as being ‘like an English city with a few water-buffaloes and vultures and lizardsthrown in’. Those words were written the day I came over the Khyber Pass, after months of cycling through the remoter regions of Persia and Afghanistan. But in 1974, having come straight from the fleshpots of Karachi, Islamabad, Pindi and Saidu, I found this ‘Paris of the Pathans’ – Lowell Thomas’s phrase – a very special place. It seemed less a city in the modern sense than an agglomeration of medieval bazaars inhabited by attractive rough diamonds of many races. It is one of the three Pathan cities – the others are Kandahar and Jellala-bad , in Afghanistan – and since my first visit it has become one of the hippies’ main junctions.
In 1963 the great eastward Hippy Migration had not yet started and Full Tilt has frequently been accused of
Readers choose
Mark Alders
Iain Pears
Jeff Corwin
Chris Lynch
Vanessa Cardui
Scarlet Hyacinth
Susan Juby
Una LaMarche
Lili Valente