Where the Indus is Young Read Online Free Page A

increasing its momentum , which suggestion troubles my conscience more than it flatters my vanity when I see groups of drugged wrecks dragging themselves around Asia. However, Peshawar’s attitude to strangers has been only slightly modified by the hippy influence. Pesh Awar means ‘Frontier Town’ and for at least 4,000 years this city has been dealing with invaders of many types. The hippies are merely a source of local amusement – and of course profit, for the many drug-peddlers in the bazaars.
    We stayed on the outskirts of Peshawar with the Khanzadas, who in 1963 had entertained me at their Abbottabad home and nursed me through a devastating attack of dysentery. But having been unable, from Saidu, to warn Begum Khanzada of our arrival, we spent our first night in a doss-house.
    By five-fifteen it was dark and beneath a gold-flecked sky we set off through crisp frosty air to explore some of the ancient bazaars. Rachel was enthralled as we wandered from one narrow, dimly-lit alleyway to another. Above us loomed tall stone and wood houses, centuries old, and we passed butchers and bakers and candlestickmakers (literally: one coppersmith was at work on a candlestick). Often we paused to watch men weighing huge chunks of marble, or carving wood or mending transistors or cobbling shoes or beating brass or tailoring shirts – all by the light of lanterns hanging from the roofs of their little stalls. A flour-covered baker gave us a length of hot nan from his underground mud oven, and we were invited into oneeating-house for juicy kebabs, and into another for small bowls of delicious tangy curds, and into two primitive tea-houses for little red and blue china pots of green tea – gahura , the Pathans’ national drink – which filled me with an almost unbearable longing for Afghanistan. As we sat cross-legged on filthy matting in one teahouse a small boy came strolling up the alleyway, noticed us, hesitated a moment, and then stood on tiptoe to hand up to Rachel a glorious pink rose bud, about to unfold. Before we could thank him he had disappeared into the surrounding shadows, his impulsive gesture having completed the perfection of our evening.
     
    A few days later we returned to Pindi to see how flights to the Northern Areas were faring. ‘No hope for you until the sixteenth,’ I was told. ‘Weather’s been terrible this past week.’
    As I turned away from the counter a young Punjabi army officer, stationed in Skardu, suggested that if I were to exert a little pressure the waiting-list might be cooked. I was uncertain what sort of pressure he meant – whether moral or financial – but I did not doubt that my debonair PIA friend would be genuinely insulted if offered a bribe. In any case, looking around at all the wretched men who had been stuck down-country for weeks, and were longing to get back to their families, I felt it would be unforgivable to jump this queue.
    We spent the next three days in Islamabad, as guests of Begum Ayub Khan. This was only seven months after the Field-Marshal’s death and his family were still mourning a beloved husband and father. Begum Ayub vividly reminded me of my own mother after my father’s death. My mother, too, was a woman of exceptional fortitude; and though such people tend not to give way outwardly to grief, its effects are all the more lasting for that.
    The Ayubs’ spacious new house is on the extreme north-eastern edge of Islamabad. Just behind it lie green, rounded hills, on which patches of light-brown earth or grey rock make an irregular pattern, and behind them rises the high blue ridge of the Murree Hills. We found the house and garden full of sons, daughters, in-laws , grandchildren, nephews, nieces and various unidentified relatives from the village. Yet Begum Ayub’s motherly hospitalityis so boundless that within those walls we felt not merely accepted but cherished.
    Aurangzeb and Naseem live about a mile away, down a long straight road bordered on one