Where the Indus is Young Read Online Free Page B

side by the homes of diplomats or rich Pakistanis and on the other by miles of open scrubland. Over this wide expanse at the foot of the mountains are scattered the National Assembly buildings, the Prime Minister’s residence- cum-government -offices, the Bank of Pakistan’s Headquarters, a colossal United Nations building, a colony of suburban villas for the British Embassy staff – looking as though it had strayed from Bexhill-on-Sea – and several of the larger embassies, including the Russian, Canadian, British and Chinese.
    I remember cycling past Islamabad while it was being built and thinking how frightful it would soon look – another Chandigarh. But in fact Pakistan’s new capital is an agreeable place of wide, bright boulevards, many trees, brilliant gardens, no high-risery and much attractive domestic architecture that is original without being ‘ way-out ’. Despite its official status it feels like an elegant, cosmopolitan suburb of Pindi – some fifteen miles away, but very close in spirit – and one hopes it will remain so. When Ayub Khan planned it he specified ‘no industrial development nearby’ but his successors may have cruder ideas.
    A more immediate threat than industry is basic Asian squalor; it does not take the Orient very long to impress itself on the latest in Occidental architecture and town planning. Islamabad is disfigured by too many areas from which builders’ rubble was never cleared and where men squat around relieving themselves in the shadow of imposing banks, embassies and shopping arcades. Even amidst the diplomatic residences some corners are piled with rubbish and occasional houses already show symptoms of jerry-building, while throughout the less affluent quarters squalor is gaining fast. In ancient Asian cities this sort of thing seems tolerable – even picturesque – but there is something peculiarly unprepossessing about disintegrating new buildings. And inevitably Islamabad has its beggars, though far fewer than any Indian city I know. These piteous bundles lie on the ground, hidden by a thin sheet of filthycotton or a ragged burkah, and one would never suspect their humanity but for a stick-like arm and motionless begging palm outstretched on the pavement beside the fine new buildings of a new country with very old problems.
    Tourist Wagons constantly ply between Islamabad and Pindi; passengers get on and off anywhere they like at either end, or in between, and pay a fixed rate of one rupee per ride. One rarely has to wait more than a few minutes before being picked up, but if a bus is almost empty its driver may cruise around the streets for half an hour, filling enough seats to justify a journey. Even when one starts out from the most swinging quarter of Islamabad, most women come aboard wearing burkahs. To discover what sort of person is sitting beside you it is necessary to study the hand that will soon appear to grip the dashboard bar as the driver swings recklessly around corners. From that hand and its adornments quite a lot may be deduced about the age, physique, social status and approximate ethnic origins of the shapeless figure lurking silently within those folds of (usually black) cotton or nylon.
    Despite their looking so spick and span, these buses, like most Asian vehicles, will accommodate on the roof virtually anything that is capable of somehow being hauled up there. Enormous bales of hay and bundles of firewood, pyramids of stainless steel cooking-pots , trussed-up, frantically bleating goats, a plastic kitchen table, a day-old buffalo calf, a sack of wheat, two geese in a wooden crate – up they all go, and are deftly secured to the roof-rack by the driver’s mate, who is usually a good-natured adolescent anxious to help everybody. Rachel’s favourite Islamabad anecdote concerns a goat belonging to one woman passenger who got at a bale of hay belonging to another woman passenger. When the goat’s perfidy was revealed, on our arrival at Pindi,