Where the Indus is Young Read online

  Where the Indus is Young

  A Winter in Baltistan

  DERVLA MURPHY

  To Diana and Jock – most steadfast of friends, in good times and bad – with deep affection

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Maps

  Preface

  Prologue: Waiting on the Wings

  1 Gilgit in the Jeep Epoch

  2 Dropped in the Indus Gorge

  3 Alarms and Excursions

  4 Enter Hallam

  5 Urban Life in Baltistan

  6 Pain and Grief

  7 A Veterinary Interlude

  8 Skardu to Khapalu

  9 The Nurbashi Influence

  10 Vanishing Paths

  11 Kiris to Skardu

  12 Spring comes to the Shigar Valley

  List of Equipment

  Glossary

  Bibliography

  Index

  Plates

  Copyright

  Acknowledgements

  This journey would have been impossible without the imaginative cooperation of the Pakistani authorities, who made no attempt to restrict my movements despite the present political sensitivity of their Northern Areas. It would also have been impossible without the stoicism, adaptability and sheer guts of my daughter Rachel, who never once complained, however tough the going. And it would have been far less pleasant without the friendship and practical help given so generously by the Raja of Khapalu and by Abbas Kazmi of Skardu.

  For editorial help I am indebted to Jane Boulenger, Diana Murray and John Gibbons, while Alison Mills and Daphne Pearce typed heroically from a manuscript that would have been deemed totally illegible by weaker spirits.

  Sketch-map showing the author’s expeditions into Baltistan

  Preface

  In his account of the 1913–14 Italian Expedition through the Karakorams, Giotto Dainelli sowed the seed of this book: ‘… a district – Baltistan – which all the old travellers recognise as the extreme western part of Tibet …’ At present no one has any hope of getting into Tibet proper, under acceptable conditions – and I am not sure that I would want to go there now – but the prospect of travelling through that ‘extreme western part’ was very attractive indeed. So I hastened off to the Pakistani Embassy in London, to seek further information.

  During the previous fourteen months I had been having an intense relationship with India. This was based not merely on the writing of a travel-book about that country but on the making of a concentrated effort to achieve some degree of understanding of Hindu culture. I had spent part of the time in India and the rest of it reading, thinking, writing and feeling about India, almost to the exclusion of everything else. It had been a challenging, stimulating, exhausting, enjoyable time – and then suddenly it was over. My book was finished, and less than twenty-four hours later I entered the Pakistani Embassy.

  At once, while chatting to a group of Punjabis on a dilapidated landing, I was afflicted by a mild version of what the Americans call Culture Shock. This most probably would not have affected me had there been even a week’s interval between my disengagement from India and my involvement with Pakistan. As things were, the abrupt change, on several levels, was too much.

  Within the preceding weeks I had often visited India House, which gives a somewhat incongruous, not to say misleading impression of elegant affluence. The Pakistani Embassy in Lowndes Square is very different. (Or was, in November 1974.) No doubt some rooms had been kept up to embassy standards, but the many corridors, hallways and stairs traversed by me were very evidently the property of a poor country. And the staff – in contrast to all those svelte, impeccably-trained Indians at India House – were so amiably clueless that they had me trotting to and fro from building to building for half an hour before I found the man I wanted. Yet that morning I was conscious of a wonderful feeling of relaxation, of at homeness – an absence of barriers.

  It is perilous to venture into comparisons between India and Pakistan but sometimes one has to risk offending both sides, for the sake of readers totally unfamiliar with the subcontinent.

  Most Europeans find it easier to form uncomplicated friendships with Pakistanis than with Indians; we instinctively sympathise with the underdog and Pakistan has always been the underdog vis-à-vis India. At the time of Partition India inherited a well-equipped administrative capital in good working order, while the new Karachi Government scarcely had a typewriter or a telephone to its name and was operating not from Lutyens’ stately buildings but from tin huts and cramped private houses. Moreover, those vast quantities of military stores which had been allocated to Pakistan under the Partition Agreements were being withheld by the new Government of India, and Field-Marshal Auchinleck’s HQ in Delhi was abolished before it had time to supervise their distribution. Also, most ordnance factories and army schools, apart from the famous staff college at Quetta, were in India. Yet the rougher the going became, during those early years, the more guts the Pakistanis showed, though they lacked that outside support they had somewhat naively expected. India, being far more influential, got proportionately more consideration from the Big Powers.

  All this naturally engenders sympathy for Pakistan. Yet our ease of communication with Pakistanis probably owes most to the obvious affinities between Christianity and Islam, though nowadays this religious factor is two-edged. Theocracies are unfashionable in the West and Pakistan initially alienated many foreigners by presenting herself as an Islamic Republic. This meant not merely that all her people were Muslim (i.e., willing to say ‘There is no God but God and Mohammed is his Prophet’), but that they were fully prepared to accept the Koran, the Sunna (traditional customs) and the Sharia. The Sharia is a formidable collection of complex laws devised by theologians more than a thousand years ago and ever since guarded against change by the Ulema, an even less flexible institution than the Vatican. It was plainly absurd to pretend that the majority of Pakistanis fully accepted the Sharia – individuals can be selective about these laws, while remaining good Muslims – and the 1962 Constitution dropped the description ‘Islamic Republic’. Since 1960 various steps have been taken of which the Ulema could not approve, notably President Ayub Khan’s ‘Muslim Family Laws Ordinance’, which restricted polygamy and divorce.

  Certainly the visitor is aware of no stifling conservative theocratic presence in Pakistan, which feels considerably less religion-conscious than the officially secular Republic of India. And having fairly recently visited a number of old-established Christian institutions, in both India and Pakistan, I can vouch for it that since 1947 Christian missionaries have had a much smoother ride in Pakistan than in India. I can also vouch for the fact that even the most powerful Pakistani mullahs have far less influence than the average Irish Catholic bishop.

  The leaders of India’s Muslim Revival, during the seventy years or so before Partition, were vigorously unorthodox reformers whose efforts to modernise Islam permanently antagonised the mullahs. While the idea of Pakistan was developing in the minds of some of these reformers, the mullahs opposed it almost unanimously – and not just because its advocates were unorthodox. Nationalism frustrates the Islamic ideal of a world in which all men are brothers, regardless of race, colour, class or occupation.

  Baltistan covers an area of 10,000 square miles and was ruled from about 1840 by the Maharaja of Kashmir; therefore it is now part of the Disputed Territory between Pakistan and India. The UN Cease-Fire-Line forms its semicircular north-east, east and south-east border, running from the Chinese frontier almost to the Burzil Pass and making it a very ‘sensitive area’. (As one semi-inebriated Sindhi solemnly explained to me in Karachi, ‘It is
the reverse of an erogenous zone – it makes people hate not love.’) I was therefore prepared to wage a long and probably unsuccessful battle for a Balti permit. The Indians, I knew, allowed no foreigners anywhere near their Himalayan frontier and why should the Pakistanis be any more accommodating?

  When I eventually found the relevant office in the embassy and made my request a cheerful gentleman behind a wide desk beamed at me and said, ‘You require no visa or permit for our Northern Areas. If you hold a valid Irish passport you may travel anywhere you like in Pakistan for as long as you like.’

  ‘No permit?’ I echoed, dazed. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Quite sure,’ replied the cheerful gentleman. ‘We have nothing to hide. Every traveller is welcome to every part of Pakistan. According to UN regulations you must keep ten miles away from the Cease-Fire-Line. Otherwise there are no restrictions.’ He pulled open a drawer and handed me a large glossy brochure in glorious technicolor. It was entitled ‘Gilgit–Hunza-Skardu’ and my heart sank. Was I too late? Had even Baltistan, of which Skardu is the capital, been dragged somehow on to the beaten tourist track? But I need not have worried. The Pakistan Tourism Development Corporation is a young organisation, as yet more given to promise than performance. Its information about Baltistan may be accurate by 1984 but was a mere Ministry of Tourism dream in 1974. Baltistan is still one of the least developed inhabited areas of Asia.

  The PTDC also failed to give reliable advice about the approaches to the Northern Areas. According to their brochure, ‘A new 302-mile, all-weather road now connects Gilgit with Saidu Sharif in the Swat Valley’. On the basis of this information I planned, before leaving London, to buy a riding-pony for my daughter in Saidu and trek into Baltistan from there, turning off the new Indus Highway near the confluence of the Indus and Gilgit rivers. But in Pindi my plan was thwarted; otherwise I might not have lived to tell this tale. Towards the end of December several thousand people were killed and a forty-mile stretch of the Indus Highway was demolished by the Swat earthquake.

  When we left for Pakistan Rachel was not yet six and some eyebrows were raised at my taking such a small child into the Karakorams for the winter. But she was no amateur, even then, having spent four months in south India during the previous winter, undergoing her Asian initiation. Had that journey not been so successful, from her point of view, I would never have contemplated taking her to Baltistan. Our daily life there was obviously not going to be entirely devoid of hardship, and our style of travelling would demand a high level of endurance – by six-year-old standards – while there would be few playmates for a foreign child. But I already knew that Rachel is a natural stoic, and a muscular and vigorous little person, well able to walk ten or twelve miles a day without flagging. Moreover, as an only child she is accustomed to amusing herself for hours on end, and, though by temperament gregarious, she had then the extraordinary powers of adaptability common to most six-year-olds.

  To me it seems that the five-to-seven-year-old stage is ideal for travelling rough with small children. Under-fives are not physically mature enough for exposure to the unavoidable health hazards, while over-sevens tend to be much less philosophical in their reactions to the inconveniences and strange customs of far-flungery. By the age of eight, children have developed their own (usually strong) views about how they wish life to be, and are no longer happy automatically to follow the parental leader. This is how it should be. I have accepted that our next joint journey – if there is one – must be something that appeals equally to Rachel and to me, rather than something imposed on Rachel by me.

  On the morning of 22 November we boarded our Aeroflot plane for Karachi. Although neither of us was using our full free baggage allowance we seemed to be diabolically burdened; the essential equipment for two people who hope to survive a winter in the Karakorams cannot but seem heavy if one is obsessed about travelling light. A list of this equipment is given on page 261.

  17 July 1975

  Prologue: Waiting on the Wings

  The large notice over the reception desk in Rawalpindi’s fashionable Flashman’s Hotel was exactly as I had remembered it from 1963: ‘Visitors are requested to leave their weapons at the desk before entering the restaurant.’ Those are the little touches that make one feel spiritually back in Pathan-land, though Pindi itself belongs to the Punjab and the Frontier Province lies west of the Indus.

  The Pakistan Tourism Development Corporation has its head office at Flashman’s, presided over by the Director of Tourism – a tall, youngish Pathan with auburn hair, green eyes and no great interest in people who want to do untouristical things like spending a winter in Baltistan. However, he courteously explained that the Indus Highway had been closed to foreigners months ago because of Chinese pressure and that we would have to fly to Gilgit, if we could manage to get seats on one of the few planes that do the trans-Himalayan trip during winter. I heard later that an American couple, travelling to Gilgit by jeep, had stopped – in defiance of Islamabad instructions – to photograph the Chinese soldiers who are building the road and who deeply resent being photographed. As a result the Chinese insisted on all foreign travellers being banned.

  From Flashman’s I proceeded down the Mall to Pakistan International Airways’ imposing offices. A side entrance leads to a special Northern Areas department and the staff here works in an atmosphere of permanent crisis, with which I was to become only too familiar during the weeks ahead. But I never heard one of them utter an impolite or impatient word to even the most slow-witted peasant or peremptory army officer. The passengers seen in this booking-office are very unlike the affluent Pakistanis who frequent the main part of the building. Most are fair-skinned, with a scattering of Mongolian types. Some have racking coughs, a few have huge goitres, too many have an eye missing or useless. The majority wear woollen, roll-rimmed Chitrali caps, that may be turned down to protect forehead and ears from frost, and quite a few are self-consciously proud of their high-class mountaineering garments, acquired from some expedition and not really the most appropriate garb for the plains. Others wear loose shirts and baggy trousers; an occasional youth sports a cheap lounge-suit tailored in the bazaar; a few elders from Gilgit look regal in gaily-embroidered ankle-length robes of homespun wool. And the Baltis often carry heavy goat-hair blankets neatly folded and draped over one shoulder.

  While awaiting met. news one sits for hours in this large room on long back-to-back seats, upholstered in jade-green leatherette, and all around cigarette-ash accumulates on the grey tiled floor, and some men eye the lone foreign woman a little uneasily. I never saw another female in that booking-office. Women of the Northern Areas rarely come down-country and the few women who do fly – the wives or daughters of government officials or army officers – invariably send servants to attend to their tedious ticket business.

  On my first visit a very tall and debonair official behind the high counter shook his head and said smilingly, ‘I’m afraid you’ve left it too late. We can’t take tourists into the Northern Areas during winter – you might not get out till April!’

  ‘But we don’t want to get out before April,’ said I. ‘We mean to spend the winter in Baltistan.’

  The young man stared at me – a trifle apprehensively, as though he fancied I might at any moment become violent. ‘Do you know where Baltistan is?’ he asked. ‘Even the Baltis wouldn’t spend the winter in Baltistan if they could help it!’

  ‘Never mind,’ I said soothingly, ‘we have lots of warm clothes. How soon can you get us into Gilgit?’

  ‘You are travelling with your husband?’

  ‘No, with my daughter. So I want one half-fare please. She’ll be six next week.’

  The young man shrugged, conveying that this further evidence of instability removed me from those realms in which rational discussion is possible. He glanced down at a thick ledger. ‘You will be number 287 on our waiting-list. You have no chance of a seat before 10 December. And it could be 10 January, if we get the winter rains now.
’ I paid then for our tickets which cost only five pounds because flights to and from the Northern Areas are subsidised by the government.

  Walking back towards our host’s house, near the National Park, I decided to go to Saidu Sharif in two days’ time. Swat stood high on the list of places I wanted to revisit, eleven-and-a-half years after my first journey through Pakistan.

  We were staying with Pathan friends a few miles outside Pindi. Their village lies well west of the Indus, their luxurious, brand-new city-house stands on a hilltop, in the shadow of an old fortified dwelling. From its flat roof we looked down on level farmland, and the evergreen trees of the National Park, and a wide stretch of reddish, fissured wasteland which daily becomes more fissured as earth is removed for making bricks. At the end of a November which had provided no winter rains the land looked ominously parched, yet our friends’ new garden was an exuberant, improbable dazzle of colour. Like most peoples of Central Asian stock, the Pathans are ardent gardeners: an unexpected and disarming trait in a race of warrior tribesmen. Equally unexpected is their interest in poetry, though even today the majority are illiterate. Pushtu is a rich, flexible language and over the past three or four centuries almost every tribe has produced a major poet, whose descendants or followers are still highly regarded.

  In Karim Khan’s household I had an uncanny sense of being at home again, rather as though I had been a Pathan in some previous incarnation. In my experience Pathan hospitality is unique. Its blending of complete informality with meticulous attention to every tiny need makes one feel simultaneously an honoured guest and a loved member of the family.

  Our host had himself designed his rambling, flat-roofed mini-palace, every detail of which bespoke enormous wealth regulated by instinctive good taste. ‘We don’t often stay in houses like this,’ observed Rachel, standing ankle-deep in an olive-green carpet and looking from the carved walnut doors of our bedroom to the gilded moulding on the ceiling. Every mod con was available, from a huge box of Lego on Rachel’s bedside table to the latest type of Swiss electric hair-drier in the bathroom. Here, one might think, was a family that in all essentials had completed its transition from East to West; but in fact this transition affects only the inessentials. Behind the façade of Westernisation, Pathan life proceeds as usual with rifles to hand, women in purdah, children married to first cousins, prayers said regularly, goats in the backyard, feuds simmering, bodyguards on the alert, and dozens of poor relations from the village being given food, shelter and affection. But ‘façade’ was an ill-chosen word, since one of the Pathans’ most attractive characteristics is their utter lack of pretence. When they can afford the material comforts and conveniences of modern civilisation they seize them with both hands, yet even the younger generation – with few exceptions – is not concerned to appear Westernised on any other level. To me, this seems both remarkable and consoling in the 1970s.