Laura tried to soothe them by suggesting they look forward to the delights of Nek Kundi, the first settlement marked on the map. It was, she said, probably full of charming little res­taurants offering the very best in Baluchi cuisine. That only made it worse when we arrived. As the only settlement for four hundred kilometres, the cartographer who created our map had given it the status of a provincial capital with print bold enough to imply a thriving town with hospitals, schools, cinemas and shops. Nek Kundi in fact consists of six sheds, one tea house and a charpoy. There was no restaurant and the inhabitants refused to sell us any food. We sat in a circle on the carpet of the tea house and dipped some bread we had bought in Taftan into a tin of cold baked beans belonging to Ramesh. A little boy threw stones at us. It wasn't quite the feast we had hoped for. Laura called to Psycho that he should join us for cay.

  'Leave him’ said Ramesh. 'He is bastard.'

  'He is driving, he needs cay.'

  'He is bastard. Really he thinks something dirty.'

  'Mun's a bum,' agreed Joe. 'He snoozin' at de wheel.'

  'Really bastard,' said Nazir. 'When we say go fast, he go slow. We say go slow, he go fast We say drink cay, he go piss.'

  'Really something bastard.'

  They got back into the pick-up with the same enthusiasm as three convicted criminals being led to the scaffold. Although sleep was impossible, Laura and I sank into a state of exhaus­ted, befuddled semi-consciousness, and thereafter the night took on a confused and even surreal quality. Sometime soon after midnight, we ran into a herd of camels. There must have been nearly a hundred of them and the first thing we saw was the dust cloud they raised looming ahead of us in the head­lights like a bank of swirling sea fog. They were running towards us along the road and when we slowed down, you could hear the thundering of their hooves on the ground long before you could see the camels themselves. Then they were all around us, banging into the pick-up, muzzling its sides, lollop­ing along aimlessly with the whole desert to wander in, yet pressing around us as closely as a herd of cows in a Dorset lane.

  Then, at about three o'clock in the morning, in the middle of the Baluchistan desert, we ran into a speed trap. Psycho was jolting along at one hundred kilometres an hour when from behind a sand bank a police Jeep pulled out and drove into the middle of the road. We braked and the pick-up skidded to a halt only a few inches from the police vehicle. There was no question of a speeding ticket and a telling off; while we sat watching, helpless, four policemen seized Psycho and set about him with lathi. They beat him down onto his knees, delivering terrible blows to his ribs, his shoulders and his hands, which he clasped about his head. The violence took place in complete silence; there was no explanation from the policemen, no cry from Psycho, no protestations from us. Then they doffed their caps at Laura and I and returned to their Jeep. Psycho was on the ground, sobbing. Then as we looked on, he got up, wiped away the tears with the back of his hand and drove on. For two minutes no one said anything, then Laura, through Ramesh, asked whether he was all right.

  'Why did they do that to you?'

  'Because I am a Baluchi.'

  'Aren't they?'

  'No Baluchi is a policeman. The police force is Punjabi.'

  'And they do that to all Baluchis?'

  'Not all.'

  'So why to you?'

  'Because I haven't got a driving licence. Every time they beat me.'

  'It's happened before?' 'It happens every time."

  Then why don't you get a driving licence?' 'I cannot afford it. It costs much baksheesh.' the Baluchi shrugged his shoulders and drove on.

  Just after dawn we hit a tarmac road. It was cold. All night we had been so shaken and jolted that we had hardly noticed the temperature. Now, on tarmac, we felt the chill and huddled up, hands in our sleeves, shivering. The morning light was brittle and steely and in the silence it lit up a depressing land­scape of bleached, white solitude; wadis, hills, cliffs and, everywhere, sand.

  Then, as the sun was beginning to rise, we turned a comer and there opened up before us an extraordinary vision: a cara­van of two hundred camels, winding their way to Quetta along the dip of a dry water course. In the lead was a huge Afghan, and behind him another, bearded like an Old Testament prophet, with a hooded falcon on his wrist. Some of the ani­mals were loaded with tents and possessions, while one carried a woman hung from head to foot in gilded silk, with a grille for a face, sitting as upright and proud as a duchess in a landau. Behind the camels trailed a string of goats and sheep, and behind them a pack of little boys, ragged and dirty, chased the sheep with sticks and brought up the rear.

  Two hours later we arrived in Quetta. After the camel cara­van the desert had slowly sprung to life. At first we had come across a few temporary groups of black, felt kibitka, the deserted tents of Afghan shepherds, and after that some large white marquees belonging to relief workers. The black tents stood in groups of four or five, randomly placed in the middle of hill­sides; the white ones stood singly in the valley bottoms sur­rounded by pens of barbed wire and besieged by small armies of Afghan refugees. The roads began to fill with trucks, brightly painted and inscribed in English: PUBLIC CARRIER-HORN PLEASE O.K.! USE DIPPER AT NIGHT. The letters were surrounded by medallions of Urdu calligraphy and nourishes of arabesque, broken into small fields of bright primary colours, like enamel inlay in cloisonne Jewellery. After that came water buffaloes, plodding bullocks, tonga pulled by blinkered horses, and swarms of yellow autorick-shaws squealing like kicked pigs. There were the film hoard­ings, with the stars bathed in gaudy blue and inferno orange, and there were the buses, all filled with luggage, leaving the people to spill out onto the roof, We passed posters of a man in a lambskin hat, and a small political rally led by a tractor and two Baluchis. They were carrying a banner and shouting. We saw peasants leading flocks of sheep to market, and a trailer piled high with farm workers carrying embroidered bags, sacks of grain and big tin pails of thickly set curds. There were no Sikhs, and the women wore heavy white chador. but other­wise the scene was instantly recognizable: it was a typical, busy, noisy, dirty, stinking, bustling, loud, hot town in north India. It was like a homecoming - a sight which I knew well, and loved, and had not seen for three years.

  We dropped Ramesh and Nazir at a hotel, and got back into the pick-up. Ramesh went in to look for a room, but Nazir came up to the window, and clasped our hands.

  He said: ‘I will never forget you.'

  'It was good to meet you, Nazir.'

  ‘You do not know what it is to me to have met you. Really you do not. Never has anyone cared so much about my life and my misfortune.'

  'It was a lot of fun listening.'

  'I have little joy now.'

  "We'll go for another nightmare drive sometime, don't you worry.'

  "You cannot know how much I enjoyed talking to you.' 'I enjoyed it too.' 'Always I will remember.'

  'We'll organize a reunion in Zahedan and eat some more omelettes.' 'May Allah protect you.'

  'Good luck in Baluchistan.' "Write to me.' I promise.'

  We shook hands one last time and Nazir kissed me on the cheeks. We drove to the station and paid off dear old Psycho. It was all curiously moving.

  We bought tickets to Lahore. The train did not leave until mid-afternoon, but exploring Quetta was out of the question. All we were capable of was collapsing. But before I did so, I had another promise to fulfil. Leaving Laura and Joe in the waiting room, stretched out on Bombay Fornicators (inge­nious Anglo-Indian wicker chairs with extended arms on which you can put up your feet), I set off to find the telegraph office. Here I sent two telegrams, one to my parents to tell them that I had left Iran, another to my great aunt to tell her I had arrived in Quetta. In the late twenties and early thirties Quetta had been her home for nearly a decade while her husband was the Commander of the Western Command, India. She had been swept off her feet by a General in the Coldstream Guards and after her marriage was suddenly transported from a large, cold country house in Norfolk to the wilds of Baluchistan.

  She managed the transition effortlessly. She was in many ways the conventional English memsahib, but bothered to learn fluent Urdu, and, teaching herself to paint, began wandering around the bazaars in a long white muslin dress, with an easel and a box of water colours. For years she worked away and produced a whole series of small, precise paintings of tribesmen and traders, always against the same copper-green background, always the same handsome, rugged faces wrapped in great swathes of turban, rising from a grey charwal chemise or the stiff-necked jackets of the Muslim Lrague.

  Before the war, she returned to England, and when her husband died she moved to the Suffolk coast, where I used to visit her from Cambridge. She would sit, engulfing a chintz-covered armchair, chins wobbling, and while describing her golden Quetta days and the breaks for the Simla season, she would quietly drink me under the table. She had pickled her­self, and this was the secret of her great longevity. Before luncheon, sipping at glass after glass of very strong gin and Dubonnet, nibbling at Bombay Mix, she would sink into paroxysms of giggles from which it might take five minutes to disentangle her. Then without warning her head would suddenly drop to one side, and she would fall fast asleep, snoring loudly. Often she would not wake until teatime. She got my telegram, and wrote a letter home thanking me for it in large, spidery writing, but I never saw her again. She died a fortnight after I returned, and at her funeral they draped a Union Jack over the coffin. As the body left the church they played 'Land of Hope and Glory'.

  By two-thirty, after a snooze, a shower and a curried mutton cutlet, we were ready to fight our way onto the train. We came out of the half-light of the waiting room, and blinked at the dazzling brightness of the platform. It was roofed with whitewashed planks and lined with elaborate fluted columns of Sheffield steel. The roofing cast a little shade onto the plat­form, but it was hot and light and noisy after the waiting room, and hard on the eyes. Everyone was on the move. Scarlet-coated coolies tottered past with great mountains of luggage on their heads. Cay wallahs pushed trolleys along the platform and shouted 'Garam Cay! Garam Cay!' The trolleys contained great gleaming Thermos vats, and looked like the hair-growth shells from Heath Robinson at War. Men selling samosas passed along the windows shoving their greasy triangles through the bars, and other salesmen passed after them offering combs, Korans, digital watches, shaving brushes, worry beads, scissors and sunglasses. There were uniformed policemen swinging lathi, soldiers with bulging kitbags, boys with jars of water, mullahs, groups of their pupils, sleeping-car attendants with white jackets and gleaming brass buttons.

  And in the middle stood the train. The carriages looked as if they were born long before Independence, perhaps in Crewe or Derby, and had seen better, grander days. But it was imposs­ible to believe that they had seen busier ones. Laura, Joe and I had between us good experience of Third World rail travel, but none of us had ever seen anything like the 15.30 Lahore Mail. It was far worse than the usual, mildly irritating discomfort one expected: it called to mind the total chaos of the Partition trai ns. It wasn't a matter of finding a seat, that was a hopelessly optimistic dream. Nor was there any point in fantasizing about snuggling up in that last unused bit of luggage rack. On this occasion one simply hoped to get onto the train. Already the corridors, loos, doorways and running board were all packed. We walked up and down the length of the train looking for a point of entry, then spotted a single window which had lost its bars.

  We heaved Laura up on our shoulders and precipitated her forwards into the train. She fought her way in, flaying like a Saracen. Once she had established a bridgehead, we followed. A coolie passed up our rucksacks, and we manoeuvred our­selves over legs, shoulders, tiffin cans, sacks, tables and benches, until we found ourselves above the central passage. Then we burrowed down. Within a few minutes we had reached the floor, and seconds later had excavated enough space to place our rucksacks down on it, and ourselves on tht m. We looked at each other and beamed with satisfaction at our achievement.

  Then the beggars appeared. How they got to us confounded all known laws of physics; some strange miracle of agility transported them. But they appeared with the speed and appetite of ducks to breadcrumbs, hobbling, shrieking, tap­ping, circling above our shoulders, hands extended down­wards. They hovered above Laura and me, peering down into our faces, then they noticed Joe. They stopped, cocked their heads, and looked back at us.

  What is this?' asked one in English.

  He is from Ghana,' I replied.

  A Ghana,' he whispered to his companions.

  Ghana, Ghana. Ghana,' they echoed.

  'Name's Joe,' said Joe.

  'He speaks,' said the first beggar.

  "Yeah, and a whole lot else besides,' said Joe.

  'Listen!' cried the beggars.

  Claw-like hands caressed Joe's hair. A leper's stump felt his gleaming, matt-black skin. One woman cackled.

  'Hey, get out of heah!' said Joe. 'Yeh, get, shoo.'

  He rose to his full height, and brushed them away. They scuttled out of the carriage, but were still taunting him from the window when the train pulled out at 15.30 exactly.

  'Damn animals,' said Joe. 'Dat's wad de are. Damn animals.'

  I read a bit more of Crime and Punishment. I had just got to the bit where Raskolnikov axes the old women, when I felt com­pletely and utterly exhausted. I curled up on the rucksack and fell fast asleep. There, lying in the middle of the corridor, with half the population of Quetta stepping over me, poking, asking the terrible monotonous round of oriental questions (Who? Where? Why? Oh Sahib, just one more question. How?), I fell into a deep sleep, and did not wake up until nine o'clock the following morning.

  Everything was green. After days of sand, shale and desolate aridity, the colour was almost violent to the eyes. The railway was raised on a bank, and all around us stretched the rich expanse of the Punjab. Even the word implies fertility: pange ab are the five waters, Chenab, Ravi, Jhelum, Sutlej and Indus; between them they made the Punjab into one of the great cradles of civilization, the Mesopotamia of Middle Asia, and still the breadbasket of India and Pakistan.

  It was the monsoon season, and the first rains had already passed. Out of the window I could see paddy fields stretching away on either side. Villages were everywhere, and seemed to grow organically out of the soil, to be part of the teeming, procreating richness that formed so complete a contrast with the lifeless half-continent that separates the Punjab from the Mediterranean. Only after passing through Turkey, and the terrible wastes of Persia, can you fully comprehend why the Islamic paradise is a garden, a green dream of fertility.

  The day passed uneventfully. After four days and three nights of nonstop movement I ached to stop. I fantasized qu etly to myself: in my mind most of that day was spent having long, hot baths, rolling in cold, clean sheets, putting on new underpants, things like that. I longed to be on my own for a moment, to bask in just a few seconds of privacy. But it was no to be. As ever the peasants kept their distance; the problem lay with the pseudo-Europeans. The first to intrude on my dream world was a dowdy creature, who sat nursing an engineering textbook on a seat a short distance away. I could see him eyeing me up for a while before he actually put down Elementary Engineering Drawing, and came over to me.

  'Crime and Punishment,' he said. 'What is this?'

  'It is a novel,' I said.

  'You are studying this book?'

  Wo. I'm reading it for pleasure.'

  'Why pleasure?'

  it was a good question. It wasn't one of those novels that par­ticularly improved on third reading.

  'Well, I suppose I rather enjoy reading novels.' He eyed me suspiciously. 'What,' he asked, 'is your qualification?' The blind spot.

  "I haven't got a qualification,' I said. He gave me an I-thought-as-much look, and returned to his seat.

  We passed more paddy, edged by a slow-flowing irrigation channel. It was almost empty of people; only one or two men stood, bent over the plants, knee-high in water, picking, or perhaps grafting the young shoots. Then we left the paddy and passed drier fields of date palms and banana groves before returning to the thick chimps of boggy marsh grass and the jungle-book green of further fields of ripe rice. I remember passing a level crossing: a herd of elephants stood queueing behind the barrier as nonchalantly as a line of Ford Escorts would behind a similar barrier in England.

  At Multan the train stopped for an hour and we all left the carriage to look for lunch. We ate another plate of curried lamb then returned to the train, where we fought to retain our places. I snoozed for a while, then awoke and got into conver­sation with Firdausi, a young Pakistani lawyer. His family were Muhajir, refugees from India, and before Partition had been wealthy Delhi-wallahs, merchants in the Chandi-Chowk, where they had cornered the Delhi end of the jute trade. He was very handsome, with dark intelligent eyes.

  'Of course,' he said, 'to be a lawyer is not the most interesting of careers.'

 

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