Day 1
The journey has been a long one and I am one of perhaps three or four white people on the flight to Islamabad, it was delayed an hour because PIA missed the take-off slot. Mostly the passengers speak in Urdu and wear traditional Pakistani clothing, some wear Western attire and I am the only passenger in a tweed jacket and chinos. The only two entertaining parts of the flight are when I accidently eat an entire chilli during dinner and have to serruptitiously poke my mouth into a yoghurt for two minutes; and when a passenger’s overhead luggage starts leaking and showers him with water.
Islamabad airport could do a lot better, it is ugly, tired and run-down. Urdu script is everywhere but I am able to read most of the signs and adverts which tend to be in English. There are many guards here, they are armed with AK-47s and pump action shotguns. I feel excited and relieved the flight is over, finally I am here!
I am met at the Arrivals lounge by a man with a sign for “Mr Michel” and I guess correctly it is for me. We take a shuttle bus to the Rawal Lounge which seems to be the VIP section of Islamabad airport. I am asked to sit down in a leather armchair as my greeter takes my passport and, after a brief conversation with security, ushers me through without even looking at the photograph in the passport.
I wait for my bags for two hours and begin to curse that I have not taken out travel insurance but they eventually arrive. As I walk towards my car I am greeted by a small man with angular facial features and a wide smile which exposes gappy teeth. He introduces himself as Waheed Gilani and is to be my guide whilst I conduct my work here. Waheed speaks good English and we make small talk whilst Nadeem’s driver, Sabar, taxis us to the Shah family home in Bani Galla. Nadeem is the chairman of the AHS Foundation and will be here during my first week. Waheed, who wears western attire, strikes me as a very friendly man, he is in his mid forties and tells me there will be plenty of work this next few months. It is 27C and I realise why I am the only passenger wearing a tweed jacket and tie.
En route I see several buses and lorries which are decorated in an outrageous fashion. Around the wheel arches and bumpers are dozens of dangling silver medalions. They have multi coloured wind mills on the engine grill which whizz round, horns and tassels. They are painted elaborately in greens, reds, oranges, yellows and have poetry and pictures emblazoned on ever spare panel. Waheed explains these are commonplace, that almost every lorry, truck, bus and van is decorated in this traditional style. At this moment I feel I am a long way from home, but the outlook is positive.
After forty minutes drive we arrive at base camp in Islamabad. I follow Waheed to the dining room for breakfast with Nadeem who is in good spirit and I am thankful to see a familiar face.
Another guest at the house greets us, his name is Kabir Sabar, he is a senior banker with RBS. He strikes me as a very impressive man and tells me that he is organising various visits and people for me to meet in Pakistan, I am thankful for his hospitality. He later tells me more of his extensive involvement in British politics and that he has stood for Parliament in England.
I have run out of cigarettes at this point, Nadeem has gone into town, so I ask Waheed to show me the direction to the shops. He says he will walk with me. We eventually walk out the drive of the house in Bani Galla and take a dusty track through some fields. Several skinny cows block the path but move when we approach and the sun beats down from above. The local village shops strike me as being quite run down. They are terraced concrete boxes, litter and dust borders the roadside and many locals, all dressed in traditional clothing, stare at me in my Western garb. I buy 60 cigarettes for the equivalent of £2.20 and am very pleased.
Later in the day Nadeem returns with a friend, Zulfiqar, who is in the steel trade and hydro electric plants. He is amiable and promises to see more of me during my stay; he will help whenever he can with the work I am doing.
Its dinner time and Nadeem and I are driven to his friend’s house. We meet Dr Farooq Beg, his wife Huma and her father Murtaza. Farooq and Huma are successful documentary makers, have produced films and programmes the world over, including for the BBC, and has won awards at Cannes. Huma is also a famous presenter in Pakistan; in fact as we sit and wait for them in the drawing room we can hear her on the television. Her father is the former Minister for Defence Procurement, he studied at the Woolwich Arsenal and is a great admirer of the British Navy. I tell him about the Champion family history during the Indian Mutiny, the VC that was won, and although he finds it of interest I am reminded that in this part of the world it is known not as a mutiny but as the Great Sorrow.
Farooq, Nadeem and I go out for dinner in a Western restaurant and afterwards go to a place where “young pakistanis hang out”, its called the Hot Spot. This is an American Diner, the walls are adorned with Western flags and Americana, they serve burgers and ice creams and if it had not been frequented by people with beards and Pakistani clothing, it could have been a burger bar back home.
Day 2
I am woken up by Waheed, my guide, at 6am and get up for breakfast. Today Nadeem and I will be travelling to the Indian border city of Lahore. Nadeem tells me the British were very proud of Lahore and they produced in the city the world’s largest network of canals.
Apperently the journey to Lahore takes three hours, but because we are taking the toll road (called the M1) there is little to no traffic and I have to say the road is as good as any English one.
Half way we stop at a service station. They are quite disimilar to the UK ones, firstly they resemble a 1970s housing estate row of shops; concrete, unsophistcated signage etc. However there are also a few stalls littered around; people who stop here tend to be more wealthy because the toll road is considered expensive. It is dusty, the sun is overhead and the temperature is almost 30C, there are no clouds. Nadeem and I sit down at a plastic table to order food, there are many, many flies.
All of the shop keepers here are in traditional Pakistani clothing (called sharwal kameez). All people working are male and almost all have a beard of some design and are wearing a hat (called Topi). One of the shop keepers asks Nadeem, in Urdu, if I am a Muslim. I don’t need the translation because he’s been staring at me for two minutes and I hear the word “Muslim”. Staring is not uncommon here, I have a beard and my skin colour is similar to Pushtoun Pakistanis – many people have commented if it weren’t for my clothes I would look exactly as if I had come from the North West Frontier or Baluchistan.
I go to the toilet and although it looks like a standard gents bog, the smell is unbearable, and there is a forboding sound of drip drip dripping echoing around the place. I hold my breath. I then convince myself that the food I have just eaten is definately going to make me ill and I remember the dirty, stained napkin they provided.
As we leave I notice an elderly white woman, she is dressed in all white robes with a scarf and has a large necklace with a wooden cross about three inches in length. Nadeem thinks she must be a missionary or a nun; Pakistan’s population is 1.6% Christian, almost three million people, and the white part of the Pakistani flag represents the non-Muslim population and the role they have to play in the country. Green is a traditional colour of Islam.
Like Islamabad, Lahore has many road blocks. A typical road block in Pakistan will involve the following: We drive up and slow down to a bottle neck. There is a concrete wall about three feet high, or a steel barrier. There are about a dozen armed police, mainly with shot guns, sometimes they have AK-47s and now and again they have what look like Heckler and Koch MP5s. The busier roads have sandbag bunkers with army personnel wearing helmets and carrying assault rifles. A policeman with a holstered pistol will look into the car at the passengers, more often than not they wave you through, and sometimes they ask you a question or two about what you’re doing and where you’re going. You chicane past two more barriers and continue on your way. Pakistan is on high security alert.
There are some sriking differences between Lahore and Islamabad. Lahore is what most Westerners imagine a city in the Indian subcontinent to be like: cars sharing a three laned road five abreast, cattle on the roadside, tens of thousands of people squashed onto the pavement, spilling into the road, men wash themselves in the canals, and there is a repetitious sounding of car horns in the air. Beggars with children or heinous injuries have mastered, totally mastered, the art of pulling a face which in turn pulls at your heart strings. They knock at the car window when you stop at the traffic lights. You do your best to ignore them.
Unlike Lahore, Islamabad is modern (conceived in the late 1960s), is an organised grid system of roads like Manhattan or Washington. Rickshaws and cattle are banned from the town centre, and it is far cleaner. Despite this, at the moment I prefer Lahore, I prefer it because it is what I imagined Pakistan would be like. It offers no surprises and I am comfortable with this.
We pull into the Pearl Continental 5-star hotel. There is a 10ft wall surrounding the perimeter of the hotel and rolls of barbed wire crest the top. Hundreds of concrete bollards are lined evenly infront of the wall to stop cars ramming through. The front gate has many police, all armed. They stop us, check inside the bonnet and boot of the car for bombs and wheel a mirror around all sides of the car to check the underneath. We are waved through.
Nadeem and I then go through airport style security scanners and go into the lobby of what is a very fine hotel. This is where most of the upper and business classes meet, there are white businessmen too and Pakistanis often wear suits. If one sees a Pakistani in sharwal kameez, they are well pressed and trimmed with gold thread or diamond cufflinks. Nadeem conducts business, and we drive on to see a solicitor friend of his.
Some solicitors in the UK own their own practice and so does Umar Mahmud Kasuri, but few own their own tower. Kasuri and Associates is based on the ground floor of Kasuri Tower. Actually its no more than eight stories high but its in the city centre and Umar, I am told, is one of Lahore’s top legal practitioners and corporate and tax consultants. We then visit the house Nadeem is securing for his friend, he takes the keys from a housekeeper who sleeps outside the front door on a mattress and we leave again for the Pearl Continental.
It takes three hours to return to Islamabad, the roadblocks are more thorough at night and the police shine torches into the car. After seven hours in the car I am ready for bed. It is midnight and tomorrow I leave early for a fourteen hour round trip to Noon Bagla!
Day 3
I am woken up at 6am again by Waheed. I close my eyes and a second later it is 7.12am, so I have delayed everyone by thirty minutes and I don’t have time to have a proper wash or carefully choose what I will wear. We are driving to Noon Bagla today so I wear my new hiking boots, brown combat trousers and a black t-shirt. I do not wear my Tilley Hat, Nadeem says it marks me out as a Westerner, but I think he’s actually embarrassed to be seen with me in it!
En route to Noon Bagla we will have to stop at or pass through Muzaffarabad (Kashmir’s capital city) and Murree which is a hill top town bordering Kashmir. I am told that many old British families live in Murree, though still a minority, they are descendants of the Empire. The journey to Muzaffarabad will take three and a half hours, and it can take a simlar time to Noon Bagla. We drive in convoy with two other people who we meet in Islamabad, they are: Zulfiqar Abbasi (whom I met day 1) and his wife Zakia. Zulfiqar is the President of the Kashmir Chamber of Commerce, but much more importantly he is the President of the Kashmir Cricket Board!
The further we are from Islamabad, the higher the ground we ascend. Kashmir is the foothills of the Himalayas. The roads begin to snake and wind up green mountains peppered with fir trees. I have not been to Switzerland or Austria but I am told it is supposed to be similar to the alpine scenery there, but on a much larger scale.
We get into Murree, it is a town centre very much like the other 1970s council estate concretia I have seen. But the roads are narrow and dusty and the shops are a metre either side of you. People walk in front of the cars, cattle roam freely and when people see me through the window they often double take. Everyone here wears sharwal kameez. The view here is impressive, it is a town built on the summit of a small mountain and when you take in the view, you can see dozens of other mountains littered with villages which sit perilously next to sheer drops and cliff faces.
The roads we travel are still snaking against a mountain range, cliff face on one side, sheer drop on the other. The roads in Kashmir are noticeably worse than the ones on the way to the border; this was the epicentre of the 2005 earthquake and Waheed, who journeys with us, points out that their is flood damage too.
There are tell-tale scars and signs of disaster en route to Muzaffarabad. Football-sized rocks often litter parts of the road, having fallen from the cliff face. There are many pot holes and large cracks in the asphalt which has not been newly resurfaced. Occasionally roadside about half a metre wide and two metres long has disappeared into the chasm. There are various signs which report the work of a charity, e.g. “Islamic Relief Leicester UK Branch…” Waheed says the roads were totally destroyed after the main Earthquake, he had to walk from Muzaffarabad for days to find his family’s home which had collapsed and killed his father. Nadeem, says he was there too, only a couple of days after the earthquake: he helped a woman bury her own children; saw the earth open up and take people and houses into its mouth, only to be slammed shut again burying them alive; he said for days afterwards the mountains still shook.
We stop at the Pearl Continental hotel in Muzaffarbad, very tidy place and clean. Again shotgun and AK-47-weilding police check our cars before we park up. Nadeem, Zulfiqar, Zakia and I go for lunch, the driver and Waheed wait outside. The view from the restaurant is panoramic and magnificent. All of the main landmarks in this dirty and very damaged city can be seen. There are dozens of pink buildings, these were all built by the Turkish who contributed very significantly to the relief work. I can also see the Mazaffarabad cricket stadium. Its no Trent Bridge but its the perfect talking point for Zulfiqar and me: “I’m actually the founder of the Carlton Club Cricket Club Zulfiqar…” ten minutes later I have an invitation from the President of the Kashmir Cricket Board for the CCCC to visit, play two matches, meet several dignatories and tour Kashmir. All food and driving and security will be provided. We just need to pay for flights and accommodation. I’ll put it to our Secretary and see what he has to say!
Now we are travelling to Noon Bagla and this is the main reason I am in Pakistan; to work in the Basic Health Unit which the AHS Foundation have just built there. But I won’t be staying in Noon Bagla for long, today’s visit is so Nadeem can check the building and negotiate the sale of further land from the tribal eldersfor further developmental work. It is the first time I will see the village.
The road to Noon Bagla no longer warrants the accolade “road”, it is a collection of uneven rocks and dust. We have not stopped ascending since Murree, three hours ago. The views are the most spectacular and breathtaking I have ever seen. But the road is getting narrower and narrower and soon we are inches away from sheer drops of what I’d estimate to be 600 metres. I silently pray that no vehicle comes the other way, there are very few passing points.
Our arrival into Noon Bagla village receives attention. Village elders, by that I mean men over the age of fifty with beards, missing teeth, weathered faces and local clothing and hats, arrive and come to the medical centre to greet us. No sooner than I alight the car, I am saying my salams (Asalam-u-alaikum, or “God be with you” in English) to about ten of these men. These are the people I will be living with for the next several weeks; I could not look more different! At this point I realise, if I am going to fit in in Noon Bagla I have no choice but to pull my socks up and learn Urdu to a more proficient standard, and buy a few sets of my own sharwal kameez and ‘go native’.
The BHU is of very good standard, and easily the best building in the village. The facilities inside are of working order and are shiny and new. Many of the pre-earthquake houses are propped up with timber shafts, the outside walls badly damaged by the quake. Cracks are visible and several houses are abandoned. We eat outside on plastic chairs with the elders, no English is spoken but I am not concerened because I know most of them understand basic English. Villages are traditional and conservative places. I must dress and act appropriately here. Apart from three women who come to the dispensary to pick up medicine, I see only men. The old men sit down with us and eat, the middle aged men loiter in the background and look interested in what is happening, the young men and boys are ordered to serve us food and drinks.
The journey back is long, uncomfortable and dark. We stop at the Pearl Continental again in Muzaffarabad for tea. When I get home I realise we have travelled twenty hours in two days. We see Kabir, he is boyant that a loan he approved has been paid three years early and he tells me of the exciting schedule he has for me tomorrow. We are served a late supper in the dining room and I go to bed exhausted.