Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [253]
In the middle, two policemen in a state of frenzy were lashing the cars with their sticks as if they were recalcitrant animals, while a third leant exhausted against a column. ‘Sometimes you even have to feel sorry for the police in this country,’ the daughter of my host – an elegant, attractive lady from Islamabad – said with a sigh, adjusting her headscarf against any inquiring glances from the men practically jammed against our windows.
Everyone is afraid of them but no one actually listens to them. They are not really monsters, they just lash out from frustration at their miserable lives ... As to Shapqadar, you could come back here twenty years from now and nothing will have changed except that the traffic will have got even worse. After all, nothing has changed in the past twenty.
It took us almost an hour and a half to get through this insignificant place; a long study of the grim, drab concrete ugliness of most Pakistani urban life. So universally grey and dust-coated were the buildings that I could not immediately tell a local landmark from the houses on either side – four blackened music and video shops torched by the Taleban a few months before as part of their campaign against vice.
This is a common step in the Taleban campaign to take over a given area, once they feel they have enough local support. Because the video shops often do show pornographic films in their back rooms, even those men who frequent them may be ashamed of the fact and feel obliged to denounce them in public; and, for the same reason, they are also very unpopular with local wives and mothers – who of course never set foot in them but deeply fear the effects on their menfolk.
Half an hour further on, the village to which we were travelling lay snoozing in the baking heat of early September, looking very much on the outside as if it hadn’t changed in twenty years, or even twenty centuries. The khaki colour of its walls was set off nicely by the rather beautifully coloured viscous green scum on the stinking stream running through its middle. We swept through a gate – really more a gap in a mud wall – and were in the family’s compound. A lengthy wait ensued, while the key of the main house was sought – for the rest of the family had not arrived yet – and I had leisure to look around, through the sweat which began to pour down my face as soon as I left the car’s air-conditioning.
The wide outer court had a small mosque on one side, and on the other sides the hujra (male guest-house or gathering place), and a sort of open pavilion where the family’s workers sprawled on charpoys in the stupefying heat, some attended by their small sons. The buildings were all whitewashed, or at least had been at some point in their history. In one corner of the court, the shafts of an old broken-down horse-drawn carriage drooped with a melancholy air.
The maliks had not long ago dominated the village economically, but their holdings had been radically reduced by land reform and repeated divisions between brothers, and now the compound of the elder was only one of several belonging to brothers and cousins on the old family property. The eldest son – whom I was visiting – now held only 180 kanals of land (43 acres), and his influence