Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [254]
The main house, in the inner court, bore clear signs of the family being absent much of the time. Much of the furniture was under dust covers, and damp stains stretched down some of the walls. Rich by the standards of the local peasantry, it was poor and simple by the standards of the urban elites – a reminder once again not to use the word ‘feudal’ as if it implied wallowing in luxury. Power cuts meant that the atmosphere inside was stifling, and that there was nothing cold to drink.
In fact, I was just about to sink hopelessly into slumber when I was jerked awake by the sight of a very familiar acquaintance from another life, or even as it seemed to my superheated brain another planet: a small tapestry of that absolute staple of the Soviet middle-class household, that emblem of respectable Russian domesticity, Ivan Shishkin’s Morning in a Pine Forest (with mist and bear cubs) – at 100 degrees or so in the shade. This was one of those not infrequent moments in Pakistan when I wondered whether sanity is not a much-overrated attribute which it would be easier simply to abandon.
In the car on the way from Peshawar a certain Russian, or at least Chekhovian-Gogolesque, atmosphere had already begun to grow, as my hostess complained of the rise of the lower classes in the village:
I loathe these new people. I know it’s wrong but I can’t help it. They should be shown their place. My father got their sons jobs in the junior civil service, and now that they have made money from bribes they build themselves big brick houses and try to set themselves up as maliks, deciding on local disputes. My father has threatened to have some of them thrown out of those houses – after all, he owns the land they’re built on.
As will become apparent, he would probably be very unwise to do any such thing.
The Chekhovian impression deepened with the appearance of the family’s steward or general factotum, Shehzad, a scrawny middle-aged individual with a long horse face, greying hair, crooked teeth, a pen clipped to the outside of the breast pocket of his shirt as a mark of status, and a manner which mixed the ingratiating and the overbearing – not, as is usually the case, when dealing with people of different status, but in talking to a person of higher status; a small, offbeat sign of Pathan egalitarianism.
No sooner were we out of the car than he began to harass my hostess unmercifully about a new mobile phone that he said that she had promised him. ‘You gave me your word more than a year ago and still I am stuck with this rubbish. This is not Muslim behaviour!’ This promised cell-phone hung around for the whole of my stay, emerging every time the conversation threatened to flag. ‘What can I do?’ my hostess asked with an only half-comical sigh, ‘He harasses me unmercifully, but he has been with my father for ever. We can’t possibly get rid of him.’
Then Shehzad took me out to the hujra to meet the agricultural labourers and tenant farmers, at which point things ceased to be comical, and I was in no danger of falling asleep. Just as the impending Russian revolution formed the looming background to Chekhov’s gentry, so it turned out that my hosts – without fully realizing it themselves – were sitting on the crust of a river of lava.
Shehzad himself, as he told me with complete candour, like the vast majority of the tenants and the village in general, is a strong sympathizer of both the Afghan and the Pakistani Taleban – something of which his master and mistress were wholly unaware, but which he revealed to me with no hesitation whatsoever. In fact, he went further than most sympathizers with the Taleban:
It is not terrorism when you attack Pakistani government employees like at the Wah factory because they were making weapons so the army can kill their own people. The government is taking American money to do this, and they should be fought. Ninety-nine