Sohail
Moughal |
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TALE OF TWENTY TWO CITIES ISBN 969 34 0000 3, Published in 1997 |
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Chapter - 1 GETTING STARTED Back in 1984, most of my classmates and friends left Pakistan to study in developed countries like England and The United States. One of them went to Russia. He liked it so much he never came back and still lives in Alama Ata. My friends would call me and tell me things about other worlds, which I couldn’t think of while living in a developing country like Pakistan. A friend, who went to study in England told me about the 1950’s Morris Minors still being used as taxicabs in Islamabad. These cars were considered as antiques everywhere else. If a Morris was seen on the roads of London, it became news to English people, and something that turned a lot of heads, making the incident even more interesting. My roommate and I often made plans to buy a Morris from some cab driver in Islamabad, get it overhauled, drive all the way to England from Pakistan and sell it there. This would make our dreams of exploring and traveling come true. We also thought that we might even make some profit by selling our recycled car in England. To make your dreams come true; you have to wake up. My roommate, Imran and I started working on our plan and decided to visit Islamabad. Imran had a Honda 200 Road Master 1982, and I owned a 1981 Kawasaki KE175. We both sold our bikes and bought a Morris. Getting it fine-tuned and overhauled was a few day’s job. Everything was going fine until we discovered that we needed visas to pass through the countries on the way to London. The countries that fall on the way are Iran, Turkey, Greece, Italy and France. I visited some of the foreign embassies in Islamabad and it seemed that almost everybody standing in line wanting a visa had the same dream as mine. The long queues outside the gates and a very humiliating and discouraging attitude from the security guards was enough to make me go back to my hostel room and forget about it. I couldnt get a chance to explain my plan to anyone at a single embassy. I felt so bad; I started hating the existing systems of the world, the boundaries, the governments, the disputes, the pacts and so-called claims on human rights and freedom. Why people have to have good and bad places. Five thousand years ago, Egypt was better than Norway and all the people wanted to visit Egypt. Some two thousand years ago, every one wanted to be in Iraq. A little more than a thousand years ago, Constantinople was probably the most lucrative place to go to. Who knows maybe they had embassies in those times too, and dreamers like me were treated the same way. Every embassy required proofs of wealth and fat bank statements. I felt as if I had to bring jewels, silk worms, persian carpets or perform some interesting aerobatics or show magical wonders to convince these embassies. I was a university student; I didn’t have that kind of money or charms. I kept asking myself, “What’s wrong with me? Last year I met a student visiting Kaghan and Naran from Australia. He said he didnt have any problems getting a visa to visit Pakistan. Why he could come to my country for a vacation whenever he or she wished to do so and I couldnt do that?” I found no answers anywhere. I must say I had very good friends. Imagine having no access to foreign TV channels, and receiving audio tapes or video recordings of MTV Charts, Top of the Pops or American Top 40’s mailed to you every month. Every once in a while they would add a copy of an off-road motocross race. I knew exactly when Lamborghini came out with a Cheetah, and Cagiva started with their Elephant. Why Deff Leppard decided to change their style of music and David Lee Roth left Van Hallen. I just wanted to learn as much as possible about the world I lived in. I had to send them books and cassettes too from Pakistan. Once I sent a newly revised and published copy of Dewan-e-Ghalib and a collection of poems by Saghir Siddiqui to my friend in England. He liked it and asked me if I needed something in return and I said I wanted pictures of Lake Districts. I wanted to see what made Williams Wordsworth write the "Daffodils". Disappointed with the visa situation, having sold my bike and stuck with a morris, I returned to Islamabad. I stopped asking my overseas friends for more information about the worlds outside of Pakistan. I didn’t want to know anything about the other side of the moon, dark or light. Ignorance is bliss! ‘Time cures all’, and I also forgot about it. After four years, I graduated and the places I wanted to visit became four years older, nothing more. I started working in a city called Mastung in the province of Balochistan. After four more years, a friend, Ijaz was appointed as Assistant Commissioner of Mastung and the adventure bug that had bitten me some ten years ago, started showing its signs again. Only this time I was more determined and I had a new travel partner, Ijaz. Mastung is a small town on RCD Highway in the Balochistan province of Pakistan, situated on the Birahvi-speaking belt of the Baloch dominated area. Balochistan constitutes about forty three percent of the land area of Pakistan. Most of the province consists of dry mountains and deserts with a population of less than twenty persons per square kilometer. A famous poem sang at tribal meetings can be translated as, "The mountains are the Balochi's forts; the peaks are better than any army; the lofty heights are our comrades; the pathless gorges our friends. Our drink is from the flowing springs; our bed the thorny bush; the ground we make our pillow." Mastung used to be the winter camp of Khan of Kalat, who while incorporating his state into Pakistan, donated gold and silver to the newly born country, equal to the body weights of Muhammad Ali Jinnah and Fatimah Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan and his sister. Probably, the British never had any strong inclinations to conquer this part of the Sub-continent and that’s why only Northern section of the Balochistan province was brought under British influence, after the Afghan wars and treaties of 1879 and 1891. The tour was chalked out and it was decided, that we’d touch the shores of Baltic and travel all the way by road, rail or sea, without doing any air travel at all. I had to go to Quetta, some fifty three kilometers North of Mastung, to catch a flight to Islamabad. Islamabad being the capital of Pakistan was the best place to gather information about the visa requirements for different countries. The conditions were still the same as ten years before; but this time I was more confident. I bore a much more credible passport being a Government servant. It gave the visa issuing people some sort of a surety that I was coming back and not staying for good in their countries. Every Embassy had different visa interview timings and days. I had to calculate the shortest possible period required to go through all of them, so that I waste less of my vacation time. I came back to Mastung and Ijaz left for Islamabad with all the information I had brought. Getting the permission to travel abroad, when you are working for the government is an ordeal in itself. Ijaz managed to get more vacation time than I could. He could afford to spend more days in Islamabad. It was also decided that he would call me when ever my presence was necessary for a personal visa interview. Logically speaking, acquiring a tourist visa for any country should not take more than a couple of hours; but there are some East European countries which take even months to process a single visa application. They have to send the application by mail to their home country and the permission to enter the country is granted from there. I found that quite ridiculous. It would have been much better if they had asked the applicant, to write directly to the ministry of foreign affairs of the country and get the visa direclty, instead of them opening a visa section full of bureaucratic procedures. East Europe had to be dropped from the route list. Iran and Turkey being very old friends of Pakistan didn’t need much time and the problem started after Turkey. The visa fee for Bulgaria was more than the sum of visa fees of all the countries on the list. Due to war in Yugoslavia, even Bulgaria had to be dropped from the list. We had to enter Greece from Turkey and it was believed by some people roaming around the embassies that Turkey and Greece didn’t enjoy good relations and entry into Greece from Turkey might be denied. It was therefore decided that if something untoward happened, we’d fly from Turkey to Italy and then come back to Greece. With the help of friends in the foreign ministry of Pakistan and some pakistani friends working for foreign embassies we were able to get visas for Turkey, Italy and Germany from Islamabad. I had managed to make friends in the right places. My presence for the visa interviews was essential and I had to visit Islamabad once again. Visiting the twin cities of Islamabad and Rawalpindi is always a multiple experience. The site for construction of Islamabad, totally a new city replacing the previous capital Karachi, was selected by Doxiades Associates (in 1959), who had completed the assignment of urban planning of Athens. Architects and city-planners like Ponti and Edward Durell Stone were the main consultants. Islamabad is divided into functional squares and rectangles, with green tree-lined avenues and an atmosphere of hushed officialdom. On the other hand Rawalpindi, connected by a beautiful carriageway to Islamabad, is a city with accidental irregularities of ancient human settlement, traffic packed streets and noisy bustling markets. Rawalpindi remains the center of social and business activities for the two cities. The twin cities are built on the Potohar plateau that gives way to rich and fertile lowlands. A few kilometers from the plateau, earliest stone-age relics of the subcontinent were found, marking the presence of the first specimen of the genus man of about half a million years ago. Lying directly on the pathway of many invasions, as it is believed for whole of the Sub-continent, the Potohar was occupied by Persians in fifth century BC and later by Alexander. White Huns after invading the Roman Empire brought a long period of instability here also. By the end of the eighth century, Islam spread into the subcontinent. Moughals built the Modern Rawalpindi in the fourteenth century. Later the British turned it into the biggest military cantonment of the Indian Empire. Even today, the Headquarters of Pakistan Army, Navy and Air Force are stationed in these twin cities. A distict landmark on the cities horizon is the Shah Faisal Mosque, dedicated to the memory of the late King Faisal of Saudi Arabia who graciously defrayed the cost of the project as a gift to the people of Pakistan. A Turkish architect, Vedat Dalokay's design was selected through an international competition. Dalokay used modern as well as medieval Islamic design principals. Instead of traditional domes usually associated with mosques, the main prayer hall is an eight faceted concrete shell representative of a desert tent. We bought Youth Hostels Organization memberships from Islamabad and I returned to Mastung again. Ijaz left for Karachi to get the visa for Greece. With some “PDP” and a huge support from friends in Karachi, Ijaz managed to get the visa for both of us. He came back to Quetta where we made final arrangements and purchases for a journey, which many of our friends had considered completely impossible. At last the time to start the travel arrived. We left Quetta early in the morning and at around one in the afternoon reached the city of Dalbandin. Dalbandin is a small town in the deserts of Balochistan and one of the rare sites, where Houbara Bustard, one of the vulnerable and endangered species mentioned in the Red Data book of the World Conservation Union, breeds outside of its Russian habitat. Before coming to Mastung, Ijaz had a job in Dalbandin and he told me about the special hunting permits granted to dignitaries of Gulf Royal families, despite the campaigns launched by various wild life preservation foundations. The Sheikhs had even funded for the construction of an airport in Dalbandin for their convenience and to follow the Arab falconry traditions. We decided to rest for a while after having traveled in the desert burning at 49 Celsius. An old colleague of Ijaz was waiting for us at the bus stop. He took us to his home-cum-office. He was an agriculture specialist trying to find ways to use the land for cultivation, and motivating the local people to make use of the tube-wells the government had planned to install at various places. After lunch we rested for an hour or so, and it was decided that we’d hire a jeep for our onward journey to the Pak-Iran border. Our host insisted on driving us all the way to the border in his car. We did not accept his offer but later agreed to take his car with his chauffeur till Taftan. Taftan was some five hundred kilometers from Dalbandin and the road conditions were horrible. Our very hospitable friend felt very bad when we did not allow him to follow his native traditions; but we could not drag him into the inconvenience we had chosen for ourselves. After a very bumpy drive in the desert on a non-existent gravel road for about seven hours, we saw a distant cluster of lights and asked the driver, if the lights were from the city of Taftan. His very interesting remark kept us laughing for a very long time. ‘Sir, those lights are from the Saindak Project and Iranian border buildings. The dark emptiness on the left is Taftan. There is no electricity in the city.” Saindak is about an hours drive short of the Pak-Iran border where Pakistan’s first Copper Gold Mining Project, in consortium with the Chinese Government, is in progress. Abid Masti Khan, the Project Director was friends with Ijaz and he was kind enough to have directed his staff to arrange for our night stay and other requirements despite his official engagements in Islamabad. Next morning, the Director of the Mining Department took us around the site and showed us the process of excavation of ores to the extraction of pure metals. A lot of water was required for the whole process and they were in the middle of laying a 400 kilometer long pipeline.The guided tour of the Project took two hours. Chinese men and women were working mostly on technical jobs. Pakistanis were responsible for providing the logistics only. Talking about his involvement with the project, the Director told us how he joined the project in 1974, when only test pits were being dug and he had to stay in a tent. Laborers were brought from other areas of Pakistan. They would reach the present site after traveling for two days in the wild desert. After spending a day or two, most of them would try to run and make collective escapes during the night. Search parties had to be sent the next day to save their lives as most of them were found fainted or lost in the cruel desert. Illiteracy being the prime asset, the locals of the area would lay obstacles on the path of the progress. The foreign workers, Government officials and the laborers were harassed and kidnapped for petty demands and ransom. This is crux of the problems, which the Pakistan Government is facing in the country’s largest province with minimum population. The province is spread on 347,190 square kilometers of land, almost equal to the area of Germany, with a population density of only 19 persons per square kilometer. To control such a place, you need more law and order enforcement agencies than the population of the area. Otherwise, highly sophisticated communication systems are required, which are not available in a poor country like Pakistan. The result is that the law of the jungle is mostly prevalent in these parts of the country. Most of the disputes are decided by a tribunal, which consists of the influential tribal chiefs of the area, supervised by a Government administrator. After the visit of the project, we came to the government owned Taftan resthouse, located a few meters from the border gates. It was strange to notice that Taftan was a city containing a few offices, about a hundred shops and a bus stop. There were no houses at all. It was purely a commercial settlement. Most of the things sold here were smuggled from Iran. Then there were some things, which were most probably brought from interior Pakistan and stored to be made readily available to the Iranians to be smuggled into their country. |
