North-West Frontier

By DAVID CAIRNS

UP in the jet-stream over Asia Minor. the Muzak fades. The pilot of our flight announces that Baghdad is just below us On the right, and, in the nice jargon of the trade, 'estimates' Teheran in one hour thirty Minutes. There, in the darkness, is Baghdad. again the Beautiful, a delicate filigree of gold crossed in great loops by a ribbon of velvet Which one suddenly realises is the Tigris, and circling it the immensity of blackness that is the desert, pricked here and there by the small, solitary light of a caravan. I try to mobilise suitable thoughts and to shut out the stream °I. tonal decadence which insinuates itself softly, relentlessly into one's ear through the whine of the jets. Muzak is the only thing wrong with PIA, an airline of admirable tact, friendliness and efficiency. I suppose the wretched stuff conies ready built in with the Boeings. Before dozing off I become doubly grateful not to be nearing any more music for a whole week. Then it is Karachi, and we are getting out into the !tot night, the crescent moon of Islam lying on Its back, and the old moon clearly in its arms, Prickly as a lichee.

West Pakistan. like all Middle East countries. seems at first deliberately composed of incon- ruities—the enormous roadside advertisement. Surf Washes Whiter, Cleaner, Faster,' momen- tarily obscured by a camel trudging with a load of hay through the night on its soft, spatulate Pads; the carrion birds slowly wheeling outside the modern luxury hotel; the lawn-mower drawn a Water-buffalo in the Shalimar Gardens at Lahore; the neat-suited businessman prostrate °fl the grass by the airport entrance at the hour °I Prayer; the cricket ground laid out sprucely .tiOder the Badshahi Mosque: the Pathan frontier tribesman fingering his hand-made replica of a 1;e-war Lee-Enfield rifle against the background a four-engined airliner. But behind these ;ings lie the real conflicts and heart-searchings II" a twentieth-century State founded on im- n"eMortal Islamic principles, a poor, populous `ttion, 80 per cent, of whom are illiterate,

grappling with land reclamation. industrialisa- tion, foreign exchange deficit, birth rate and the problems of communication between its two split halves across hundreds of miles of unsym- pathetic India, and fighting to modernise itself in time before the tide of Communism engulfs it In its course towards the warm waters of the Indian Ocean.

Korangi, the refugee settlement on the out- skirts of Karachi : in some ways it is the most enduring first impression of Pakistan. When all qualifications have been made—the fact that the drive out there takes us conveniently past some of the appallingly primitive makeshift hovels for refugees which still remain within the city, the disadvantages of living a few miles out of town on what is still featureless sandy plain, the in- evitable tales (some of them inevitably true) of families who did not want to be moved—Korangi is living evidence of the impact of a govern- ment that cares. Under the system which, after Partition, gave the country a decade of 'politics' (a rude word in Pakistan now), there was a glittering Ministry for Refugees occupied by an army of bureaucrats; and at the end of ten years the refugees were precisely where they were when they first arrived from India. The popular story is that General Azam Khan (now Gover- nor of East Pakistan), who was appointed Minister by Ayub Khan's regime of Martial Law, abolished the Ministry after sacking most of the staff and resettling 15,000 families within six months. Korangi is of course a government showpiece; there is still a refugee problem in Pakistan. But it is impossible to visit the settle- ment without being excited and moved. We saw it towards evening, maybe a flattering time, with the sun slanting low across the long parallel rows of flat whitewashed houses and the yellow baked earth (which must become a quagmire when it rains). I have never seen so many children materialise so quickly; each gap between the parallel rows of houses disgorged them in dozens, running shrilly towards our car. Birth control is a constant and so far largely unsuccessful preoccupation of the regime; but one felt, with these children, that there was some point in their being alive.

The 'house' which one family occupies is just a brick-walled courtYard enclosing a single small living-room, separate cubicles for washroom and lavatory and enough space in the yard to grow vegetables, lay bedding out at night if the family is big and perhaps later add on another room. There is a tap somewhere near, shared with other families. Small things for a human being to show for a single, unique existence in the world, but they represent the beginnings of hope, the possibility of life—a solid roof and a garden of one's own and some privacy for the women in purdah.

As we get back into the car, a hockey match is kicking up little puffs of dust across the stretched-out expanse of plain. Opposite, white buildings, half-constructed schools and markets, gleam against pale earth and egg-shell sky, now deepening into night; and high in the balm of the dusk air scarlet kites tug at the strings in their abstracted owners' hands and are touched for a second by the sun as it slips over the rim of the world. It is certainly a pretty landscape, but also a landscape with meaning, and a future.

The Pakistanis seem people of profound natural courtesy. Even the rogues treat with you without servility, as equals, robed in a dignity that is above rebuff; they look you straight in the eye so transparently and with a gaze of such disarming candour—implying there is something preordained in this relationship, that each of you needs the other--that you almost feel your friendship obliges you to succumb. There is the benign, distinguished-looking rickshaw driver (the rickshaws are motorised now) who, while weaving his way with one hand through the manic Karachi traffic, produces with the other from the folds of his shirt a greasy piece of paper to prove the innate superiority of his rick- shaw to all other rickshaws in Karachi; before he waves it away I have time to read something about 'engaging first gear.' He smiles with a sad, fatherly air over my wilful refusal to accept his very liberal currency offer; I observe primly that the Government is trying to stamp out the black market, and the conversation lapses; but at intervals during every drive our silence is suddenly broken by his slightly reproachful in- cantation, murmured almost to himself, above the noise of the traffic: 'You sterling, rupees, business wallah?' Then there is the small boy who with charming frankness tries to sell me a newspaper for ten rupees (fifteen shillings), adding enigmatically, by way of extra induce- ment, 'You fokee foker?'; or the snake-charmer who squats on the pavement outside the Metro- pole Hotel (playing to a bemused old cobra with dull, beady eyes), the noise of whose gourd-pipe, swaying and turning about two or three notes with a whining timbre which sounds from a dis- tance like a comb-and-paper. wakes me on my first morning in Karachi. I peep only for a moment out of my fourth-floor window, but he has seen me, and even at that distance his flash- ing smile and confident wave of the hand make it unthinkable that I should not throw a coin.

With the courtesy goes, as far as I can see, a complete lack of any complex, a natural mag-

nanimity, about 'the UK'—no resentment, no vestiges of a cringing deference which loathes itself, no superiority- or inferiority-feelings. The attitude seems to be: the past is past, we are equals now; the British did many good things. I saw nothing in Pakistan more critical than a laconic inscription in the old fort at Lahore: 'Sikh paintings revealed after removing British- Period whitewash.' The street-names have not been altered, and remain imperturbably British: Preedy Street, Victoria Road, Macleod Road. Hoardings recommend the purchase of National Savings Certificates; English is everywhere. This Partly for the reason that, in a country with several languages and many dialects, but no common tongue in which all, or even all edu- cated people, are equally fluent, English is often the most efficient medium of communication, even between husband and wife.

It would not now be practical to eradicate the British influence. But neither does there seem to be any desire to do so. It has gone deep in Inany places, and been assimilated. The Rawal- Pindi Club, with its calm, spacious corridors, antlered heads and dark panelling, its billiards rooms and huge lofty suites in which one half expects to be woken in the middle of the night bY echoes of ghostly regimental dinners, is now nnselfconsciously Pakistani. In the club at Peshawar the Masters of the Peshawar Hunt 8lare cloy, -1 from the pale-cream walls—robust, mustachioed proconsuls in the imperial heyday, becoming slightly wizened and apologetic as In- dependence nears—then, around 1947, an abrupt Change of colour and a return to the full face and confident moustaches of the Victorians. It is history in strip-cartoon form.

Paradoxically, perhaps the best indirect tribute to British values is the present regime. Several of them. including Field-Marshal Ayub himself, ...Were British-trained soldiers in the North-West 1-rontier Province. It is -somewhat difficult to imagine the British army, in the event of a national emergency, taking over this country and running it with the energy, decisiveness and Powerful common sense of Ayub and his Cabinet. But one begins to wonder whether there flay not after all be something in the old myth ?f. an instinctive mutual respect and understand- ing binding the Englishman and the proud Iribesman of the hills, when their historical con- Irontation on the North-West Frontier has led t such a swift and impressive canalising of natural energy.

In a draper's shop in the Kisechani Bazaar at Peshawar, over a cup of sweet green tea hospitably fetched by the proprietor from a café :1Ong the street, I sit and converse in leisurely i'asbion with a handsome, aquiline young Pathan student with the sly, tough look of his race.

arn just back from a drive to the Warsak Dam, tWenty miles outside Peshawar, where the Kabul ,,,River breaks out of the mountains into the plain. I be dam, built by Canadian engineers under the Cnlombo Plan, and financed half-and-half by the Canadian and Pakistan Governments (Paki- stan's debt to Canada is to be repaid not in sca re e foreign exchange but in rupees, which vitll then be reinvested in some new develop-

ment project), is being opened early next year by Ayub, and visited soon after by the Queen. It is already supplying electricity in large quantities to West Pakistan. Shortly its water will be transforming great tracts of arid land by irrigation. Even a layman, experiencing the layman's difficulty in knowing just how one is supposed to look at a darn, can appreciate that, in the dry, fierce air of the North-West Frontier. The Pathan student has seen the Warsak and is aware of its significance, but he is concerned at the moment to persuade me to send him an English revolver when I get home, since the weapons made in the local arms factories in the hills are not suitable, and he wants it to protect himself against a hostile family which is pur- suing an age-old vendetta over some land dispute.

His family is one of those that have come down from the Pathan highlands to settle on the plain in the once-despised occupation of cultivators; but fhe old tribal habits linger on. Up in the valleys, Khyber, Malakand, Surat, behind the turreted mud walls of the tribal fortresses, the ancient way of life flourishes with remarkably feudal splendour, and every- where you see reminders that this is one of the few regions on earth never subjugated by a conqueror. The Pakistan Government shows its military power discreetly in the area. The Pathan is wooed warily into the twentieth century by education and opportunities for economic ad- vancement; but he still hops on and off the trains that climb laboriously up to the Khyber, with- out being obliged to buy a ticket, and he is still allowed to shoot his enemy in the next-door family. Occasionally a serious tribal insurrection is quelled by the army without getting talked about in the press, but on the whole the Pathans are probably content with the present situation, and even quite eager to enter the modern world. The issue of a separate Pathan State, Pakh- tunistan, disingenuously kept alive in Kabul, cuts no ice. Economically, culturally, even politically their links are with the East, with the fertile plateau of what is now Pakistan and India; as are those of the Afghan tribesmen who still cross the Khyber every autumn, spurning passports, to winter below the mountains, as they have done for centuries, with their women dressed like gipsies, and their flocks of camels and sheep and goats shuffling up clouds of dust behind them across the plain.

(To he concluded)