12 Chapter 12. Echoes of the Raj

It had been nearly thirty years since Pakistan and India had gained independence from Britain, but it still had the feel of empire when I travelled there. As a Canadian, my immediate sensation in crossing the border was one of intense familiarity. Outside of francophone Québec, the English-speaking part of Canada in which I grew up was still very British. “God Save the Queen” was still sung in schools and at formal events, Queen Elizabeth II’s portrait (circa 1952) still graced institutional walls, and her face was on Canada’s currency. Only a decade before had Canada adopted its own flag, shorn of its British hallmarks.

For the many British travellers who made the journey to India, the sensation was even more intense. Grant John Szuveges notes that British travellers experienced a kind of nostalgia for a time and place seemingly so near, yet so far—a world in slow retreat.¹ Upon entering the subcontinent, says David Tomory, people with “British connections saw their own history reveal itself.”² David Harvey, who travelled in the early 1960s, remarked on the British legacy in one of his letters home:

Coming into Pakistan is like coming home again. First of all, you go back to driving on the left which is rather difficult to get used to again. All the road signs are in English and are exactly the same as the English ones. The roads in Quetta are all called Pretoria, Mafeking, Victoria, Queens, Lytton, Curzon, and Ladysmith. It was strange seeing the familiar red pillar boxes and the soldiers all looking exactly like British soldiers. Even the advertisements telling you to use the Post Office Savings Bank all look so English.

The nostalgia lessened in later years. By way of an ironic acknowledgement of the empire’s decline, many Britons travelled to Asia simply because their money went further. Alastair Harper, who left Britain in the early 1960s to travel to India, pointed out that Britain was an extremely poor country after the war, with no luxuries, few opportunities to travel, and severe restrictions on capital withdrawals. But if you were able to leave Britain, you wanted your money to go far.

Leaving Britain also represented a kind of cultural escape from a place Harper described as riven with a kind of “meanness” that was “unpalatable” and “stifling.” For him, “Britain seemed a rather dull and drab country, not very exciting compared to other parts of the world.” By the late 1960s, however, Britain had become the centre of Western counterculture. Heading for India no longer meant a fleeing from, but a going to. Fergus F. recalled that “everybody I knew in London’s counterculture scene either wanted to go to India or were planning to go to India because it had become so much part of the literature, the music, and even the superficial attire of the time.”

Once we were through the Khyber Pass, the landscape changed, broadening out, but the roads and the traffic changed only quantitatively, with the relatively less occupied roads of Afghanistan giving way suddenly to the multitude of vehicles and pedestrians that occupied roadways in Pakistan and India.

Basil Jay describes Pakistan’s roads as “thoroughly congested” not just with motor vehicles but with “masses of people” and “all manner of beasts of burden: water buffalo, oxen, horses, donkeys, and even cows, pulling carts of various sizes and descriptions, but some like camels, and even elephants, just trudging alone with their back piled high with all manner of cargo.”³

My fellow travellers and I arrived in Peshawar late on October 31. Our first task was, as usual, to find a hotel—or, rather, to allow ourselves to be guided to one:

We walk in long circles until a grey, old man, smacking his gums, but speaking some English, takes us to the Rainbow Guest House.

“See Park Hotel,” the old man says, pointing. “Fifty rupees for a bed. Crazy, Park Hotel. Too much money. Rainbow, good bed, hot showers, six rupees.”

“Peshawar good city,” he adds.

I tip him one rupee. Is that enough? He seems disappointed.

Our walk to the Rainbow Hotel involved the usual gauntlet of curious onlookers who, as David Dudeck remarked, believed that people from the West “drank Scotch, went to discos, and couldn’t control our sex drive.” One offshoot of these perceptions was that Western males were sometimes tested by local youths wanting to show off their macho fitness, or alternatively, were sexually harassed. Though homosexual behaviour is condemned in Muslim societies, local men sometimes made subtle sexual advances, by look or touch, to Western males.

Macho contests and occasional sexual invitations aside, we males were far less likely to be molested than our female counterparts. Western women often faced harassment and casual sexual assaults in the form of unwanted groping as they moved through throngs of people on the street or were pressed into close quarters on buses and trains. Ever present was the chance that groping might escalate into a more dangerous physical assault.

Such incidents reflected common cultural beliefs, fuelled by imported movies and television, about the character of Western women—that Western women were without “honour.”⁴ Writing of the Middle East, Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit argue that the veiling of women in Muslim cultures aims to safeguard their privacy and protect them from male lust, while the “exposed women of the West … are regarded by devout Muslims, or indeed ultra-orthodox Jews, as whores and their men as pimps.”⁵ In my experience, Western women were sometimes viewed by local males as “easy,” as objects simultaneously of both irresistible allure and dangerous temptation. A woman travelling alone, an act thought both unusual and unwise, might add to negative views of her character, and her choice of dress could easily be seen as too “free.”

Female travellers therefore tended to travel in groups, often accompanied by males, or to take chartered buses, and often dressed down so that clothing was neither provocative nor accessible. When directly threatened, some responded forcefully. Dervla Murphy carried a gun and fired it on at least one occasion.⁶

None of the women I met carried a gun—at least as far as I know. While they were strong and independent individuals, as a male I typically also often found myself in the role of bodyguard. On crowded streets I might walk in front of the women, with another male walking behind them, always alert to potential troubles. Bruce Shore remembered standing guard whenever women used a washroom in train or bus stations.

Moving through crowds while also looking out for the safety of one’s companions could become exhausting, but as we made our way to the hotel, Maude made my work easy. She was tall, fit, and quite independent. She quickly dispensed a swift punch to a few gropers along the way. The effect was that the sea of bodies ahead of us parted as we approached.

Minutes later, we arrived at the Rainbow Hotel. I got a bed in a dormitory: it had four doors, four beds, six windows, a toilet, a shower, and an unworkable sink, along with numerous water-beetles and a lifetime’s supply of ants. As I stepped onto the balcony, I felt a sense of déjà vu. The balcony overlooked a noisy car parts store, just as my room at Tehran’s Amir Kabir had. But, as I noted, the room’s temperature was “warm and balmy, pleasant.”

After checking in, we set off in search of a hearty meal of “curried rice, French fries, toast and jam, and Coke.” It was 8:30 at night. We walked the streets of Peshawar, entranced by the blend of architectural styles—European colonial buildings, interspersed with beautiful examples of traditional architecture variously illustrating Mughal, Persian, Central Asian, Sikh, and South Asian styles. “It is night,” I wrote,

but not pitch-black, only a pale blue, and though the streets are poorly lit, yet the crumbling façades seem to emit their own light. There is something unreal and majestic pulsing from everywhere. The mini-taxis swarm in and out like bumper cars at a circus. The people stream out of alleyways and shows. In the narrow side streets, convoluted, broken stone, stagnant water, and chai shops thrive. The red-hot coal of a brazier is burning. An old man in his fez smokes his hookah pipe, a fine, grey smoke. There are fruit vendors and simple friends, dogs sleeping.

I stop to take a flash photo of the street where a Pakistani man with his new, larger camera, a gift from his brother in Kuwait, is also taking one. He gets a picture taken with Maude and me and says he will send us pictures. It is his hobby.

Another Pakistani man asks, will I go to North Vietnam? To Mozambique? When will I go to South America?

I have no answer for him.

As we walk, I become aware of a strange sense of dislocation, as if I were observing from a distance an experience in which I was intensely engaged:

I look at the streets and feel as though we are being painted into a picture. The artist is moving us deeper into the scene—perhaps a Dutch painter with a fine sense of detail and an attraction to the beauty of the low and the outcast.

I conclude that Vermeer is painting us and tell Maude that I’ve discovered I’m in love with the world.

Perhaps I was stoned when I wrote those lines, but Peshawar somehow reached into me and touched my soul, summoning up a tenderness and compassion.

Maude and I sat in a chai shop above the main street and watched the milling crowd, the continuing surge of arrivals by car, by bus, and by foot. We drank our tea and listened to horns and a singer growling on a car radio. Turning to Maude, I said:

“If I was the best writer in the entire world I couldn’t describe how I feel right now.”

Maude is smiling, bemused and stoned, but completely naturally. She has been like this all day and is quite beautiful when so. Rainer is beside himself.

I stare out into the mass of humanity, hot, sticky, loving, hating, breathing, beautiful humanity. They are alive, and I have never felt as alive as on this journey, nor ever felt such a reason for living.

I stare and I laugh.

I laugh because I want to laugh. What more can I say?

Okay, yes, I was definitely stoned. But there was also something about the common decency and serenity of the people I saw and met, even in the briefest of conversations, that left a mark on me. Even today, it is the sense of these moments, and not any particulars, that remains with me.

That night, the night before our departure, I lay in my bed listening to the syncopated rhythms rising from below my window, of men at their work, the high-pitched “chink” of hammers on rails, hammers on nails, voices, and the warning peel of a train coming from far off.

Bruce Shore and Brenda Grant did not share my liking of Peshawar, describing it as “too busy, filthy, grey, and chaotic.” They decided to travel north into the Swat Valley instead. Shore’s brother had told them of a friend named Sean who had fled some legal difficulties in Britain and now lived in the interior hill town of Madyan. Shore and Grant took a bus over poor roads and through a fertile valley with “flowing rivers and streams,” Grant wrote in her diary. They shared the road with donkeys, horses, and trucks, and as they got off the bus in Madyan, they immediately had to step aside to make way for a dozen men on horseback. They had bandoliers full of ammunition strapped across their chests, and short swords dangled from their sides. Bruce recognized their rifles as Lee–Enfields from the early 1900s.

Shore went to the post office and asked the postmaster where they might find the Englishman, Sean. The postmaster said he had never heard of a Sean but asked where someone might find Bruce himself should someone come asking. That evening, a police officer came to Bruce and Brenda’s hotel, checking their passports and asking why they had come to Madyan, then left again. The next morning a young man showed up who took them on a ninety-minute walk to Sean’s farm, where they spent the next two days visiting.

Bruce asked Sean about the mounted horsemen they’d seen and was told they were local tribesmen. They maintained order, as they had done for hundreds of years, moving about and doing business as they wished, trading in such things as arms, food, drugs, and jewels.

In the past, Sean told them, the Pakistani government had tried to assert their authority over the valley. They sent tax collectors, accompanied by a few soldiers, but they disappeared. The government then sent more tax collectors, along with a platoon bearing light machine guns. This time, he said, a lone soldier returned with the message, “Don’t send any more.” The government got the message. Beyond the positions of chief of police and postmaster, the authority of the Pakistani state ended.

Many years later, I was reminded of Shore’s account when I read about the attempted murder in October 2012 of fifteen-year-old Malala Yousafzai, a young activist advocating for the right of women and girls to receive an education. As she was on her way home from school, the bus in which she was riding was intercepted by three members of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, or TTP, who, like their Afghan counterparts, adopt exceedingly restrictive attitudes toward woman but who also openly engage in terrorist activities. One of the three shot her in the head, though he failed in his mission to kill her. She recovered and in 2014 was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, the first Pashtun ever to win one.⁷ The attack took place in Mingora, the largest city in the Swat Valley, where Yousafzai had grown up. As I subsequently learned, “Yousafzai” is also the name of one of the most powerful Pashtun tribes, who have dominated the Swat region since the sixteenth century.

As in Turkey and Iran, the United States had leaned on both Pakistan and India to crack down on drugs. Pakistan agreed, but their crackdown was soft, and buying drugs was reasonably easy. Trish Flindall recalled seeing “lots of young Europeans shooting up” in Pakistan’s and India’s hotels and hostels in 1968–69. Fergus F., who travelled there around the same time, remembered that “I sometimes met very sad, beautiful young boys who had no idea how to cope, not only with the drugs, but with their so-called freedom. Some guys went off the rails.” Of travelling through Pakistan three years later, Ann Woodruff said that drugs could be obtained from “taxi drivers and everyone else.” And Don Skelton told the sad tale of crossing the border into Afghanistan in 1973, en route from Quetta to Kandahar. His bus stopped five kilometres from the border point at Chaman and he began walking: “There were dead trucks and cars, and big crowds of people walking both ways. I met a Westerner, in some hovel, a heroin addict. He’d lost his passport and been there for years, and now couldn’t go either way.”⁸

As I mentioned earlier, border crossings were a typical locale for police searches, but trains also offered a particular opportunity for enforcement. As in Afghanistan, anyone carrying drugs had first to avoid being caught, and second, if caught, to quickly pay any bribes before the demands escalated. Travelling by train from Peshawar to Lahore, Maude, Rainer, and I narrowly missed ending up in trouble:

We pushed on to a car, only to have to file out again as there was no room in the car. The inhabitants in the next car, about eight men lying on the bunks, tried to tell us it was reserved, but dismissing this as bullshit, we took up squatter’s rights and settled in. A replica of Edward G. Robinson sat on a top bunk facing us, three less Hollywood types stared at us from below. Immediately above us, from another top bunk, an arm and occasionally two feet dangled, their owner unseen. A black-haired Pakistani with fair English sat beside me.

After an hour, during which the train cars shunted back and forth, we were on our way. I finished reading Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and lay back. Maude lay half asleep on my shoulder. At last, an officer appeared at a stop and after a preliminary feel of the locals’ bags, turned to Rainer and had him dismantle his pack. I thought it might end there, but when he began to search Maude’s pack, we decided to jettison the small quantity of foil-wrapped hash bought at the Afghan border. With one hand, Maude deftly fingered the package out of her basket while the locals watched motionless, then handed the package to me. I stood up, coughing into my hand, and threw the evidence out the open train window. Sitting down, a smile passed between the Pakistani passengers and me.

“Is it gone?” asked Maude.

I nodded while the officer gave us a puzzled and somewhat suspicious look. He knew something had happened, but he didn’t know what. A moment later, his hands were exploring the basket, now safe. He made a cursory search of my bag before the train halted and he departed.

“You are good people,” the Pakistani man beside me said.

“What?” I asked, uncertain.

He repeated his comment. At a later train stop, he made up a joint to smoke. We had one toke and then tried to sleep. About five in the morning, I crawled up to sleep in the bunk that Edward G. Robinson had earlier vacated. I slept well, half dozing through a train stoppage—apparently, a thirteen-year-old boy had fallen off the train, breaking his neck—before arriving at Lahore around 9:15 a.m.

In Lahore, we took a room at the Ringo Bell Hotel. The city still exuded the heavy legacy of British culture. I walked past several small parks, the High Court, and a Catholic church, all of which were distinctly neocolonial. It could have been London, except for the water buffaloes, horses, goats, and sheered sheep that shared wide streets with motor vehicles.

In the evening, Rainer and I bought some canned Dutch Gouda cheese, which cost us eighteen and a half rupees. We ate all of it while Maude recuperated from the day. I then returned to my hotel room:

The room costs five rupees, and it came with several live, running lizards. I am lying on the bed. It is getting on to midnight. A sultry warmth hovers over the silent town, a silence broken only by the occasional sound of a motorcycle and the fan spinning overhead.

The room’s walls are green, the panelling a grubby brown. Scribbled on the wall: “Take care of the dirty bunch of thieves working in this hotel. They will try anything.”

The next day, early, we took a bus to Wagah, at the Indian border.

1. Grant John Szuveges, “The Overland Hippie Trail to India and Nepal in the 1960s and 1970s,” 58–60.

2. David Tomory, A Season in Heaven: True Tales from the Road to Kathmandu, 67.

3. Basil Jay, 65 Days to Delhi: An Incredible Journey, 620.

4. Tomory, A Season in Heaven, 95; Sharif Gemie and Brian Ireland, The Hippie Trail: A History, 79.

5. Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit, Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies, 132. Views of Western women as sexually available and lacking in modesty were not, of course, restricted to devout Muslims and Orthodox Jews but were, and remain, quite pervasive in colonial and postcolonial contexts. They found their counterpart, and still do, in the Western white male view of women of colour as sexually voracious, at once threatening and magnetic.

6. Dervla Murphy, Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle, 17.

7. “Malala Yousafzai, Biographical,” The Nobel Prize, accessed September 18, 2024, https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/2014/yousafzai/biographical/. See also “Assassination Attempt of Ms. Malala Yousafzai, October 11, 2021, World Organization Against Torture / Organisation Mondiale Contre la Torture (OMCT), https://www.omct.org/en/resources/urgent-interventions/assassination-attempt-of-ms-malala-yousafzai.

8. Skelton’s tale is surpassed only by Frank Sullivan, who related the story of waking one night in 1979 to the sounds of a couple in the room they shared in Benares, needing to get their fix. “They were trying to stick in a needle, but it was dark and they couldn’t find the vein. It was horrific: the noises, the grunting. Any sense I had that heroin might be a romantic thing vanished.”