 Peshawar
& Vicinity
When I look at the photos
from those last days, I wonder about our mental status: the big Yankee
smiles were still pasted on our faces, but any sane and righteous
face would have shown fear and outrage.
 After
a month on the road — a month of one damn thing after
another — we settled into this dark and desperate city with only
our sense of wonder intact. We were not technically in any sort of
war zone, yet the region thrived on bloodshed. The local Pashtuns provided
aid and comfort to their warring brethren in Afghanistan, while they
sustained their long and complex blood feuds among rival clans right
here in the North-West Frontier Province.
In the lobby of the posh Pearl
Continental Hotel was a large and elaborately framed sign:
HOTEL POLICY. Arms cannot be brought inside
the hotel premisis [sic]. Personal Guards or Gunmen are required
to deposit their weapons with the Hotel Security. We seek your cooperation.
Management.
Everything was dutifully managed.
There were policies and rules and permits and codes of conduct. The
fierce vengeance-driven local code of pashtunwali generally
took precedence over the laws of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan.
In general, if someone killed you, there was a good reason. You'd
violated the code in some way. The government coped. In a land where
labor was cheap, if you wanted to venture into dangerous territory,
the governmental bureaucracy simply assigned you an armed guard. The
smooth logic of it all kept us intrigued and occasionally tense but
never feeling quite in danger.
Maybe our wits were dulled by then.
Or maybe we'd escaped harm so many times along the way, that we'd
developed a brash sense of invulnerability. I'm reminded of the feelings
we had on that very first day in Rawalpindi as we walked through the
bazaar without anyone really noticing us — that sense of being
extra-dimensional beings slipping through someone else's world —
an odd flash of color, barely comprehended. It had all become an amusement
park ride. And, really, by that time, what else was there to do? We
could spend only so many hours a day looking at beads and carpets.
Our first side trip was into the Khyber
Pass, the 35 miles from Peshawar to the Afghanistan border.
Our guidebook said it was closed to most foreigners. "UN officials,
diplomats, and accredited journalists can apply to the provincial
home secretary and the minister of tribal affairs for permission to
drive through." But for Quixote and Sancho, it was a snap. Jim simply smiled at the cabbie who stationed himself outside Dean's.
 No
problem.
Moghul was a henna-haired Pashtun
who was happy to take us anywhere we pleased. He escorted us to the
office an Afghan political agent and got us the correct permit. The
next morning, much to our surprise, we started our excursion by picking
up our bodyguard, a young man in black, carrying a carbine and sporting
a bandoleer of bullets across his chest. Oh. Okay. Then I guess
we're all set.
Everyone's heard of the Khyber Pass,
but I don't know why. Something to do with Rudyard Kipling and the
British Empire. A famous railroad runs through it — one of those
monumental feats of British engineering with 34 tunnels and cliffhanging
switchbacks — but the tracks have been hopelessly destroyed by
saboteurs since the Afghan-Soviet war. When you get up to the Afghan
border and look back into the pass, your eyes are knocked out by the
beauty and geography-book familiarity of the sinuous road you've just
traveled.
We took some time at the border
station — surrounded by the tall and lavishly uniformed men of
the Khyber Rifles — to gaze down into the bleak Afghanistan terrain:
mountainous and dry, colorless except for sparse dots of green in
the distance. It makes you reflect for a minute on the relationship
between environment and people. The harsh unforgiving landscape has
nurtured the harshest most unforgiving tribes… but I'm not an
anthropologist so enough.
We saw refugees, but not droves
of them. Many were returning home. A small bus — one of Pakistan's
colorful Flying Coaches — stopped near us. It was crowded, with
men clinging to the roof. A young man got off the bus to talk to me
in careful, halting English. He was sweating profusely and complained
about the Pakistani heat and said he was headed home to Jalalabad
but some day he would go to America where his aunt and uncle lived.
He shook my hand before getting back on the bus.
 A
woman nearby huddled with a baby. She was draped head to
toe in black but her eyes were visible and she was taking me in. I
smiled at her. She pulled away her veil just long enough to smile
back.
Moghul and our guard got us safely
back to Peshawar. The only warning we got was not to take
pictures of the Pashtun family compounds lest a flying bullet come
our way. (But of course we couldn't resist snapping a few from the
car as we sped by.)
CONTINUED... |