Why Pakistan?
When I remember my days in Pakistan,
the colors come first: a palette of browns and grays, from the forbidding rock of the
mountains to the liquid gold of men's eyes. When I try to capture my experience there, I
remember one damn thing after another. One damn thing after another, like those
early picaresque novels where shit just keeps happening to the not-so-heroic hero. A road
trip.
I guess like a lot of road trips it was
also a buddy story. Quixote and Sancho, Huck and Jim, Butch and Sundance, Thelma
and Louise, Hope and Crosby. We were Jim and Susan, surrendering to the Karakoram
Highway.
It was 1992. The Vassar-bred Benazir Bhutto was back in power
and the government stable — no wild-eyed ayatollahs in charge. The Soviet attempt to
occupy Afghanistan to the west had finally collapsed. There was the usual saber-rattling
with India over Kashmir to the northeast and, of course, the southwestern border with Iran
was to be avoided, but overall it read like a reasonably safe destination. In a burst of
economic development, Pakistan had partnered with China to build the Karakoram Highway,
which followed the old silk route into western China and opened up trade with Central Asia
(all those ex-Soviet republics: Kazakstan, Uzbekistan, all the 'stans).
We were attracted by the fabled romance of it all: the Silk Road,
Marco Polo, Alexander the Great and the magical names of destinations like Kashgar,
Tashkent, Samarkand, the Khyber Pass and the historic eras like the Great Game, when
England and Russia jockeyed for colonial supremacy. We found a book: Lonely Planet's Karakoram
Highway: the High Road to China. The road led to Kashgar, crossroads in the Great
Game, oasis on the edge of the vast Takla Makan desert, and home of the largest weekly
outdoor bazaar in Asia (which gave us visions of getting the first pick of antiquities
pouring out of starving Central Asian republics). (See map.)
So, we had five weeks, a guidebook, a destination, and a route (a new
highway, for godsake). And we had confidence. In 1990 we'd traveled through Thailand,
where we found abundant tourism assistance and where every little village took MasterCard.
Who needed a plan? Let's just go. Stay where we want as long as we want and leave when
we've had enough.
When I think about those days — those 5 weeks, I know they add up
to something more than the backdrop of an unpublished novel, but I'm not sure what. I have
a hundred pages of handwritten notes and 800 photographs, but I can't express what it was about.
I could probably summon up the common themes for road + buddy stories, but I don't
necessarily want to jam my own story into a universal template. I mean, the whole point of
traveling to the far ends of the earth is to break out of your own mental models, to
observe, to experience, precisely not to retrofit everything into preconceived
categories. (But I do love categories.) So perhaps I should just tell the story, one damn
thing after another, and watch my own themes emerge.
I can say this, right off the bat: Pakistan has nothing in common with
Thailand and no one takes MasterCard. And the highway was a two-lane notch
blasted into the sides of the planet's steepest and most unstable mountain range, where
the Indian sub-continent is still ramming itself into Asia. (Look at the photo above. The
thin slice out of the rock in the lower right is the Karakoram Highway.)
In general, we knew what we wanted to do, where we wanted to go. In
general, we were prepared to be flexible about our itinerary and to go with the flow. In
general, we packed well: one big backpack each, with detachable day packs, good shoes,
hats, clothes that were cool but befitting the Islamic sense of modesty, and medicines for
all ailments.
Go with the flow. What a beautiful, easy image. How often do we
say that to people who have trouble with change? Go with the flow. Go with the fucking
flow. What flow?!? What exactly is it that's flowing for me to please-God
hitch a ride on? There was no flow in traveling the Karakoram Highway — just
one nerve-wracking portage after another.
Things stopped flowing the moment we arrived in Karachi and
learned that time-zone confusion had caused us to book the flight to Rawalpindi on the
wrong day. Five weeks later, as we were about to get on the plane out of Karachi, we were
detained as suspected terrorists. In between, we were continually in harm's way and our
only defense (I'm still convinced of today) was our big American smiles. It certainly
wasn't our intelligence.
I think I need to take my time with this story. Two of my other trip
diaries I rushed to transcribe and put them on my website with little more reflection than
was already contained in their pages. But this time I think I'll linger a little and probe
deeper to see how the passage of time  might let new insights emerge.
Link to
the next installment in the Pakistan Chonicles. |
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