The Sunday Times
June 7, 2009
Jemima Khan's broken country
Jemima Khan
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article6446446.ece
In
Jemima at a camp for Afghan refugees in
The day I'm leaving for
Ten men are lined up and each one is filmed talking inaudibly to camera. The first man is pinned to the ground by four others. His throat is slit like a goat at Eid and his head held aloft by his hair. The Urdu subtitle reads: "This is what happens to spies." It's a Taliban home video — to jaunty music — of serial beheadings. There are plenty of these doing the rounds nowadays.
I'm off to
For my last four years in
It's hardly a tourist destination these days so I'm surprised to find that the flights are all full. I am an aerophobe; my real fear is getting there. The only direct flight is on PIA, otherwise known as Please Inform Allah. British Airways stopped flying there after the Marriott bomb attack in
As I'm packing, my London neighbour, the comedian Patrick Kielty, drops off a parcel containing The Complete Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook with a note pointing out the pages on how to escape when tied up, how to take a bullet and how to survive if you wake up next to someone whose name you don't remember.
I arrive in
Yet before disembarking we are obliged to fill out two forms. Recent proximity to pigs and/or Mexicans will result in an obligatory spell in quarantine. It must be the name of the virus that's causing alarm. Pakistanis dislike pigs. Until quite recently my children thought the word for pig was "gunda-pig" (dirty pig). The wild boar in
I'm staying with Imran, my ex-husband, and our children in the house I helped to design but which we never lived in together. It's on top of a hill outside
I was pregnant and scarpered to
Had I been an aspiring politician, I'd have stayed put in
The next day I set off for the refugee camps close to the Swat valley, where the army is fighting the Taliban. Before I leave, Imran's chowkidar (watchman) tells me that the newspapers in
Jalala camp between Mardan and Mingora is the first point of refuge for those escaping the military operation in Swat. It's full to capacity: 80% of internally displaced persons are children. Thousands have been separated from their parents when fleeing their homes.
Two children are fighting over coloured crayons when I arrive. A girl with blistered burns on her face from the sun shouts at a small boy who turns out to be her brother: "If you don't give them back to me I'll tell the Taliban and they'll cut your throat."
According to the teacher in the camp, every child has witnessed public beheadings. Eight-year-old Amina explains quietly from behind her teacher how she saw her uncle's stomach gouged out by the Taliban. Another girl's mother was shot for not being in purdah. And another was shot at with her family when she was walking outside during the curfew. Seven-year-old Bisma, I'm told, has seen all the male members of her family hanged in what has become known as
The children are equally afraid of the army. There's a joke going round: "What's worse than being ruled by the Taliban? Being saved by the Pakistani army." When the chief minister landed in a helicopter next to the camp a few days ago, I'm told, the children fled screaming in terror to their tents.
A group of small children are drawing pictures, part of an art therapy programme run by Unicef in its child-friendly spaces within the camps. Here traumatised children can play volleyball, sing songs and be read stories in shaded safety.
A boy called Salman hands me a precisely drawn and signed picture of a Kalashnikov. A shy eight-year-old girl sitting cross-legged next to him, with her grubby green dupatta half obscuring her smile, offers me hers of a helicopter shelling a village. "That's my house," she says, pointing to some scribbled rubble.
Their schools and homes have been destroyed. All have had relatives killed. An orphanage in Mingora was caught in the crossfire when soldiers based themselves on the roof of the building with 200 children trapped inside.
After an hour and a half in the camp we are asked to leave for security reasons. Apparently the Taliban have been infiltrating, trying to recruit supporters.
There's certainly support for the Taliban in the camps. They represent, for many, an opposing force to an army that "drones" (it's now a verb here) its own people.
The following day I drive to
As I approach
Compared with the tranquillity and solitude of Imran's mountain-top idyll,
It's the first time I've been to
Imran's father died last year and I'm here to offer condolences, a cultural imperative. It involves visiting the bereaved, in this case my former sisters-in-law, and offering a formal prayer in Arabic, arms extended, palms open, for the deceased.
I'm nervous as I haven't had any contact with them — bar my Facebook friendship with the children — since getting divorced, but everyone is exceptionally warm and welcoming. I cry when I hug Imran's niece, who was 13 when I first arrived in
I'm staying at the haveli (mansion) of Imran's old schoolfriend, Yousaf Salahuddin, in
You need only to read Salman Rushdie's Shame to understand how important honour (izzat) and reputation are — although I shouldn't really write that. The last time I admitted to having read Rushdie (for my university dissertation on post-colonial literature), I had a thousand placard-waving beards outside my door and adverts in the papers, calling me an apostate and demanding that my citizenship be revoked.
Yousaf is
Once a politician in Benazir Bhutto's government, Yousaf is now a music producer and fashion aficionado. He has girlfriends — plenty and young — he smokes, he serves alcohol in his home, he loves music and models and he parties with Lollywood's glitterati. He also has a deep knowledge of Sufism and is a passionate supporter of restoration work in the old city.
Like everyone here he likes to opine: where
JP, a film-maker friend, is here to research a film about
As we arrive he is packing up his paints. His models, two gypsy sisters, one clutching a baby, are sitting quietly motionless on a mattress in a dark, windowless back room in his studio. Every half an hour in
We sit in candlelight in the thick, still heat and the girls sing classical songs, using upturned metal cups as instruments. Chewing betel nut, they giggle and reveal red-stained teeth. We cheer and clap and chuck rupees in appreciation.
I'm starting to feel sick and dizzy from the heat. Everyone's face is coated in sweat, strands of hair stick to the girls' faces as they sing, but nobody else seems bothered. Finally they take pity on me and we retreat prematurely to the dark, fabric-swathed, air-conditioned inner sanctum of Yousaf's haveli and stay there until nightfall when the old city begins to wake up.
Yousaf has invited a qawwali singer, Ustad Rahat Fateh Ali Khan, a huge star, to perform privately for us in his smoky underground music chamber.
Rahat's family have been qawwali singers for 600 years, the skill passed down from generation to generation. He shows me a video on his mobile phone of his five-year-old son performing qawwali. He has been training the child since he was two. The little boy sits cross-legged on a chintzy sofa, raises his tiny palms to heaven imploringly, closes his eyes and starts to sing, smashing his hands back down on make-believe tublas and throwing his head back in mock ecstasy with all the passion and panache of his ancestors.
We're joined by Iman Ali — or "monster" as Yousaf calls her — one of
She's extremely opinionated even for this ready-steady-rant society, prefacing each pronouncement with, "Well what would I know? I'm just a dumb model but . . ." She's very bold and at times perspicacious, especially about religion.
She tells us that Indians are all "cry babies" and Muslims would do better to be cry babies, too, and that way gain equal levels of sympathy abroad. I like her forthrightness. She says things others wouldn't dare to say here, albeit euphemistically.
She questions how it is that she is the most successful celebrity in
I return to the calm of the capital, scoop up my cricket-fatigued boys at 2.30am and head to
The airport was the first glimpse I had of
As we're jostled along towards the check-in area, I think about Pakistani society. It is an endless contradiction — hostile and hospitable, euphemistic and unambiguous, spiritual and prescriptive, aggressor and victim. Nothing sums up its topsy-turvy nature quite like the Heera Mandi in
To support Unicef's work in
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