Pakistan

… And seeing the mountains from the plane as it started to run in towards Islamabad, and the sunlight catching on the high ice, blue and yellow, and straining my neck in the economy class seat and trying to work out if it was Tirich Mir I was looking at, or one of the giants further east. And the first feeling of the livid heat wriggling against my face at the top of the steps from the plane. The smell of hot plastic and rust in the battered yellow taxi, and the shiny prayer disc dangling from the windscreen as we bounced along the Murree Road. And hearing the muezzin for the first time, cutting through the jet-lag sleep and realising that I was back. The first scalding mouthful of sweet tea, and mutton karahi from a sizzling pan with a pile of naan with the taste of the tandoor still on it, eaten in a dark, dark chaikhana somewhere off the Qissa Khwani, and all the other men eating with their red-stained eyes and hollow cheeks and grey beards.

Standing out on the little crooked balcony over the street in ‘Pindi as the sun went down and seeing the kites going up into the dense air all across the city and the colour of the sky fading from purple to red to orange to pale, pale blue up high, and the muezzin again.
Going north on the Karakorum Highway, and feeling the air change and seeing a man in the bazaar in Abbottabad with a knife in his hand, holding a struggling chicken over a block, and turning, but not seeing the knife fall as the bus sped on. And dozing with my head rolling on the back of the seat and knowing when we were passing through a town because of the sweet-sickly-bitter-spiced smell of the bazaars. And being already in the high mountains by sunset, and stopping in the humming dark for the men to pray beside the road in a space of brushed dust, and a man who hadn’t even been speaking to me paying for my food. And coming over the Lowari Pass from the South and feeling that I was leaving the world behind as the minibus began to wind down through the pouring switchbacks.
And staying at Ingineer Khan’s in Rumbur valley, and drinking wine, and the silence after dark, and the stars, and in the morning hearing a Kalash girl playing a flute as she sat under a walnut tree, and villagers all the way along the valley stopping me and pressing handfuls of walnuts on me until my bag was full.

The light coming gold on the high peaks behind Sor Laspur and being high between Gilgit and Chitral in October, and the blue, blue of the river, and the colour of the poplars and how slow the journey was before they metalled the road, and the bitter wind on the pass. Eating pomegranates with a Chitrali prince, in a crumbling palace high over the valley, and sitting in the dark in the freezing cold in Khapalu clustered around an oil lamp with three huge Pashtuns from Waziristan who were singing love songs about beautiful young men, and how good it felt to reach Astor coming down from the rain on the Deosi. And feeling lonely, for just a fraction of a minute in Skardu until a man from Gilgit paid for my kebabs. And the clatter of hooves and polo sticks and the red dust from the hooves and the smell of horsesweat, and being jostled through and pushed into a seat with the VIPs, and everyone stopping for a moment when the prayercall went up, then play starting again.

And in Gilgit in the Medina Guesthouse and Yaqoob refusing to take anything more than half of the money I owed after I stayed for five days, and finally having to turn back from the Rakaposhi base camp when the snow was up to my knees and everything was white and then how still and calm it was in the valley below and stumbling onto the carcass of a dead horse in the damp meadow. And walking north, across the valley from the highway, and gusts of dusty wind coming along the track and the mountains being so huge, and a man and a woman and a small child walking past me with only a smile and a nod, then a hundred yards on the man sending the little boy running back to give me an apple. And coffee and cake in the Café de Hunza. And warm bread for breakfast in Passu and the long light on the Tuppopdan Spires and a man digging potatoes from a hole under the moraine of the Passu glacier giving me tea with salt in it, and the road up there being smooth and blue and it being so, so cold at night. And feeling like I couldn’t be further from every trouble in the world.

And in Charpusan asking Alam Jan if the people in the valley were fasting for Ramadan, and him smiling and saying “Ramadan? What is Ramadan?”And being high, high up the valley, and knowing that if I had been there a month earlier I could have walked into Afghanistan and no one would have stopped me. And waking in the tiny little room in Baba Ghundi, where I was the only person left but the policeman and his daughter who fed me the night before, and knowing before I opened the door that it had snowed in the night…

And the feeling of aching longing, again, stronger than the last time even as the rattling red jeep pulled away from the Chinese border post, almost buried in snow, and began to roll downhill towards Tashkurgan…

© Tim Hannigan 2007