of
thousand
people in the fight of the Afghanistan,” he said in his slow, dignified English. g “I killed the more people, from Russia. —Russian! In Holy Qur’an say, ‘Don’t kill the peoples,’ but
who
is peoples? Peoples, he is peoples when he going by the
Holy Books
. Holy Books is four: Qur’an, Bible, [indecipherable], Torah is the Books. h These people is
people
. Who is don’t like the Books, he—
no
people! The
Roos
is wild. Like horses, like donkeys, like cows, they are coming in the Afghanistan here—invasion to Afghan countries! We don’t like them. I kill
more
of the Russians in Russian forts. He living in the Afghanistan now. He came, the
Roos
, him, from Russian country to our countries. They are
fighting
with me, they KILLING our little boys—he drinking milk, he hitting, they taking on his shoulder and his small small hand and small feets, they take him away, they kill him; this is not good.” —(The Brigadier shook his fist; he cried; I can never forget the anguish with which he said this.) —“Our children they are killing,” he said. “Our children, and our girls, and our old mans and young mans … In the fight, he taking and putting in the tank, between the tank, the young man and the young girls that are fighting with him; he killing! They are doing the
zillah
with the dead mans. i They, they
sexing
the dead girls! j They are like donkeys, from another world. I kill them! They kill me! I kill them!”
II
THE REFUGEES
5
“OR AT LEAST A LONG HALT”:
REFUGEES IN THE CITY
(1982)
From the Young Man’s sketch map
And Peshawar is now, as always, very much a frontier town. The formalities of dress and manner give way here to a free and easy style, as men encounter men with a firm handclasp and a straight but friendly look. Hefty handsome men in baggy trousers and long loose shirts swing along with enormous confidence, wearing bullet-studded bandoliers across their chests or pistols at their sides, as if it were a normal part of their dress. There is just that little touch of excitement and drama in the air that makes for a frontier land. An occasional salvo of gunfire—no, not a tribal raid or a skirmish in the streets, but a lively part of wedding celebrations.
… Peshawar is the great Pathan city. And what a city! Hoary with age and the passage of twenty-five centuries; redolent with the smell of luscious fruit and roasted meat and tobacco smoke; placid and relaxed but pulsating with the rhythmic sound of craftsmen’s hammers and horse’s hooves; unhurried in its pedestrian pace and horse-carriage traffic; darkened with tall houses, narrow lanes and overhanging balconies; intimate, with its freely intermingling crowd of townsmen, tribals, traders and tourists—this is old Peshawar, the journey’s end or at least a long halt, for those traveling up north or coming down from the Middle East or Central Asia, now as centuries before when caravans unloaded in the many caravan-serais now lying deserted outside the dismantled city walls or used as garages by the modern caravans of far-ranging buses.
from a brochure by
T HE P AKISTAN T OURISM
D EVELOPMENT C ORP ., L TD .
(ca. 1979)
“Or at least a long halt”
T rying so hard to generalize (why, I really don’t remember), the Young Man Who Knew Everything explained to his notebook: “The uncleanliness of American cities is composed of such items as shattered bottles and blowing newspapers, beer cans, chemical spills, Styrofoam incubators for hamburgers, and the like. In Pakistan production and distribution are not nearly as advanced; accordingly, the diet of its cities is hardly so rich, and their excretions and lymphatic disorders have an altogether different character. Much that would be thrown away in the U.S.A. is prized here—and of course there are no beer cans.” —Peshawar, then, was a city of tumbledown streets and filth; and the Young Man, with his preference for advanced trash,