Blogging on Meds

When I visited the area around Peshawar in 2006 there were lots of potheads who loved folk music but no Taliban arguing how to excecute “spies.”

Peshawar, a Pakistani city of a million that sits on the Grand Trunk Road between Islamabad and Kabul, has been in the news recently. In short, the Pakistani Taliban have moved into surrounding areas and seem to be ready to assault the city. The Pakistani Army responded this weekend by shelling the militants.

Peshawar is the capital of North West Frontier Province, areas I visited in 2006. One of the major Nu Taliban hubs is Mardan, a small city that I went to when it was Taliban-free. From Mardan, I traveled 15 miles northwest to spend a few days in a small village called Khatti Garri. There, I found much Taliban sympathy, but no blatant sign that militant Islam would so quickly infiltrate the area.

Below is my journal from the trip. It offers a unique perspective on the people who live in what has become a Taliban hotbed. I found the Pushtu or Pathan (both words can be used, though I like the way the latter sounds better) people of NWFP to be funny, open-minded, and hospitable—and insane potheads, worse than Jamaican Rastas. I even went to a DIY folk concert. 

March 2006, Pakistan.

We’re on the road before sunrise. My childhood friend Zaryan, whose family I was visiting in Pakistan, are heading to North West Frontier Province, Pakistan’s untamed badlands. Driving us is Ijazz, a bulky, bearded 27-year-old who works as a driver for Zaryan’s family’s house. Zaryan convinced him to take us to his village of Katti Garri, two hours north of Peshawar, NWFP’s capital.  

From Islamabad, we drive an hour on an express highway before jumping on the famed Grand Trunk Road, a four-lane road crowded with flashy painted buses. A sign: Welcome to the North West Frontier Province, Peace Be Upon You. The 25-plus million who live in NWFP are of the same Pathan or Pashtun ethnic group that populates Afghanistan’s eastern flank. The province is among earth’s most untamed landscapes—a dangerous place of tribes and terrorists, smuggling and war, where kidnapping, rape, guns, honor killing, Sharia law, and drugs proliferate.

On Peshawar’s dusty, chrome-sky outskirts, we pass a bus station where 60 twisted black charred bus hulks sat, remnants of Danish cartoon violence (some Danish paper had run an illustration of the Prophet with a bomb as turban) looking like the aftermath of a firestorm. I beg Ijazz to stop, but he has a schedule: His wife, who he hadn’t seen in two weeks, expects him home by noon. Just before entering central Peshawar, we turn north.

An hour passes before we hit Mardan, a rough trade hub. Its main drag bustles. People throng around open-air stalls. Bbq grilles are next to bootleg DVDs stands. We sped by the town’s finest building, a white walled, 70-ft green-domed Mosque. I’d read stories in Dawn newspaper about marauding kidnapping gangs taking hostages for ransom and terrorizing Mardan. Unlike in Peshawar, I did not beg Ijazz to stop.

Ijazz soon veers off the main road to a series of one-lane paved and unpaved tracks that wind through rice fields and past stone house conglomerates. Ijazz calls these “mini-villages.” Few cars are on the road. Occasionally, we roar past a beat-up egg shaped bus or an old truck stacked with too much cargo overflowing with people hanging on the sides, back, and roof. I see no women on the streets, but do see a lot of men riding black bikes that looked like beach cruisers with colorful plastic beads attached to the spokes—the wheels whirling rainbows.

“We’re almost there,” Ijazz announces with pride. He drives with caution along the dirt road approach to his hometown.

The village of Katti Garri lies on a riverbank in the middle of an arid plain, though hovering nearby are a few small, chunky brown mountains that looked like rock candy. Some 4,000 people live in the village, all in slate and/or brick houses. Wood is a luxury in resource-starved Pakistan, and trees scarce across the surrounding flatlands.

After parking, Zaryan, Ijazz, and I walk on muddy roads barely wide enough for a car. Red, black, and green flags flutter above buildings, all slate and brick with few windows. “There is no police force here,” Ijazz says. “In Katti Garri Islam is law.”

After jump, hash fiends dominate NWFP youth culture.

Children play a pick-up game of cricket at the local ground on the riverside, ringed by white stones, with “Welcome” inscribed by more white stones on the ground’s far side. Harvest was still a few months away, and bursting green rice fields stretch far into the town’s outskirts.

At Ijazz’s family’s compound, two young cousins stand waving in front of a metal gate. Aged 8 and 11, both boys have shaved heads (to avoid lice) and wear gray shalwar kameezes wrapped by Kashmiri shawls. After a few minutes of waiting in a walled courtyard, we’re brought to our quarters–a small, minimalist concrete room with two rope cots and low-slung seating.

“My family has one of the best houses in Katti Garri. Thirty people live here,” Ijazz says. Still, there was no television, no car, and no computer; half the compound has dirt floors. 

Word of our arrival spreads fast through the village and soon a few dozen men and boys invade the compound, surrounding us, all staring. Pathans are light skinned, often olive in tone, and with their sharp green and blue eyes they could pass for Europeans. In a lawless society, it’s little wonder these beautiful, uneducated people may want to keep their woman locked away.

In fifteen minutes two men have already told me, upon guessing I was American, that the Taliban were misunderstood: “They are a pious people. What is wrong with them? Talib means student of Islam. That is all they: Allah’s best students.”

Six men have asked if I was Muslim by the 20-minute mark. No, a Christian, I lie, since being a Jew wasn’t really an option.

“Christian good religion. American people good,” the man says in broken English, “Your cowboys like guns and dancing girls—-just like Pathan films!” It’s true, the cinema of the region was a cross between Bollywood musicals and Hollywood Westerns, one hundred shoot out fights and one hundred bhangra lady dances, as they say. “But American government bad.”

Every Pakistani remembers how the US abandoned Pakistan after the Cold War, saddling up with India and imposing sanctions, as if Pakistan hadn’t helped defeat and bankrupt the Soviets in Afghanistan, thus setting in motion Communism’s unraveling. Americans sometimes ask, “Why do they hate us?” Pakistanis don’t hate us, they hate our foreign policy, which supports the Punjabi-dominated Pakistani Army  and kills Muslims around the world. Actually, the Pathans in this village loved the American myth of hard-working, religious, individualist frontiersmen. It’s the same myth as their own.

Ijazz became apprehensive about the scene we’d caused and offers to take us on a village tour. We start walking through the village, but more and more people keep joining us. Soon, over thirty men and boys are following us down mud roads towards the river. (During our time in Katti Garri, Zaryan and I would meet hundreds of men but manage not to see a single woman.) Adding legitimacy to the Pied Piper scene at hand is a teenage boy playing a hand-made wood flute (like the recorders of grade school music class) delivering a simple soundtrack. The group meets the river and walks along its bank’s footpaths. 

Just outside town, we come across a family of Afghan refugees squatting in an animal skin tent, a few donkeys, sheep, and chickens their only possessions. One of Ijazz’s friends begins cursing the family, calling them “dirty Afghan thieves,” as Ijazz translated. Xenophobia is a classless bias in Pakistan. I noticed many Pakistanis felt its neighbors, and the world, are against her, which makes sense considering that Pakistan is the most fenced off nation on earth besides Israel.

We climb a two hundred feet to a mountaintop Sufi shrine. A tomb—white stone-carved, above ground—is smothered with flowers and green flags. The flute boy plays a faster pace, more joyous tune. Sufism is a mystical strand of Islam fond of music, dancing, and known for its liberal interpretations of the Koran. While few Pakistanis are purely Sufi, nearly all celebrate Sufism good time vibe.

The shrine faces another, slightly larger mountain. Below, the river cuts between the valley. Limestone infected green-blue rapids bubble white foam. One of the men with us, Ijazz’s uncle, is showing off his Kalashnikov. The gun has an eagle carved on its grip. He took a squatting position and fires the weapon. Three rounds burst out. The young boys cheer. Three more rounds were squeezed off. Excited by the gunfire, the boys begin skipping rocks off the mountainside.

The day is overcast, comfortable but quite humid. Zaryan wears a black leather jacket and black jeans. I wear jeans and a t-shirt. To a man, everyone else wears shalwar kammeezs, the basic two piece suits of the Pakistani everyman, defined by a flowing cotton shirt over pants of the same color. All wear leather or plastic sandals.

This style may sound homogenous, but no more so than the jeans, sneaker, and t-shirt clad youth of the West. Pakistani men take their shalwar and sandals combo with as much seriousness as sneaker and high-end jean obsessed “metro-sexuals.”

On the walk through town to the shrine, every time an old friend neighborhood friend greeted Ijazz, there was the requisite hug, followed by an up and down stare off to see who had the best gear. Sandals compared, shalwar stitching investigated, hair and beard styling approved or disapproved, and cell phones fiddled with, showing off different funky ring tones. Because Ijazz had access to the bazaars of Rawalipindi, Islamabad’s twin city, he usually won these fashion stand offs against his provincial friends.

Pathan style was co-opted by Bin Laden and Al Qaeda when they were here fighting the 80s Jihad. The look was mixed with Gulf Arab and Che Guevera revolutionary styles and is now associated with Islam’s struggle against the West. It has become a commercialized political fashion statement, much like the punk or hippy styles. Even the poorest, most conservative Muslims in Pakistan suffer from status anxiety and want to look as cool as they can.

In fact, Ijazz hopes to someday find a career in fashion, as he hates the servant life. He is paid to drive and run errands for the Zaryan’s family house, working far away from his village. While I never learn his salary, I understood it couldn’t have been more than $200 per month. “I am not a donkey,” Ijazz had said one day after being yelled at for not wanting to pour Scotch for religious reasons.

All Ijazz wanted is to buy a house in his village and open a clothing shop. But a small house would cost him around $2500, more than he can afford, and start-up money for for his business would be another $1000. “Pants, shirts, sandals, shawls—this is what I want to sell. Simple clothes for simple men,” Ijazz tells me as we stood on the hilltop.

Zaryan points to a Charles Manson looking friend of Ijazz’s rolling a hash cigarette. Ijazz notices our enthusiasm, smiles, then introduced us to his Manson pal, and I’m sure mentions his name, but the joint was already in my hands, and lit, and my memory fails me. The hash, or charas, was brittle and causes my head to feel like a radiator.

Ijazz doesn’t smoke drugs, he’s very religious, but he isn’t against hash like he is alcohol. This is pretty common among the “beards,” which is a common nickname describing the more fundamentally religious Pakistanis. (In my six months in Pakistan, never did I meet a beard that decried marijuana as a crime against Islam, even in militant Madarassas, though “Do you smoke hash?” wasn’t always my first question to the Mullahs.)

Ijazz’s uncle fires his gun once again. More cheers.

I ask Ijazz if he was happy to see his wife. “Yes,” he says. “But she is weeping. Always she is weeping.”

“She misses you.”

“Yes. But there is more. She lost a baby,” to a miscarriage I assumed.

“Oh, that’s terrible.”

“I know. We will try again.”

Conversation moves to a lighter topic: lunch.

All thirty of us slowly walk back towards the village on a curving hillside path. Some of the group breaks off and heads in other directions. High above us, groups of men smash the mountain with sledgehammers. The mountain looks as if it had been bombed: shattered white stones were sprinkle around large outcroppings.

One of the stone workers yells down to Ijazz. The men are his friends, Ijazz reports. We decide to climb and join them. An old Russian tractor blocks the trail in front of us. Rock piles sat at the tractor’s rear and in an attached truck bed. The men with the sledgehammers are rolling the rocks down the hill. 

“Are they really rolling stones?” Zaryan asks, rhetorically, laughing.

About ten of us from climb to join the three stonerollers on a steep perch shaded by a chopped up mountain wall. Ijazz says his three stone cutting friends were all aged twenty-something. They spend their days laboring in the mountains, cutting and lugging stones to the village. A full day’s work might yield a few dollars. If they sold the stones, that is. Since there was so little work in Katti Garri, too many young men chop stones, and thus the market is flooded.

Tea is served by a stoneroller who looks like Luke Skywalker. Ijazz explains the man is an expert rebob player, a rebob being a banjo sized sitar. That night, like most nights in Katti Garri, Ijazz says there was to be a concert. He asks if we want to attend this “music program,” adding that there would be a lot of “charas.” Of course we did.

After tea, each stoneroller rolled a joint by hollowing out a cigarettes, mixing it with hash, then repackaging. Minutes later four joints are being passed. These Pathans literally spend every day getting stoned and rolling stones—Bob Dylan’s song, the band and magazine of the same name, be damned! This was something else, man. While the rolling stones of the 60s counterculture gathered no moss, it was precisely the gathering of moss—the stagnant reality of being poor and jobless—that forces these young men to chop and roll stones.

After dark, Zaryan and I go with Ijazz to the music program. A crowd of fifty-plus men and boys pack a rectangular flat-roofed one-story building with slate walls and dirt floors littered with hay. During the day, this de facto music hall is a volunteer run medical clinic. The venue reminds me of basement and community hall hardcore shows. People sit on rope-thatched cots. A wavy cloud of hash and tobacco smoke billows; a dangling light bulb the eye of the storm.

By 10pm everyone chants Uurdu. Three men make up the band. Luke Skywalker, the stoneroller, kicks the show off, playing the rebob with ferocity—a dink, dink, dink twangy sound like a banjo from India. Two crude drums made from rawhide and jugs balance the rebob’s twanging rhythm. Lead vocals mainly fall to a big, smiling, curly haired and mustachioed cousin of Ijazz. The set’s a series of punk length (2 min) Pathan folk songs of love, God, and hope. The lyrics must be funny, too, because there’s mucho laughter. Each tune uses a building verse to a rollicking chorus.

By reputation, Pathans are supposedly amongst the world’s most conservative people. Yet I’ve never witnessed such flagrant marijuana consumption in front of children—even in Jamaica.

Towards the end of the performance the crowd chants “Ijazz, Ijazz.” He hops up to do a dance. It looks like faster Tai Chi.

The concert ends before midnight. A young, handgun-toting cousin of Ijazz guards us in our sleep.

Zaryan taped the event on a borrowed Chinese-made boom box. The next morning, on our way back to Islamabad, we listen to the cassette, a raw hash-influenced record unlike anything we’d likely ever hear or see again.