Crossing the Line
He is coming soon. I can sense it. He’ll be here before dawn, in a few more hours, just as daylight cracks on the mountaintops. Like warmth fading from a bath, I feel his coldness creeping steadily up the valley. I’ve given word to the men to let him through unhindered, though he’ll never be out of their sight.
My name is Michaelson. You’ve heard of me. I’m the one they call mad. ‘Gone native’ was what they used to say about people like me. They say I’m evil, a sort of human tumor. I’m an object of hate. A mirror reflecting the darkness they fear.
I no longer believe.
They want to see me dead. Five times they’ve sent their assassins up this valley. Always this time of year, as soon as the snows melt and the apricot blossoms cover the trees. Five times they’ve forced me to act. He who lives by the sword shall die by the same, my father used to say. Evangelista, the one on his way, the latest assassin, will be here soon. Perhaps this time they will succeed. I am tired. My insides are eaten away. Perhaps I do have the madness. It is such a thin line. I’ll let you decide. But first let me tell you my tale.
I came to Afghanistan after the big quake. Four, maybe five years ago now. The villages around here were flattened–the landscape was a wasteland. Houses which had once protected little children and animals had become murdering things, squashing, splitting apart and covering all living beings. Mountains slipped away as new ones rose from the earth. For those minutes of terror, the ground became as unstable as the sea, sucking everything into its swirling mouth.
By the time I arrived, the first outsider, five days later, the survivors had crawled out from beneath the stones and earth, but they moved and blinked in slow motion. They spoke in whispers as if afraid to disturb the mountains again. Women wailed in silence for their dead. I had come with medicines, water pipes, sacks of food and gear of all types. Ready to rehabilitate the survivors, bury the dead and quarantine chaos from order. The agency had sent me up to establish a beachhead against the forces of disorder and local helplessness. It was nothing new. That’s what I do. I am an aid worker. A post-modern missionary.
That was before. Now I am mad.
My former colleagues, my co-religionists, who once praised and promoted me as a secular saint, now want me dead. Murdered is all right with them. I haven’t left the Wakhan, Afghanistan’s thin extended finger, since the quake. This is my home now, and these people are my family. I am safe with them, and they leave me alone. I ask nothing of them, but they give me all I need.
My father was a man of the old religion who believed in the salvation of souls and the mandate of Heaven. But I gave my soul to another Faith. I became an apostle of Humanitarianism. A creed universal and acceptable to all. Infallible and intolerant of dissent. My conviction in the Greater Good was no less strong than my old man’s had been in the Almighty. He had his Great Commission, given by the Spirit to spread the Word to every corner of the globe. We Humanitarians had the Imperative, given by ourselves, to ourselves, to feed the hungry, reconcile the fighting, empower the weak and to spread the new gospel: that the day of salvation was at hand once we arrived with our trucks full of kit, our experts full of knowledge, our bags of food, our tents and latrines.
I was a true believer. One of the Elect. If you wanted to make sure your program was a success, if you wanted to get a real mess cleared up, you got Michaelson. I cut my teeth in the Cambodian refugee camps in Thailand and in the dry lands of Ethiopia. Since then, I‘ve been spreading the gospel in dozens of places: Mogadishu, Kurdistan, Sudan and Guatemala. Freetown in ‘97, Sarajevo in ‘92. Great Lakes I and Great Lakes II. The biggest human disasters of our time. I liked that they called me great.
I accepted the agency’s call because they were paying well and because the Wakhan seemed about the farthest place from where I was: Angola, where I went cross-line.
***
They flew me in from Brussels and didn’t let me leave Luanda airport. Three pot-bellied big wigs, one each from the American Embassy, the European Union and the UN, briefed me for three hours in a huge room with grimy windows facing the sea. Russian cargo planes and fat troop transporters skidded and roared down the runway. The American is the only one I can still remember. Dick Jaspers was who he said he was as he shook my hand; I can’t remember who he said he represented.
I introduced myself but the other two didn’t say much. The UN guy slid his card across the table like he was putting a deposit down on a dirty deal. The European mumbled his name and took the notes. Jaspers, a former military man–I could read a hairdo–was in charge of the show.
He knew my CV real well, and ran through it; for the benefit of the other two, he claimed, but I think he really just wanted to let me know how much he knew. While he did, I stared out at the Atlantic and thought of all that oil beneath the surface and of the Indian diamond dealer who had sat next to me on the plane. Angola was rich and a rich country in Africa is to be pitied.
Jaspers stood up and with the aid of the UN man was blu-tacking a badly reproduced map of the country to the wall, making Angola look like a mess of spilled ink. There was a pocket of displaced persons, internal refugees, “right about here,” he said, moving his finger in a circle on the map. “In the Altiplano, the highlands. Rebel country.” There were, he reckoned, about 30,000 in Chitembo, 14 maybe 16, 000 in Cangote and an unknown number in the jungle between Vila Nova and Jamba. “About a hundred thousand, a hundred and a half, tops.”
Naturally, Jasper and his friends wanted to get food and relief to these people immediately. The jungles of the Altiplano were thick and the roads completely fucked if they existed at all. Most of the fighting was further to the west, Jaspers said, but mines were a problem and the fact that the DPs, the displaced persons, were spread over a space of several hundred square kilometres would mean this project needed strong leadership. “Which is why we insisted upon you, Michaelson.”
I’d run similar missions deep in Zaire, before it became Congo. At least these DPs weren’t on the run moving deeper into the jungles like Hutus fleeing Rwanda. Setting up a camp is one thing but running mobile soup kitchens in the middle of a forest that hasn’t been penetrated in centuries is insane. This operation, what Jaspers and these other two wanted me to do, seemed a cinch.
The hitch of course was that it wasn’t. Angola was not Congo. War here was a refined art; they’d been at each other’s throats, burning each other’s villages, stealing each other’s children, and violating one another’s women for thirty years without intermission. Lines here were never crossed. You chose to work on one side of the line or the other. Either you worked with the government or you worked with United Movement for Angola, UMFANG. The rebels. No question. Angola was an expensive place to operate out of. Every agency had to run double programs. Like working in two different countries. People who worked in UMFANG-controlled areas never saw Luanda. And if you worked in Lobito forget visiting your colleagues in Caimbambo, just thirty klicks up the pike. The country was stained in hate and distrust and we agencies began to act that way too. You distrusted your sisters and brothers working across the line. You despised them. Hate grew inside you like a hungry worm.
Jaspers was saying that this project was unique and innovative. Cutting edge was the phrase he used. This was the first cross-line operation ever attempted in this country.
“The front lines in this area,” Jaspers was tracing his finger down a river and then inland and then back towards the river, “are always shifting.” Because the DPs were stuck behind both lines and because the armies were so close, they were pretty freaked out. Constantly moving a few miles this way and then back the other direction. They were getting pretty weak; some had already died from desperation. They need help, Jaspers said, but no one was willing to set up a program across the lines. Too risky. Who wanted to lose all their vehicles and supplies? No one wanted to put the lives of their staff at risk. The government troops up in the Altiplano were the toughest; they had been given liberties, a different rulebook, than their fellow soldiers in the lowlands.
“I thought the DPs were in rebel-controlled land,” I said to Jaspers, still looking out at the black ocean.
“Some of them are. Chitembo is a UMFANG town. Vila Nova isn’t. Cangote goes back and forth, depending.”
The European kept taking notes. The UN just nodded.
“Depending on what?”
“Things.” Jaspers wasn’t a smoking man ,but he looked like he could use a cigarette. I turned away from the window to look at him. He had sat down next to the UN man and for a moment avoided my eyes. I waited.
“Hell, I’ll level with you, Michaelson,” he stood up again but then sat right back down. “This is Angola we’re dealing with. It’s different here.”
“What are you telling me?”
Angola, he said, was not just another screwed-up African backwater ala Somalia. There were things at stake here. Lots of things, like wealth and influence, for example. Oil and diamonds. Coastal waters thick with fish and the richest soil in Africa. Angola was prime real estate. South Africa right there, Congo to the east. French, British and American oil companies had been here for decades, but they had never been allowed to truly exploit the black crude because of the fighting. The time had come, Jaspers said. The world wasn’t prepared to stand around any longer waiting for the government and UMFANG to settle this thing. “They’ve had 30 years already, for Chrissakes, and they’re no nearer ending the war then when the Portuguese left in ‘75.”
Angola needed development. But that just wasn’t going to happen, Dick Jaspers said, as long as the military situation remained as it was. One side had to get the upper hand. Sure, everybody, the UN, the Europeans, we Americans, hell, even the Russians, were trying their damnedest to keep both parties true to the peace accord, “But to be honest, Michaelson,” Jaspers sighed, “there comes a day when you gotta draw a line.”
I suspected there was more to come.
“Since the last government offensive in November,” Jaspers was back at the map pointing at things, “UMFANG hasn’t been able to get back to Vila Nova. It’s immensely important to them, symbolically. Where their movement started back in the early sixties. A holy sort of place. But the government has the town locked up tighter than a you know what.” Jaspers coughed but didn’t smile; I was getting antsy. I could sense where he was leading but I just wanted the bottom line.
The bottom line was that this was not your straightforward humanitarian mission. Sure, the DPs, on both sides of the front line, needed assistance, but so did the UMFANG units in the area. If they could recapture Vila Nova, the government would suffer a psychological blow that just might bring the whole corrupt facade down like the walls of Jericho.
What did they need me for, I wondered.
“To make sure that the two programs go ahead with equal urgency but that the, ah…um, assistance to UMFANG segment doesn’t get out of the bag. There’ll be lots of publicity, media interest and what not, in the relief program ‘cause it’s the first time anyone’s attempted it across the lines. So that’ll be a natural diversion, so to speak, from the other operation.”
The other operation, the guns for the rebels part. I raised my eyebrow and turned around and asked who was running that?
Jaspers said not to worry. What he needed me to do was to keep the focus on the relief side of things. He and his sour companions wanted a perfectly run operation, something the media and the UN could feel proud about. Something so clean, so big, even Woodward and Bernstein wouldn’t suspect the shadow operation. “Can you handle it?” Jaspers asked.
I know what you’re thinking: running guns and grain in parallel convoys, you got to be kidding, right? But what Jaspers had to say didn’t phase me. I’d seen the same thing done in Afghanistan in the early ‘80s and you’re looking at one of the Contras biggest fans. You can’t swim in the river without getting wet.
I could handle it, I said, as long as we kept a couple of things absolutely crystal clear. One, UMFANG kept Jaspers’ guns pointed at government soldiers and, two, they stayed out of the DP camps. As long as the Greater Good was being served, Jaspers’d have no problems from me. In this world things aren’t always as clear-cut as we’d like them to be. Making sure the rebels got a steady stream of weaponry may be a humanitarian act. Who knows? Depends which side of the line you look at it from.
***
I set up base in Chitembo because it was the furthest settlement from the fighting and because the airstrip there seemed like it could be re-rolled quickly if we needed to. The few buildings that hadn’t been destroyed had no windows and were pock marked from bearing the brunt of thousands of artillery shells. Kids in tattered shorts and barefeet played on the rusting Russian tanks that lay half buried in grass and clay on the edge of town. The DPs were huddled close to the town to avoid the constant shelling in the jungles. Every building overflowed. Excess humanity shivered under tin, or plastic, or shanties with leafy roofs. The highland colours are the only pleasant memory of the place I have. Wide blue skies, the burnt red clay roads, green green jungle, black faces. Red mangoes, yellow plantains, avocados by the ton.
The little market started to grow again as soon as we arrived. The three camps around town and the market drew people out of the jungles like a magnet. Creaky lorries, with old tires bolted on the wheels, splashed through the puddles. Twisted, rusted metal-framed beds, scraps of blue plastic, roots, cassava, scrawny chickens and porcelain toilet bowls looted from the houses, were put on sale on the side of the road. That thin, skittish Congolese music flowed out of battered tape machines from morning till night. Chitembo was a carnival at the gates of hell.
Jaspers found some Australian engineers and a slew of Irish nurses. We set up camps near Vila Nova and in Cangote as well. Jungle was cleared, roads were bulldozed, latrine pits three meters deep were gouged into the earth, huge tin water tanks erected. Overnight six new villages complete with clinics, food stores, administrative offices, whorehouses and video halls sprung up on the outskirts of the three camps. We worked our asses off but when the camps were finally up and the displaced families issued with their ration cards you couldn’t help but feel good. The Europeans made sure we had all the money we needed, and those camps were the best I’d ever seen. Each time I drove through the camps with the kids jumping and hanging from the jeep, seeing the queues by the water collection points and nurses weighing the new babies, I tell you it was a feeling like a king. Almost divine. We had done it again. Drawn a thin line between madness and order.
After an endless series of meetings and negotiations with government and UMFANG, both sides agreed to let our vehicles move freely across the lines. As long as we gave each side notice each morning and as long as we kept to the one radio channel they allowed us. There were teething problems, to be sure. Government commanders tried to negotiate a cut of the food rations. Some of our nurses were detained for 6 hours by drunken UMFANG soldiers at a checkpoint, but they were just young boys having a hoot. Both UMFANG and the government were glad to have us in the area because our camps meant they could officially wash their hands of any responsibility for the displaced and concentrate on the real objective: continuing the war.
I didn’t see Jaspers much once the camps were set up. On one of his trips up from Luanda he introduced me to the UMFANG regional supremo, Joao Batista Mulagu, a tall man with a wrestler’s chest who never removed his sunglasses and who wore a rubber shower cap under his blood-coloured beret. Once a week I’d travel out to his bush headquarters to be briefed on the ‘other’ operation. Whenever his people harassed us at the checkpoints, I reported it to Joao Batista, and he took care of it. He was always interested to know how the camps were running, and expressed his appreciation for the international community’s kindness to his people. I wasn’t looking for a friend and only visited him to make sure his men stayed away from my camps.
Commander Joao loved to smoke, and had a collection of smoking paraphernalia. One afternoon before the rains started in earnest, with the sky bruised all black and blue with heavy, threatening clouds, he pulled out his leather case and proudly showed me his collection of pipes, cigarette cases, lighters, worn leather tobacco pouches and Portuguese wooden match boxes, decorated with pictures of old Popes and the dictator Salazar.
“In three days we go for Vila Nova,” he said, setting the case on the camp bed. We sat inside his large canvas tent drinking rum and warm banana beer. Outside you could hear the low rumble of heavy lorries rolling through the camp; Jaspers’s convoy of arms, mines and ammunition.
“Will you take it?” I asked. I hoped so. That would mean easier access to the camps around Vila Nova. I didn’t think, like Jaspers and Joao Batista, that the government was going to collapse if they lost the town but if the rebels managed to move the front line back towards the lowlands, that would give the DPs more protection.
“We have the weapons this time,” Joao was tamping the tobacco into a large-bowled pipe. “And the men are eager and brave. But in warfare you always need some luck.” He smiled at me from behind the veil of smoke that rose from the pipe with each deep pull.
The rum was sweet but the banana beer rancid. I avoided the dirty glass of it that he had placed in front of me. I returned his smile but wanted to leave.
“You have been good to us Mr. Michaelson, to my people. Without your camps we would not have been able to concentrate on our main goal.”
“That’s what it’s all about, Commander Joao,” I said. I had no idea what it took to win a battle, whether luck played a part in victory or not. All I knew was that on this continent there were millions of people who needed help and that it was up to people like me and the nurses and our logisticians and engineers to save them. Nothing would happen if we left it to the government of Angola or UMFANG. Without me and my people, his people were snowballs in hell.
I finished my rum and lit a cigarette of my own. I stood up to leave. Commander Joao rose as well and put his hand on my shoulder. I bent my head and moved out of the tent into the humid, greying evening. Commander Joao’s pipe needed lighting too, so I held out my old Zippo lighter with the faded “HHH in 68” logo on it. His tobacco was nearly gone; he was having trouble getting the smoke going. But I was edgy and wanted to leave. “Add it for your collection, Commander,” I said. “Good luck at Vila Nova.”
A weak ray of sun flickered against his reflector shades as he waved to me. I drove out of the bush towards Chitembo.
The assault on Vila Nova never took place. The rains began to fall the night I left UMFANG headquarters and didn’t stop for a week. Floods were reported on several rivers and half of Cangote II camp was under water. One of my people radioed me to come as soon as possible but I couldn’t do anything till the rains stopped. On the ninth day after my meeting with Commander Joao, I took a driver and a jeep and headed down toward Cangote town.
The road was rutted deep making progress slow. We kept the jeep in low gear, moving steadily forward lest we got bogged in the red gluey mud. It was a beautiful morning. The black clouds were far to the east hovering over the hills but on three sides we had blue sky and revealing sunshine making the water on the avocado trees sparkle. You had the feeling, as so often in Africa, of looking out onto Eden.
At midday we had to turn off the main road because a bridge was out and a lorry had broken its rear axle and would block the way for days. The higher we climbed into the hills the rockier the narrow path became but the less muddy. We made good progress. With my arm out the window I was enjoying the sun for the first time in days.
Very few people were on the track. Most of the villages in this area had been forcibly evacuated years before. Both warring parties were desperate to ensure that no civilians remained to give succor or support to the enemy. The only people who lived outside the camps were the families of UMFANG fighters and the nuns who kept a watch over the churches and convents that lay in the shallow valleys like they were trying to avoid detection.
The wet sunshine stung my arm and neck. The driver said that his sister was a nun at the convent of Donna Maria de Corrao, just a few klicks up the road. Could we stop and have some coffee? The difficult driving conditions had exhausted him. I said yes, but that we had to make Cangote before dusk. I’d never been to the convent of Donna Maria de Corrao but some of my nurses visited the place every fortnight to deliver high protein cereal for the orphans.
We could see the square steeple of the convent’s chapel with its huge white cross from across the small valley. The driver moved faster, eager to see his sister and stretch his limbs.
When we pulled into the gate a half hour later we realised that the chapel was the only building not destroyed. Three long residential halls to one side, the school rooms behind the chapel and the shacks which housed the animals the nuns kept for food and milk were burned to the ground. All that remained were charred smouldering limbs of timber. All around the courtyard, strewn like cans of beer at a festival, were the heads and limbs of infants, small stuffed toys and grey and white pieces of the nuns’ habits. The sisters, their bodies contorted and twisted, some with the horror still on their dead faces, lay to one side. Blood, like pink spray paint, covered the chapel walls and next to a mound of burned animal and human carcasses lay a Bible and a calendar photo of an old church in Lisbon.
The driver walked through the carnage muttering to himself. He didn’t stop moving, just walking around and around in circles, whispering to himself as if he’d gone mad. The government had been active in this part of the country. The front line was on the other side of the bridge that had washed out, but the convent was definitely on the government side. Dirty fucking bastards.
The smell of death made my neck cold; my rage made me queasy. I was desperate to get to Cangote to protest to the government’s man. This sort of thing threatened our continued humanitarian presence in the area. I called to the driver who was still muttering and rubbing his fingers against his dry lips. I would drive. I started the jeep and was about to turn the wheel when near the pile of charred bodies I’d just come away from I saw something glint in the sun. I don’t know why but I got out of the car and walked toward it. It was only a few paces away. I stooped to pick it up. A battered Zippo lighter.
***
Jaspers couldn’t understand why I was leaving. I’d done, he said, such an outstanding job. Both operations were a success. Things were working out just like we planned. For once.
I said I couldn’t explain. I had to go. I caught the Sabena flight back to Brussels and then the quake happened. Sent eighteen villages and four thousand people under the ground. An agency I‘d done work for from time to time was surprised I was in town. Would I go? It was a humanitarian disaster. The worst thing to hit this part of the world since the last worst thing. Already they had raised a million and a half dollars without even trying. The victims needed food, medicine, shelter, the whole shooting match.
You’re our man, they said. We pay well.
I accepted.
It wasn’t Angola that I was afraid of, or running from. It was the blackness. Something had worked its way inside me at that convent, and it had begun to devour me from inside. It’s still eating me alive. The world ended for me at Donna Maria Corrao and I saw it for what it was. A conjurer’s trick. The lid popped off, revealing nothing but an empty box. The curtain of the temple had been rent from top to bottom. Dunant was dead.
That day when they said go to Afghanistan the people need you, they are suffering, I wanted only to cover the blackness. I flew to Islamabad and two days later, with a lorry loaded with pipe, chlorine, plastic sheeting, sacks of wheat and tins of oil, I jumped out on to a narrow mountaintop and surveyed the scene. The agency had sent a Dutch administrator and a water engineer from Bangladesh as my team. More would be recruited they told me, just get there now. It’s an emergency.
It was too late that day to do anything. And that night I saw the dream. The same one I had had since my visit to Donna Maria de Corrao. A vast landscape of devastation. Trees have been turned to stumps, rivers have run dry. Fields no longer produce paddy or wheat. People have shrunken into grotesque children. The sky is red and purple and the giants on the earth are ghostly and silent. They reach down with pale hands full of food but as the ‘children-people’ reach up the food disappears and the hands throttle the supplicant’s throats. Some ‘children-people’ do not come forward, preferring to cower in the shadows, afraid of and yet desperate for the attention of the giants of the land. In the earth are scraps of tattered clothes, broken pottery, shards of glass and twisted striplets of iron. It is ugliness. I am observing the scene, unsure of where I am but with a warm sense of familiarity. I’ve been here. This is where I live.
Slowly, a ‘child-person’ crawling on all fours approaches me. Its face is that of an old woman, wrinkled and ashen, but her body is of a nine month infant. Her eyes are black and impenetrable but as she moves with such fragility I am not afraid. I look at her. She moves closer and reaches out her small, fleshy hand. In it is a shard of green glass and I am afraid lest she harm herself. I come close and try to remove the glass from her hand but now she is growing larger, more adolescent. I reach for the glass but she moves her hand away and brings it to my neck. I know what she is to do. I don’t move. I feel the glass press against my skin and feel the vein pop as she cuts me open. She has now lost her child’s body and her face has become young. Her body is strong and adult and beautiful. She moves away and I see that the other ‘children-people’ have grown as well and the giants have disappeared. I am alone and dying. The people have turned away and left me.
***
The agency wanted to know what had become of the Bangladeshi and Dutch. Why did I not allow the helicopter to land? How could I explain the lack of communications from my side? Why didn’t I answer their messages? Had I forgotten that there were people to be saved? The world had responded to helplessness and chaos once again. What the fuck are you doing?
***
He’s here. I know he has arrived. Feel my him in limbs and neck. Here. They are cold. He’s brought the coldness. Even though it’s summer, I am shivering.
It will consume the little of me that is left.
They say I’ve gone mad. I’m the devil, is what they say. Michaelson is the devil. I’ve heard the reports. I know what goes on. Don’t think I don’t. This one, Evangelista, the sixth emissary to come and collect me. Why should I allow him to get away? I can’t resist any more. I’ve tried. I’ve tried to forget. To cover the blackness. I’ve prayed to it and cursed it and pleaded and let my mind be ravished by it, but it is never satisfied. There is no salvation.
My father was a man of faith. I told you that, didn’t I. He used to warn me, but what son listens to his father? I remember his warning. I can hear it now: the devil comes as an angel of light.
This is a story I wrote many, maybe 30 years ago. None of the people I shared it with liked it. They found it silly. I think its derivative and a bit too earnest. And pointless. But it was fun to write.
Rivers, Spies and a Treasure Trove of Stories (Pt. 1)
Lollywood: stories of Pakistan’s unlikely film industry
Rivers and Stories
His eyes might there command whatever stood
City of old or modern fame, the seat
Of mightiest empire, from the destined walls
Of Cambalu, seat of Cathian Can,
And Samarcand by Oxus, Temir’s throne,
To Paquin of Sinaen Kings, and thence
To Agra and Lahore of Great Mogul….
(Paradise Lost XI 385-91. John Milton)
Fourteen hundred kilometres due north of Bombay and seventeen hundred kilometres to the northwest of Calcutta, sprawled across the flat northwest plains, lay the fabled city of Lahore. The city, erstwhile capital of not just the Mughals but numerous Afghan, Arab, Turk and Hindu kingdoms, had a reputation that extended across oceans, continents and time itself. Lahore was mentioned in Egyptian texts and visited by travellers and adventurers from China and Arabia in the early centuries of the current era, all of whom valorised the river city as a place of incredible wealth, luxury and refined taste. Elizabethan poets and dramatists including Milton and Dryden, fascinated by the contemporary accounts of adventurers from France and Italy imagined Lahore to be one of the grandest cities ever constructed by humans. Even in the late 19th century, the Orientalist opera Le Roi de Lahore (The King of Lahore) by French composer Jules Massanet, ran to full houses and ecstatic reviews all across Europe and North America. It’s bungled-up quasi-historical plot, set in the 11th century, had Lahore ruled by a ‘Hindoo’ raja named Alim (a Muslim name!) who tries to rally his people to stop the Muslim invaders. Almost forgotten today, Le Roi de Lahore was able to succeed simply by playing on the city’s name, which more than any other conjured up the mysterious exotic Orient in the minds of 19th century Europeans.
Compared to Bombay or Calcutta, Lahore was a seeming backwater. It possessed none of the attributes of the sparkling imperial cities. Where Bombay was new and young, Lahore was ancient. Where Calcutta was the modern power centre of India, Lahore was the sometime capital of the recently vanquished House of Babur. The new colonial metropolises looked outward, beyond India, to the future. Lahore and its walled ‘inner city’ seemed to be the perfect symbol of an insular and irrelevant past.
Far from the coasts, a distant outpost of Empire, there was nothing about Lahore that would suggest that movies, this most modern and technologically complex of entertainments, would take root here. In the early days (1900-1935) films were produced in all sorts of town across the subcontinent. Hyderabad, Kholapur, Coimbatore, Salem and even Gaya, reputedly the site of where Siddhartha Gautama meditated under a bodhi tree on his way to becoming, the Buddha. All had film production units, though almost all fell by the wayside after one or two outings.
Movie making was a cottage industry of sorts and anyone with a story and some basic equipment could shoot a short film. But as the audience for movies grew and with it a demand for meaningful and quality content (there were only so many wrestling matches and train arrivals you could stomach), production became concentrated in Bombay, Calcutta and Madras. With the possible exception of the Prabhat Film Company, initially based in Kholapur but by 1933 centred in Poona (Pune), and which over a short life of less than 30 years produced only 45 films, Lahore was the only non-colonial city in South Asia to produce films of high quality, significant volume, in multiple languages over an extended period. And which continues to do so.
Why Lahore?
While Bombay, Madras and Calcutta had the location and access to new forms of capital and technology, the one thing they didn’t have much of prior to the arrival of the British was stories, the most ancient and beloved form of human entertainment. At heart, movies are nothing more than the most dramatic way of telling stories humans have yet invented. And prior to the arrival of Europeans, the three Imperial cities of India had little history. It was the British who conceived and built the cities; in essence their histories are inseparable from the history of the British Raj. This is not to suggest that the countryside around what became the three great Presidency cities was some terra nullius, devoid of human settlement and imagination. The islands of Bombay had been part of various kingdoms stretching back to prehistory and even under the Mauryas a regional centre of learning and religion. Various Hindu and Muslim dynasts had controlled the islands and, the settlements along the coast had well established links with far away Egypt. But by the time the English took possession of the islands they had lost any significant political or economic consequence. Prior to the East India Company there no Bombay.
So too with Calcutta and Madras. Though they were located in regions which had been part of ancient civilisations, both were mere villages that the English built into complex urban metropolises. Any stories that were told in these new cities had been brought in from outside. Bombay, Madras and Calcutta were blank canvases upon which was written a modern tale of interaction between Europeans and Indians. History was being created here. The past with its legends, myths and tales belonged to the countryside, the far away ‘interior’ from whence the cities residents had come to seek their fortunes.
Lahore, though, was different. It was not just ancient, it was still a vital, thriving city with a huge catalogue of stories stretching back to the very beginning of the Indian imagination. Like the other cities, Lahore attracted to it people from other parts of India but the stories they brought with them were absorbed into an already deep and luxurious sediment of fables, sagas and epics that remained every bit alive when the British arrived as they were when they were first told.
The Pakistani film industry, that which today some call Lollywood, is built more than anything upon this uniquely rich Punjabi culture. At the heart of which lies the immemorial city of Lahore. It’s worth taking a quick tour of this landscape to help us understand why the emergence of a movie industry here was not so much unlikely, as almost inevitable.
Treasure trove of tales
Punjab is the cradle of Indian civilisation. It was here in the land of five rivers (panj/5; ab/water) beyond which, in the words of Babur, Mughal India’s founding monarch, ‘everything is in the Hindustan way’, that the very story of India began.
Greater Punjab which includes all of the present day Province and State of Punjab in Pakistan and India, as well as parts of Khyber Pakhtunkwa, Rajasthan, Sindh, Haryana and Delhi, is home to one of the world’s richest, most variegated and dynamic of South Asia’s innumerable cultures. Peoples, and with them their stories, poems, music, gods, heroes, languages and ideas, have been flowing into the subcontinent via the Punjab since the earliest days of human settlement on the subcontinent. It is not in the least surprising that when the right historic moment arrived a lively and resilient cinema would be crafted from this treasure trove of material.
And to truly appreciate the deep roots of Pakistani films it is essential to have an understanding of the shared culture of language, song, theatre, poetry, storytelling and visual art that has distinguished this part of South Asia for millennia. It is from this profound tradition that Pakistani films initially took inspiration and upon which they continue to draw. And why, despite the many attempts to legislate against the industry, or even blow cinema halls up, Pakistanis keep making and watching movies.
Spies, scholars and antiquities
The good old man unfolds full many a tale,
That chills and turns his youthful audience pale,
Or full of glorious marvels, topics rich,
Exalts their fancies to intensest pitch.
Charles Masson
In 1832, while carrying out his undercover duties as a ‘news writer’ (spy) in the employ of the British East India Company, a certain Karamat Ali was taken by the recent arrival of a strange European in the bazaars of Kabul. Following from a distance he made mental notes of the character which he included in his next report to his control Mr. Claude Wade, British Political Agent in Ludhiana.
‘I would like to bring to your kind attention’ writes Karamat Ali in an undiscovered report, ‘the presence of an Englishman in the city. He keeps his hair (which is the colour of some of my countrymen who stain their beards with henna) cut close to his head. His eyes I have noted are the colour of a cat, by which I mean, grey and transparent. His beard is red as well. He appears to be a strong man as he has no horse or mule with him. His clothes are dusty from walking across the countryside and on top of his head he wears a cap made of green cloth. You may find it difficult to believe but he wears neither stockings nor shoes on his feet. I have learnt he carries with him some strange books, a compass and a device by which he reads the stars and thus makes his way from one place to the next. He answers to the name of Masson and speaks excellent Persian. I trust you will find this information helpful in your duties as Political Agent. Post Script. He could be mistaken for a faqir.’
Mr. Wade was well pleased with this information which he tucked away in the back of his mind. Over the next several years this mysterious Mr Masson continued to enter and exit official British communications like a phantom. Some reports had him pegged as an American physician from the backwoods of Kentucky. Others spoke of his brilliant command of Italian and that he was in fact a Frenchman. He popped up in Persia then Baluchistan; some reports detailed his convincing tales of journeys across Russia and the Caucasus.
But Afghanistan was where this strange morphing wanderer seemed most at home. He was reported to be interested in the history of some old earthen mounds outside of Kabul and had enlisted a number of the natives to assist him in his digging. Political Agent Wade kept tabs on Masson until finally three years after Karamat Ali’s report he wrote a letter to the wanderer with some shocking news. Over the years Wade had pieced together the mystery man’s history and in his letter he took great pleasure in letting Masson know about it.
‘I know who you are, Masson. And not just me. Calcutta is perfectly informed of your antecedents. The jig is up, old boy. You are not Charles Masson at all, sir. You are an Englishman and a traitor. Your true name is James Lewis born in London the son of a common brewer. You arrived in this ghastly country some dozen years ago as a private soldier in the Bengal European Artillery 1st Brigade, 3rd Troop.’
The letter which clearly made Masson panic went on to detail his history as a deserter from the Company ranks at Agra and the precarious position vis-a-vis his former employer he now occupied: he was due to be shot if apprehended. But Wade being a practical sort of man and a patriot had already received permission from his superiors to throw Masson a lifeline.
‘We’ve noted your excellent knowledge of several languages including Persian, French and Hindoostani. You also appear to be blessed with a natural ease in your interactions with the natives of the regions you have traversed. Your mind clearly, though not pointed in the proper direction, is sharp. In light of this and by way of making amends for your dereliction of duty and in recognition of the reality that the Tsar is intent on extending Russia’s influence into our Asiatic possessions, I offer you the following modest proposal.’
Wade informed Masson that if he would like to escape the firing-squad he would be wise to accept the Company’s offer to return to Kabul as its spy and to use his sharp mind, ears and eyes to keep Wade abreast of events in ‘lower Afghanistan and Kabul with special attention on the comings and goings of the tribesmen in support of Dost Mohammad but even more so the Russians.’
Mr Charles Masson of course agreed to Wade’s proposition and did (unhappily) return to Afghanistan as the Company’s ‘news writer.’ For several years, leading up to the invasion of the country by his compatriots in 1839, Masson filed detailed and insightful reports many of which cautioned against a British invasion. At the same time, he continued his archaeological digs on the outskirts of Kabul and beyond, wrote ponderous historical poems and engraved a couplet that included his name onto the majestic 55 metre high Buddhas of Bamiyan where it remained until the icons were blown up by the Taliban in 2001.
By the time he left the Company’s employ in 1838, Masson had ensured his place in history. Not so much as a spy or soldier but as a scholar. His archaeological digs around Kabul are now acknowledged as advancing the world’s understanding of ancient Afghanistan as well as its archaeological history. His work is still hailed as absolutely fundamental, especially his identification of Bagram as the ancient city of Alexandria Caucasum. Alexandria in the Caucasus while geographically inaccurate was indeed a city established by the Macedonian conqueror, Alexander, but one that history seemed to have assigned to legend. No one knew where exactly it was located which perhaps accounts for the faulty identification of the mountains where it was thought to have been located. Did it even exist?
By digging up tens of thousands of coins many with Greek script on one side and the Kharosthi script on the other, around the town of Bagram, north of Kabul, famous in more recent times as the site of the US Air Force’s major military post in Afghanistan, Masson identified the city as not only as one of the many ancient Alexandrias but shed new light on the Greco-Buddhist culture that dominated the area until the arrival of Islam. Indeed, Masson was instrumental in uncovering evidence of the spread of Buddhism into Central Asia from its Indian birthplace, as well as unearthing the names of several hitherto unknown monarchs of the region.
Masson returned to England in 1842 where he faded away, the only trace being the thousands of artefacts he dug from the Afghan dirt and transported back home and which are now on display in collections across the country. And though he is regarded as a pioneer of Afghan archaeology this rough and tumble shape shifting scholar-spy-poet is also credited with another landmark historical discovery.
Reflecting in 1842 on his initial desertion from the Company’s army in Agra and escape through the Punjab plains sixteen years earlier, Masson wrote,
A long march preceded our arrival at Hairpah (Harappa) through jangal of the closest description…Behind us was a large circular mound or eminence, and to the west was an irregular rocky height, crowned with remains of buildings, in fragments of walls, with niches, after the eastern manner…I examined the remains on the height, and found two circular perforated stones, affirmed to have been used as bangles, or arm rings, by a faqir of renown. He has also credit for having subsisted on earth and other unusual substances…The walls and towers of the castle are remarkably high, though, from having been deserted, they exhibit in some parts the ravages of time and decay.’ (Narrative of Various Journeys in Balochistan, Afghanistan, and the Punjab 1842, pg 452-54)
Thus, within a few lines from an adventurer’s memoir the Western world hears the name Harappa for the first time. Harappa, of course, is the small town just 24 km west of the modern Pakistani city of Sahiwal where 95 years after Masson’s overnight camp, excavations lead to the uncovering of a large buried city, and ultimately one of the world’s oldest, most sophisticated and enigmatic urban societies.
Thirty years after Masson’s visit, British engineers engaged in building the rail line between Multan and Lahore discovered a trove of wonderfully hard but thin kiln-fired bricks lying just beneath the surface of the earth. The bricks, much to the engineers’ delight made the perfect beds upon which to lay the rails and tens of thousands of them were used and in fact remain in place even today. The bricks formed the ‘castle’ Masson described in his book. Scattered in and amongst the bricks, railway workers discovered a number of small soapstone seals, no larger than a large modern postage stamp, but exquisitely crafted. They were quaint, mysterious objects whose beauty and workmanship were beyond question but whose history and significance baffled the archaeologists. A few made their way into the British Museum where bearded antiquarians speculated they dated to a Buddhist past around the turn of the millennium. In 1921, a young Punjabi archaeologist and Sanskrit whiz, Daya Ram Sahni, did some initial excavating at Harappa for the Archaeological Survey of India. His report piqued the interest of the ASI’s Director, John Marshall, who authorised Sahni to undertake more systematic excavations.
To their amazement Sahni’s men uncovered an entire city laid out with gridded streets and communal buildings. Delicate, finely worked beads and bracelets emerged out of the Punjabi mud as well as further south in Mohenjo Daro in the Sindh region. Many of the artefacts, especially the seals, were marked what appears to be a script–lines, single or in close formation–squiggles and geometric designs. Despite the efforts of Sahni and others to decode the language, the lines remain one of antiquity’s great mysteries. But the archaeologists noted that the most extensive use of the language was visible on the seals and amulets which also featured a menagerie of beasts.
These seals depicted bulls with massive humps, rhinos, elephants, tigers and deer, sometimes with humans bowing before them, sometimes with the poor sods being attacked. Here was India’s first story. But what exactly is the plotline? What is the point of these images? Are they telling us about the spirit world or the world of markets and trade? Who are the heroes? Which ones are the demons and villains? If only we could make out that writing.
What seems clear is that the people of Harappa and other Indus Valley cities were not particular inclined to warfare and violence. Archaeologists have not found anything that suggests the people were massacred or that their cities were burned or destroyed in combat. Rather, the similar layout and construction of the houses, the lack of particularly large private dwellings together with those seals, which scholarly consensus suggests, were “probably used to close documents and mark packages of goods“, (they’ve been found as far away as Iraq) suggests early Punjabi life was relatively cooperative, civil, peaceful, prosperous and not very religious. There is little of the elaborate hierarchy of later Hindu India and relatively little evidence of great economic inequality.
Such readings of the Indus Valley story are speculative but not so far-fetched. However, the relatively tolerant, accepting, less heirarchical social structure that some scholars attribute to the people of the Indus Valley does echo, if ever so faintly, the Punjab which until the mid-19th century was renowned for its syncretic, less orthodox and unitary culture.
One thing that can be said without any doubt about the people of the Indus Valley is that these earliest of Punjabis had vivid imaginations. Of all the animals depicted on the seals the most common is what appears to be a unicorn, a cow like quadruped with a long pointy horn protruding out of its forehead.
This unique beast which we now associate with rainbows and 8 year old girls, was born in the Indus Valley but doesn’t seem to have survived in the post Harappan culture. Further west though, the unicorn went on to enjoy a glorious career as a symbol of chastity, the Incarnation of Christ, strength and true love. The one horned Punjabi horse/cow was and is so revered it graces the coats of arms of noble houses from the Czech Republic to England and is the subject of some of the most sublime works of European art and storytelling.
The cities, script, society and unicorns of the Indus Valley vanished from the Punjabi story about 1900 BC and would all but be forgotten for thousands of years. But an even richer series of chapters began to unfold around the same time. Nomads from the steppes of Central Asia came across the mountains with horses, powerful hallucinogens and a love of gambling. Over several centuries they herded their cattle and horses across the plains and between the Punjab’s many rivers. These nomads who called themselves Arya began to recite an elaborate series of poems that told tales of mighty gods and wily demons who provided instructions on how to sacrifice animals and conduct animal sacrifices. Like the American blues would millennia in the future, the Aryan poets bemoaned the addictions of gambling and intoxication.
Unlike the Harappans, the Vedic Punjabis left no cities or monuments. The only way we know them is through their stories—the Vedas—especially the Rg Veda, a song cycle of 1028 verses that was and continues to be passed down by people who took it upon themselves to memorize its every syllable, tone, character and subplot. Suddenly, around 4000 years ago, the Punjabi/Aryan/Vedic/Indian imagination erupts with the intensity, colour and wild swirlings of an acid trip.
The rivers of this land, the Rg Veda tell us, are not five but seven and the land is called Sapta Sindhu (seven rivers). Each one of them is identified by name and is in some way a geographic representation of a character in the grand Vedic story. Vyasa (Beas) is the great sage who divides the Vedas into parts and Askini (Chenab) is married to Daksha who is instructed by Brahma to create all living beings. One of the great Vedic sages Kashyap has a daughter Iravati (Ravi) and one day he asks the goddess Parvati to come to Kashmir to clean up its valleys which she does by becoming the river Vitasta (Jhelum). Saraswati, the goddess of arts and learning herself is a river that flows through the desert but eventually dries up leaving one of her tributaries, Sutdiri (Sutlej), to carry on and join with the others in the rushing Sindhu (Indus).
In these early Punjabi poems and narratives it’s easy to find the deepest roots of many of the outlines of what would one day depicted in the films made in Bombay and Lahore. Take for example the story of the lout who takes a swig of soma (a sort of pre-historic Vat 69) and with his mates tosses the dice onto the gambling mat. He laughs and carouses as his dutiful and kind wife watches silently. Eventually, but too late, the gambler realises his mistake. “I’ve driven my blameless wife away from me. My mother-in-law hates me and all my friends have deserted me. They have as much use for me as a decrepit old horse.”
His mother cries and tries to make him stop but he pushes her away. As the sun goes down, he starts his lament confessing that as soon as he thinks of the tumbling dice, he is off to the gambling dens with his male buddies. Like the drunken Talish in the 1957 film Saat Lakh, who sings the apologia, Yaaron mujhe muaff rakho, mein nashe main hun, [Friends, forgive me, I’m completely pissed] the Vedic gambler sings, “I can’t stop and all my friends desert me.” As the story comes to an end he collapses and dies. (Rg Veda 10:34). Very Lollywood!
The Aryans slowly moved eastward, leaving their beloved Sapta Sindhu behind to push into the northern plains watered by the Ganga and Yamuna rivers. Eventually Vedic religion as outlined in the Rg Veda was transformed into what we recognize as Hinduism and the central importance of Punjab to the Hindu story diminished somewhat. Which is not to say it was completely forgotten, as later epics such as the Ramayana and Mahabharata are filled with references to the places and people of Punjab.
This northwest corner of the subcontinent which was the reputed land of legendary wealth was coveted by other non-Indian empires. Persians, Greeks, Chinese, Mongols, Turks and Arabs and numerous waves of Afghan raiders came crashing through the Punjab on their way to the fabled riches of India. With each of these incursions came not just soldiers but new traditions, new ideas, new heroes and new villains.
During the period 500 BC-300 CE small fiefdoms and city states vied for control of the Punjab and more layers were added to the already rich three-millennia old culture. Taxila, 375 kms northwest of Lahore, became the most significant political and cultural centre of the region. It was here, the story goes, that the sage Vaishampayana (pupil of Vyasa) gave the original recital of the Mahabharata to king Janamejaya. The world’s longest narrative poem (100,000+ verses) the Mahabharata tells with fantastic imagination and a cast of thousands, the battle of various Punjabi tribes for supremacy.
Darius I of Persia, drawn to India for its supply of elephants, camels, gold and silk conquered Taxila in the mid 5th century BCE. By the 4th century Buddhist jataka tales (fables of the Buddha’s early incarnations) were speaking of Taxila as a mighty kingdom and centre of great learning. Indeed, it was around Taxila that Greeks who had ventured to the edge of India as part of Alexander’s victorious army, intermarried with local women and developed the unique and elegant Greek-Buddhist Gandhara, culture that added a distinctly European flavour to Indian culture and which Charles Masson did so much to illuminate.
Tales and narratives travelled in both directions, influencing the stories of Punjab but also taking Indian stories to the far corners of the world. The fable of Alexander and the Poisoned Maiden is one such Punjabi story that grew out of this mingling of Greeks and Indians. Though it is long forgotten in India the story was picked up and recorded by the Persians from whom it was passed to Arabs, Jews, and eventually Europeans who recorded it in Latin.
The astrologers of an Indian king warn him that a man named Alexander will one day try to conquer his kingdom and before he does, he will demand tribute of four gifts: a beautiful girl; a wise man able to reveal all of nature’s mysteries; a top notch physician and; a bottomless cup in which water is never heated when placed on fire.
When Alexander arrives in the kingdom, the king obliges in hopes of saving his kingdom. He selects a beautiful maiden whom all of Alexander’s emissaries agree is the most beautiful woman they have ever laid eyes on. Little did they know however, that the woman had been raised as a child by a snake and has been fed poison all her life, instead of milk. Alexander immediately falls in love and that night sleeps with her. However, the top notch physician is aware of the woman’s true nature and quickly slips Alexander a special herb that protects him from the girl’s poison. A grateful Alexander is able to enjoy sex with the woman but not die and he goes on to conquer the Indian king’s country.
Though his story does not exist in any Indian text its central character–a dangerous woman who in fact is a snake (nagina)–is a famous and recurring subject of many a horror film in both Pakistan and India.
Such fantastic stories pop up throughout the history of the region and are buried deep in the DNA of Punjab. We have stories of Buddha as a college boy at Taxila University as well as stories from Zoroastrian Iran. There is even a story told of how St. Thomas was sold into slavery to the king of Taxila by none other than Jesus himself but who manages to secure his freedom by raising the Punjabi king’s brother from the dead! A thousand years later the film makers of Lahore would tell a similar story in the cult horror classic Zinda Laash (Living Corpse).
Note: the letters from Karamat Ali to Charles Wade and related conversations are made up. However, the basics of the narrative are historically accurate.
Missionaries, Mercenaries and Misfits 