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JOHN STANMEYER/VII FOR TIME
Separated by race and religion, Pakistanis are united only in their antipathy towards their giant neighbor
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Mohammed Pervez's train was a heap of junk, a rusting pile of squabbling spare parts dragged by a 40-year-old American engine way past its retirement age. The windshield was shattered, none of the gauges worked, and even at its top speed—25 km/h—the whole train shimmied like an overweight belly dancer. "Sorry," grinned Pervez, "but if I drive any faster, it falls off the track." Not that I cared. Why? Because he was taking me on the first leg of a 5,000-kilometer journey across Pakistan and India, from the haunting moonscape of the Baluchistan desert to the lush tropics of the Indian northeast. And because Mohammed Pervez let me ride up front and blow the horn.
The Chaman to Quetta train pulled a single carriage of similar decrepitude. All the original fittings, like coat hooks and ashtrays, had been stripped away or had simply fallen off, to be replaced by a thick layer of grime. The women had a compartment to themselves, so all my fellow passengers were men. There was a migrant bricklayer returning home with blistered hands; a bearded youngster who smirked, "I'm from al-Qaeda," although his friends said he was a soap salesman from Pishin; a chemistry student who had read Karl Marx in his native Pashtu and called himself "progressive"; and half a dozen Kalashnikov-toting policemen to protect me from all of the above. The police were assigned to this duty by the Baluchistan authorities—an admission of just how lawless this vast desert state could be. Chaman itself lay only a few kilometers from Pakistan's border with Afghanistan. It was chaos there. An endless stream of trucks piled high with sacks of grain thundered into Afghanistan. Pakistani border guards lashed out with canes at Afghan men and boys trying to enter Chaman to sell tank tracks and shell casings—any old iron that would fetch a handful of rupees from the town's scrap merchants. Yet this pitiful scene belied a more heartening trend. Almost a million refugees had returned to Afghanistan since the ouster of the Taliban, with a million more expected to follow soon. When a ferocious dust storm blew through a nearby refugee camp and lifted the flaps of the tents, I saw they were all empty.
"In the name of Allah, the beneficent, the merciful," intoned Mohammed Pervez as we pulled out of Chaman. Soon the train was trundling through a lifeless plain stretching off to heat-blurred horizons. Somewhere to the southwest, in a district called Chagai, Pakistan had conducted its first nuclear tests in 1998. The vibrations are still being felt today. As my trip began, India and Pakistan had once again been mobilizing for war over disputed Kashmir, with both hinting that nuclear weapons were an option. But as I would discover on my journey, the futures of both countries are also clouded by internal divisions. Over 50 years after its creation, Pakistan is still struggling to find a national identity amid poverty, corruption and ethnic unrest, and is split over the government's support of the U.S.-led war against terrorism. In India, Hindu nationalism has led to violence against Muslims and shattered the nation's cherished image as a secular, progressive state. Meanwhile, separatist activity has made northeast India almost as deadly as Kashmir. I couldn't fail to sense these tensions as I made my way slowly along the subcontinent's immense railway network—a 72,000 kilometer system that ranks among the greatest engineering feats on earth.
Strife has long been synonymous with the subcontinent. The British built the line from Chaman to Quetta over a century ago to carry soldiers and munitions to defend the Empire's wild western frontier. To reach its destination, the track must burrow through three kilometers of mountains by means of the spectacular Khojak Tunnel. Considered the jewel in Pakistan Railways' crown—the tunnel's picture graces the country's five-rupee note—it was built between 1888 and 1891 by the most cosmopolitan of workforces. The British recruited laborers from Kabul and Kandahar, Swat and Kafiristan, the Tibetan highlands and the African trading port of Zanzibar—all under the supervision of Cornish tin-mining engineers. According to legend, the nearby station of Shelabagh was named after a dancing woman called Shela who entertained the workers. "They don't build tunnels like this any more," says Reg Mohammed, 52, a maintenance worker on Khojak for three decades now. He demonstrated the ingenious lighting system still used to inspect the tunnel: an enormous swivel mirror heaved onto the track, then angled to send a wide, dusty beam of sunlight deep into the gloom. This illuminated half the tunnel. "How do you light the other half?" I asked. Stupid question. "We've got another mirror at the other end, of course."
The train clattered on past dry riverbeds and mud-hut villages chiseled from the landscape. The number of graveyards—simple mounds of dust decorated with white stones—testified to the hostility of the environment. Beyond Quetta the train entered the Bolan Pass, a spectacular mountain route forged by centuries of invaders from Central Asia and, since the 1880s, plied by a plucky extension of the Indus Valley Railway. This train was faster than Mohammed Pervez's junk heap—it would hit an enviable 50 km/h on downhill stretches—and was positively a blur by the standards of a legendary train that traced a route through the North-West Frontier province. That one was so slow, I had heard, that you could jump off, relieve yourself, have a leisurely cup of tea, and still manage to climb aboard again without it even stopping.
As I hung from an open train door, the superheated desert wind grating like sandpaper against my skin, the Bolan run felt like a roller coaster ride. The train plunged and twisted through tunnels with fortress-like entrances bristling with battlements, and emerged each time to an ever-changing vista: a herd of camels standing motionless against hills carved by earthquakes and streaked with minerals, or a middle-of-nowhere village with a tiny mud mosque and the forbidding name, Ab I Gum (where water disappears). Abruptly, the mountains reared up into giant, ragged wedges, like a petrified tsunami.
I arrived in Sibi just after sunset. This was good timing, since this Baluch town has only one claim to fame: it is the hottest place on the entire subcontinent. By 10 the next morning, a thermometer bought in the bustling bazaar read 51°C in the sun. By noon, as the market crowds began to thin—began, it seemed, to evaporate—the mercury edged past 55°C and then shot off the scale. I stood there, a hideous Niagara of perspiration, idly wondering why I was not dead yet. I rented a pony and a trap—Sibi's chief form of transport—and set off through the well-kept streets of the British-built cantonment area on a doomed quest for an air-conditioned hotel. There wasn't one. I settled for a guesthouse where the walls still radiated the day's ferocious heat, but where—with the aid of a violently wobbling ceiling fan—the nighttime temperature dipped to a positively chilly 48°C.
The main (male) pastime in Sibi is watching bootleg Indian videos in shaded tea shops. Pakistan's government recently banned cable operators from offering Indian entertainment channels, even though (as one outraged Pakistani columnist noted) watching Bollywood movies was the best way "to escape the tension of an ever-imminent war." I asked a man at one Sibi establishment if he thought it unpatriotic to watch Indian films at this time. "Just watching is O.K.," he replied. "But we are mentally prepared to fight India at any time." Mental preparation, in this case, consisted of studying two pneumatic Bollywood babes jiggling in bath towels.
The only other women to be seen in Sibi were widows lining up at the town's colonial post office for a twice-yearly government stipend of 1,000 rupees. They mostly hail from the Bugti tribe, their gray, henna-streaked hair draped in colorful scarves that sometimes slipped to reveal ears pierced by countless silver rings. Among the Bugti, I had read, tribal law is so strict that an honorable woman must hang herself if she is spotted with a man other than her husband. It was tempting to view such unforgiving codes of conduct as an extension of radical Islamic law. In fact, many Bugti traditions probably predate Islam—like the "ordeal by fire," in which a man charged with a serious crime, such as murder or theft, is obliged to walk across hot coals. If his feet blister, he is guilty. I thought such medieval practices would be dying out. But according to Shaheed Bugti, a clansman I met in Quetta, ordeals by fire are not only routine but increasingly popular among other Baluchistan tribes. "No case takes more than a week to be settled," he explains. "If a plaintiff seeks justice through a state court, he will go to his grave before he gets it."
State control in such remote districts is almost nonexistent. For many tribespeople, the government's authority—and even the authority of the local mullah—pales beside that of their sirdar or clan leader, whom they imbue with almost supernatural power. The head of the Bugti was Nawab Akbar Bugti, educated at Aitchison College in Lahore—"the Eton of Pakistan"—and still known as the "Tiger of Baluchistan," even at 76 years of age. His remote seat of power, a place called Dera Bugti, lies some 130 kilometers to the east, in a region rich in oil. It is currently besieged by hundreds of state troops, sent there to halt a series of attacks on oil installations by unnamed Bugti "terrorists," whom the government suspects the Nawab of harboring. I called a Dera Bugti number that Shaheed Bugti had given me, and to my great surprise the Nawab himself answered. "It's very hot up here," he said in a clipped British accent. "A lot of natural heat, as well as—you know—the man-made variety." Helicopters were circling his house, and his water and electricity had been cut off. "And the phones are tapped too," the Nawab added—at that point the line went dead. When I rang back, nobody answered.
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