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I left Sibi on the Quetta Express, bound eventually for the important Punjabi city of Multan. At each stop passengers disgorged onto the platform to wash their faces and refill drinking flasks at trackside water pumps. Vendors served curry in pages ripped from a Karachi telephone directory and tea in plastic cups pilfered from Pakistan Airways. Just before midnight we crossed the Indus, whose dark waters irrigated a landscape of rice fields and fruit orchards—a welcome lushness after bone-dry Baluchistan. Then we skirted the edge of the Cholistan desert; and once again choking dust poured through the open windows. India lay on the other side of the desert, and a patrolling Pakistani fighter jet streaked low across the night sky, its wingtips blinking red.
My compartment was a spartan, metal box with windows barred to thwart fare dodgers—a kind of holding cell on wheels. It was too hot to sleep, so I read instead. I had picked up a copy of a book called Mechanics of Doomsday and Life After Death. An alarming blend of pseudo science and Koranic prophecy, the book revealed all the telltale signs of a coming apocalypse. More earthquakes will occur, it warned, and rain will fall out of season. Human blood will become worthless and "singing women will be on the increase." It also quoted a verse from the Koran, which—with two nuclear-armed countries straining at their leashes—I found quite chilling:
They wait not but one blast,
Which will surprise them,
While they are disputing.
According to a Persian saying, Multan was famous for four things: heat, dust, beggars and burial grounds. The latter were the magnificent tombs of various Sufis, or Islamic mystics. Legend has it that one Sufi deployed his miraculous powers to lure the sun closer to earth, thus creating Multan's crippling heat. In the 4th century B.C., Alexander the Great swung through town on his world tour, almost dying there when an Indian spear punctured his lung. Seven hundred years later, a Chinese traveler found a mammoth Hindu temple in Multan. Not a brick of it survives today, although a tiny community of Hindus does.
They live in Railway Colony, an area near the station with crumbling brick houses and narrow, cobbled lanes. It is mainly inhabited by Christian descendants of rail workers employed during British rule. About 35 Hindus cluster among them, where they feel more secure (most Hindus in Punjab province fled over the border after partition). I watched as a small temple, shaded by a hallowed pipal tree, slowly filled up with worshipers. Inside was a tinsel-draped shrine loaded with votive fruit and smoldering incense. A sign above it read, "Om sweet om."
Multan's Hindus have many grievances—grievances echoed by Pakistani Christians I spoke to. Muslims are always favored when it comes to job offers or college places, they say. "We are poor—much poorer than the Muslims," says Parwan Lal, a 20-year-old arts student. Yet Parwan and his friends claim they would not hesitate to defend Pakistan against any aggression from their Hindu brethren in India. "I'm a Pakistani first, and a Hindu second," says Chaman Lal, 20, another student. "We will defend our motherland, just as Muslims in India would fight to defend their country against Pakistan."
Was this simply the necessary patriotism of a minority, part of an embattled community's highly-evolved instinct for survival? I'm sure it was heartfelt: even casual visitors are impressed by Pakistani patriotism. Yet Pakistanis seem to love their country without being particularly proud of it, a schizophrenic attitude they share with my compatriots, the English.
This struck me at my final stop in Pakistan: Lahore. I arrived in the blazing noonday heat. The British-built station is sturdy and imposing, like a Victorian prison. It was Sunday, and the sky was peppered with thousands of kites flown from the city's rooftops. I joined the families strolling through Hazuri Garden in Lahore Fort. Above us soared the red minarets of Badshahi Mosque, built of sandstone quarried in India and ferried here by elephant. You could once climb one of the minarets for an unrivaled view of the city, but recently it had become a popular suicide launchpad, and was now closed. "Poverty, joblessness—these are the main reasons for the jumpings," shrugs Sami Ullah, a local tour guide.
In one corner of Hazuri Garden lies the simple sandstone tomb of Mohammed Iqbal, the Punjabi philosopher-poet. It was he who first proposed the idea of a separate Muslim homeland, a prosperous nation guided and governed by pure Islamic principles. Nearby, a group of old men, their grizzly beards tinged with henna, were heatedly discussing Iqbal's legacy. One man was recalling before a rapt audience the 1997 celebrations that marked Pakistan's 50th year. "But what is Pakistan?" he asked accusingly. "Corruption only. Why on earth were we celebrating?" Here, it occurred to me, is a nation created in God's name, a promised land, yet it seems unblessed. It is impoverished and fragmented, united only by a futile hostility toward a giant neighbor, whose teeming millions—beset with problems of their own—care less about Pakistan's opinion than most Pakistanis seem to realize. What had gone wrong?
None of the old men debating near Iqbal's tomb could agree. Apparently it had nothing to do with burning issues such as the toppling of the neighboring Taliban regime, or Pakistan's edgy role in the ongoing war on terror—topics the men didn't even mention during the hour I listened to them. Instead, some claimed the problem was too much religion—too much power in the hands of the mullahs. Some—like Mohammed Buta, 71, a retired railway worker—believed the problem was not enough religion. "Yes, we are an independent nation," said Buta, "but look at all the sin and corruption here. We are nothing." He raised a withered finger toward the tomb. "If Iqbal were alive today," he declared, "he would look around and he would say, 'This is not my Pakistan.'"
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