Sunday, 27 February, 2011
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What are client-states? The client-state as a category developed for a State acting subservient to an imperialist power in the neo-colonial world order. Pakistan falls under the category – except for the rather short Zulfikar Ali Bhutto era. The Pakistani state fell under the category of ‘non-aligned’ during this period.
the media adopted the view of the victims – rather unquestionably to this point – that one of the victims carried a gun because of a family enmity. Should the media have accepted this perspective so easily? There is something deeply disturbing about this tacit acceptance. Are we a society in which every man with an enmity is mandated a gun? Events, as we must come to realize, are complex creatures. This is especially true of events manufactured in Pakistan. It is strange to think that both a foreign minister and an information secretary of the PPP have fallen to statements uttered on the diplomatic status of Raymond Davis. These individuals are figureheads of bureaucratic and party offices. Their statements reflect the position of the machinery beneath them. They do not produce their own information. There is a strange mechanism that is working to topple dominoes. Shah Mehmood Qureshi falls, Fauzia Wahab falls…is the democratic government next? The many non-fans of democracy are now spreading their wings. It is hoped that it continues to be remembered that the malady before us does not take route in the PPP government. It takes route in the previous military government of General Musharraf. The PPP, one has to concede, have been bad at cleaning up. But the mess that was left to them was rather cancerous. So, yes, it has a chance to perform chemotherapy. But its resistance appears to be likely to take its steam down with it. There are other questions too.
If Davis is indeed a member of a private security consultancy – or if indeed he is a spy then what are the questions that originate and where must blame be directed at. If he is a security consultant and he was let in then the letting in of ‘security consultants’ began in the Musharraf era. And thus it is the army which has so-quietly shied away from the political landscape as the matter gained ground. Can a diplomat be let in without ISI clearance? More so – can a security consultant be let in without ISI clearance? And why – indeed why – was that security consultant not being monitored? The military intelligence has a habit of making straw puppets of our politicians and putting them in front of the public as piniyatas. Can we mature to recognize that there are no toffees available in the straw piniyatas we make of our politicians. The politics that has emerged after the incident is by no means simple. We do not realize it that the moment on a number of very specific futures: (a) public memory (b) US-Pakistan relations (c) immediate political developments. I suggest the public memory shall be the most important – and perhaps most problematic. The question to ask is: what sort of a legacy is produced when a public is anti-imperialist but a State is comprador? Not that the public’s imagination is unproblematic or partakes more of emotion than sense. But the question is of the specific antiimperialist stance we are to take after the Raymond Davis incident – and it is not a stance we can take without deciding that the future of the Pakistani state cannot be as a client of the United States of America. Blackwater, the CIA, the ISI – and Raymond Davis types do not matter in such a future.
2 ’Dealing with crimes of the times’ 4 On a track less travelled
he Raymond Davis issue is not the Raymond Davis issue. If it were merely limited to Davis then the response to it would not have been as elaborate. Two federal ministers have been toppled due to comments made on the matter. The Pakistani State has been structurally shaken. And the question we are left with is Lenin’s question: what is to be done? It is likely that by the time this article appears in print Raymond Davis will have been let go. This shall be despite the three complimentary petitions being heard in the Lahore High Court calling for different micro measures – but coherent on their collective aim: bringing down the influence of the ever-fading American empire in Pakistani socio-politics. But there is another point to be made. A rather more subtle point for the charged political atmosphere we find ourselves in. It is that all three petitions miss their end. None asks for the truth of the event to be uncovered. It is a strange event. It is moreover a bizarre event. An American national shoots down two Pakistani motorcyclists in broad daylight. He gets off his vehicle to make their video. As he does so, a Consulate Landcruiser comes the wrong way – purportedly to his rescue – but kills a pedestrian along the way. The purportedly cavalry (the Landcruiser) is later nowhere to be seen. The American national who shot the men and is now video-taping them is arrested. It turns out that one of the dead men has a licensed gun. The arrested man identifies himself as Raymond Davis. All these details were established in the first five minutes of the reporting of the incident. It is most interesting to note, days after the incident nothing more is known for certain. The incident – and more importantly – the actors involved in it all appear shady. There are shades of grey all around. The incident is like all other high-profile incidents to have taken place in Pakistan’s political history. Assassinations and intelligence scams are both covered over – and covered over well. Despite the lack of facts a public imagination develops around an incident – that transpires into a form of politics. That form of politics mires itself in a strange mix of hyper-nationalism and mob fever. This is not to say, as I said earlier, that
we not be anti-imperialist. I am an anti-Imperialist in my heart. And I shall use the Raymond Davis incident to centre my anti-Imperialism. But I am not one who shall forget to ask the rather simple (or so it appeared) question: so…what actually happened? Moreover this is not the limit to my questioning. It appears we shall also have to disarticulate two other ideas (a) the idea of diplomatic immunity (b) the idea of the killer’s skin colour. This is not to say again that we not take an anti-imperialist stance. It is to say, rather, that we ask questions. The idea of the killer’s skin colour is an interesting idea. Allow me to be biased but most of those – including those who wield proud beards – would prefer Raymond Davis’s colour of skin. A disrespect of our own self was naturalized into us during the colonial period. But there is an interesting something about this self-disrespect that we carry. We channel it onto our perceived oppressor. It is a slave’s rebellion. It is a dialectic. It is a Hegelian moment. It is an attempt to restore our humanity. This is necessary. Only that it needs to be channeled into the long-term and into coherent politics. Mock hangings of Raymond Davis are not going to make a difference. A structural re-adjustment is needed – and a new selfperception. Those who understand what I am saying now please raise their hands. I am only being playful. One must stop and attempt to understand. Again as I said earlier, it is not that I am not anti-imperialist. It is not that I do not want Davis to be punished. But rather what I wish to open up the space for is to let the truth of the even t that we are imagining to come out. What if it turns out that the event is a massive intelligence cover up? What if the two men who were killed were intelligence agency chaps? The possibility has already been speculated in the media. The BBC itself has lend credence to the theory. I remember sitting at home watching the incident being covered the first day on four separate TV channels. I was told four separate stories on the chronology of the shooting. Though the quickness with which
the review
By Hashim bin Rashid
the review
Q&A with Karen Armstrong
By Anum Yousaf
K
aren Armstrong, the world renowned historian of religion has recently toured Pakistan in an attempt to launch the local chapter of the international project “The Charter for Compassion”. She has also launched her books “12 Steps to a Compassionate Life” and “Letter to Pakistan” while speaking at various venues including LUMS, Punjab University and the Karachi Literature Festival. The genesis for this project took place when Ms. Armstrong was given the 2008 TED prize which she chose to utilize to setup this charter which seeks to transcend religious and ideological boundaries and turn compassion and empathy into drives for change and giving a voice to the ‘silent majority against the forces of violence and extremism”. It is an ambitious and optimistic project with many leading intellectuals directly involved. It’s a project
which seeks to implement The Golden Rule i.e. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” into the difficult and cynical conditions of the 21st Century. The Charter has met with much success with its projects around the world and it plans to take on many projects in Pakistan as many people join in attempts to do their bit. But where there is hope, there is skepticism. Ms. Armstrong fielded many questions about the practicality of such a project and when, why and how it can be implemented. The following are excerpts. Q: “The Golden Rule” i.e. ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you’ has been propagated almost universally by all religious traditions, but it has never been widely practiced. Yet, you feel that the “Charter for Compassion” will be successful. What makes you so confident that it will be undertaken and implemented? KA: I think that the golden rule has been implemented throughout history. Prophetic traditions and sages throughout cultures have upheld it. It’s an uncomfortable
virtue, no doubt about it but it has to be practiced. It needs to be practiced. The fact of the matter is that we have to get on better with each other. Humanity will not survive the current state of affairs. In today’s world, so may disaffected groups of people have the power of destruction and are pitted against each other. As a people, we have become hard-hearted, sneering and prejudiced. In Britain, in America (as the recent death of a Congresswoman shows) and the state of affairs in Pakistan is no different. We have to change our perceptions which haven’t caught up with the reality. We need to become serious about religion and morality and the golden rule is the basis of morality. Agreeing or disagreeing with it is not the point. There is an urgency in world affairs that needs to be attended to. Q: Since this charter advocates compassion to all, how can one be compassionate to say a Nazi or a terrorist who bombs innocent people? KA: I deal with this extensively in my book. First of all, what we need to understand is that learning to be
A double treat for the connoisseurs of literature
Sunday, 27 February, 2011
A special feature of the Urdu section of The Ravi is the allocation of space for select study of some classical and modern Urdu literary personages like Meer Taqi Meer, Noon Meem Rashed, Dr Waheed Qureshi, Ashfaq Ahmad, Dr Muhammad Hassan, Dr Wazir Agha and Farkhanda Lodhi Illustrated & Designed by Babur Saghir
02 - 03
‘Dealing with crimes
T
he two magazines have coincidentally appeared in close succession. The Ravi is a premier university magazine boasting of an illustrious tradition spanning a full century. It has three sections viz., English, Urdu and Punjabi. The contents of the magazine are varied and bear a quality comparable to any good literary magazine in these languages, at the present moment. Aside from students, contributors to the instant issue include Khaled Ahmed, Zia Mohyeddin, Pervez Hoodbhoy, Kamal Azfar, Tariq Rahman, Zafar Iqbal, Muzaffar Ali Syed, Saadat Saeed, Prof. Fateh Muhammad Malik, Dr Aslam Ansari, Asad Muhammad
By Syed Afsar Sajid Khan, Mansha Yad, Faisal Ajami, Dr Mazhar Mahmood Sheerani, Dr Riaz Qadeer, Prof Dr Khalid Aftab, Hasan Rizvi, Ashfaq Ahmad,
The Ravi 2010 – a trilingual magazine of the GCU Lahore
Zarnigar (Oct-Dec 2010), Faisalabad edited by Zia Hussain Zia
The paradigm of offensive and its counter-offensive just ratchets up more violence
of the times’ compassionate is not instantaneous. It’s a process, a lifetime worth of work. When we started working on this Charter, a student in the US chapter said that we could have graduation ceremonies after the students have completed the book and the course! That would entirely defeat the purpose because compassion is supposed to teach you something else. With specific regard to your question, implementing the golden rule doesn’t imply you pulling yourself nihilistically into criminality. You can’t condone what is terrorism under the guise of the golden rule. It is not atavistic, in that sense. But what would compassion in this scenario look like. Put yourself in the shoes of the co-religionists of the terrorists who haven’t taken up arms. Feel their pain and what they are going through. Being compassionate in this instance would require one to meditate on the crimes of our times. For instance, Auschwitz was the hideous epiphany of what we can do when we don’t respect people. But Hitler couldn’t have done what he did without the long history and culture of Anti-Semitism
Iftikhar Arif, Amjad Islam Amjad, Wajid Ameer, Sanaullah Zaheer, Sabir Lodhi, Anwar Sadeed, Dr Wazir Agha, Sarmad Sehbai, Saud Usmani, Ghulam Hussain Sajid and Najam Hussain Syed. English and Urdu editorials by Ummar Ziauddin and Rana Hamza Ejaz respectively are thought-provoking. A special feature of the Urdu section of The Ravi is the allocation of space for select study of some classical and modern Urdu literary personages like Meer Taqi Meer, Noon Meem Rashed, Dr Waheed Qureshi, Ashfaq Ahmad, Dr Muhammad Hassan, Dr Wazir Agha and Farkhanda Lodhi. The extract from Muzaffar Ali Syed’s article on Meer Taqi Meer titled Meer ki Farsi Sukhangoi Barr-e-Sagheer Kay Tehzeebi Pas Manzar May spells out some important facts about his Persian poetry with a view to determining its literary worth. The writer avers that Meer’s Persian divan enjoys a pivotal position in the making of his literary individuality in the context of his historical milieu and artistic accomplishment. Ashfaq Ahmad is an eminent fiction writer and intellectual of our times. Prof Dr Khalid Aftab’s impressions of the literary icon amply serve to refresh the reader’s memory about his person and art followed by a hexagonal symposium and a dialogue articulating his (Ashfaq Ahmad’s) views on some relevant issues of literary contemporaneity. The inclusion of Ashfaq’s Ahmad’s short story Dhor Dungar ki Wapasi in the issue, is meant to familiarize the reader with the content and more of his fiction. Noon Meem Rashed is a harbinger of impressionism in Urdu nazm. His verse tends to explore the innate relationship between words and meanings, between language and awareness and the complex issues bearing on literary creativity in a given socio-cultural perspective. Prof Fateh Muhammad Malik and Dr Aslam Ansari have discussed his poetics and person from different angles in their articles. Likewise Dr Wazir Agha’s contribution to Urdu prose
that existed in Europe. It is our great collective shame that we made something like that possible. That we put conditions on Germany which made that political history possible. So the discourse that say that ‘they’ are bad and we are utterly blameless victims is also not what a compassionate outlook would pertain. It’s not that simple. Q: How much do you think is it important to deal with the hate-mongers on TV and in print, and those in mosques and churches who have pulpits to advertise their views and have a significant impact on shaping people’s opinions? KA: Media! There’s a lot, a lot, of work to be done there and I can’t stress that enough. It bears a huge responsibility for the miscommunication and the misrepresentation that pervades our world. It perpetuates a lot of hate that the world can do without. But times are changing and it provides us and you with the opportunity to do something. For instance, newspapers are beginning to fold and they are increasingly read online. This affords everybody a
greater audience and an opportunity for you people to take the initiative to do something that is different from what the mainstream says and perpetuates. For example, in Egypt, there is extensive coverage of the massacre of cops but not enough of events like people forming human chains to save the worshippers in a Church. In Pakistan, during the floods, there was extensive coverage of the inefficiency of relief efforts but not enough of how many local philanthropists stepped in to help. Media has a huge role to play in the depiction of religion and the way it does is mischievous and guiltworthy. I once heard a leading media manager say to me that it’s not news unless its conflict. New media like blogs and such give you the opportunity to change that. One of you could run a blog about the West and tackle the misconceptions that the media spreads about it here. After all, we (the West) are not all bad. So, it is easy to say what others will do but we, ourselves, need to do more. Q: They eye for an eye principle is entrenched in many religions. How does this affect the Charter for Compassion? And relatedly, how do you then envisage the concept of punishment in a compassionate society? KA: With regards to the first question, that principle is not as clear as it sounds. I am very amused when Christian fundamentalists quote it to push Draconian laws around the world and I point out that you people missed out on the second part of this principle. For example, the Jewish scripture follows this statement with the caveat that it is better not to do it. The Qu’ran also says that forgiveness is better for your soul and much preferred to revenge. This principle across religion was meant to function as a limiting principle so that an entire village is not taken out in response to an eye. But as religion progresses, this principle too was modified and implemented to the suit the needs and aims of some. With regards to punishment, the jails of today turn convicts into hardened criminals. So we really need to ask ourselves: whether we want to punish or rehabilitate? Our chapter in Seattle devised a programme for a jail where, among other things, the Prison Officers had to be nice and compassionate to the inmates. This programme was implemented for a trail period to see how it would affect the violence in jail. Everybody over there was hoping to reduce the violence by a figure like 2.5 per cent but the governor called the head of the programme and informed him that violence had gone down not by 5 per cent or 10 per cent, but a 100 per cent. He also stressed on how much this could save the federal government. So, it’s not just moral to treat people well but practical. Q: Do you or don’t you think religion is an obsolete force at this stage of history and we need to move beyond its efficacy. Much of the conflict in this world (especially the wars being fought currently) is not religious. How can the Charter of Compassion (which is religious) then address that?
KA: The Charter is not exclusively religious. It seeks to transcend religious barriers. It just recognises that religion can be a potent force for social change which is why I draw on all religious traditions. A lot of irreligious people are joining in as well. The organisation TED that is funding me itself is highly secular and it was a big thing that it gave me this prize to undertake this project. So, the audience is skeptical as people, especially in my home country the UK, run a mile when they hear the name of religion. But at a conference after I finished my talk was an archsecularist who was wondering what people like him could do to help and I stressed that compassion is not the exclusive domain of religion. But the world is changing and there is a lot of what I call “unskillful religiosity” which gives people the wrong impression about what religion is and how it can be implemented. With regards to the part about the war, I am sick of my own voice because I keep saying that these wars are not religious or civilisational as some people would have us believe. They are fuelled by human greed and use religion to give them ideological justification and legitimacy. I am working on a new book on the relationship between religion and violence and maybe in two or three years, I will be better equipped to answer this question and offer a nuanced approach to the issue. Q: In a fractured society, where people kill each other, how can one implement such an idealistic Charter? KA: I know that Pakistan is a polarized society but it’s not unique to Pakistan. It’s a common problem throughout the world, e.g. the gulf between the right and the left is apparent in the US. Most Middle Eastern countries deal with this including Israel. But it is an important question; how to deal with the hardliners within. But speaking with anger will only escalate the problem. I’ve spoken to many rightists and I have sensed a profound fear of annihilation within them and the secularists aggravate that with their offensive discourse. So they become extreme as a defense mechanism. Denouncing with anger is often counterproductive. Even in academics and politics, the aim of discourse is to win and to humiliate the other person. I attended the conference back in 2000 called “God in Today’s world” which had scholars from seven different faiths. We had a lovely discussion about how God was perceived in today’s world and what we had learnt. But on the last day of the conference, a Christian fundamentalist burst into an incoherent tirade about how all the Muslims and Jews were going to hell and he started screaming and he had to be hustled off. And here we were all these scholars with our books but we were all winded and we didn’t know how to deal with it. The man was hustled off but I felt that we should have talked to him because we had in a sense failed him because he had felt assaulted by our ideas. We have to deal with these issues in a calmer way. This paradigm of offensive and counter-offensive just ratchets up more violence.
and nazm is widely recognized. The editors have done well to earmark some space in this issue carrying Hassan Rizvi’s dialogue with the luminary and a sample piece of his prose for the benefit of readers. In the English section, Khaled Ahmed’s essay on Babur and His Farghana Today, Zia Mohyeddin’s Classic and Classicism and Pervez Hoodbhoy’s What Pakistan Needs are quite educative in the specific areas of their interest. Zarnigar is Zia Hussain Zia’s brain-child who is a well known literary figure. This is the sixth issue of the magazine. Published in book size, it contains a wide but rich variety of literary stuff – qualitatively fair and readable. Prominent contributors to the issue include Khurshid Beg Mailsivi, Naureen Talat Arooba, Sohail Akhtar, Zia Hussain Zia, Dr Waheed Ahmad, Aftab Iqbal Shamim, Ahmad Hamesh, Iqtidar Javed, Ahmad Sagheer Siddiqi, Ain Salam, Faheem Shanas Kazmi, Uzma Naqvi, Karamat Bokhari, Aizaz Ahmad Azar, Rakhshanda Navid, Ali Jafar Zia, Mah Talat Zahidi, Anjum Mehru, Shahzad Ahmad, Zafar Iqbal, Mansha Yad, Syed Mashkoor Hussain Yad, Hameed Shahid, Shabnam Shakil, Sheba Traz, Khalid Mehmud Khan, Nusrat Siddiqi, Sofia Bedar, Amir Sohail, Rana Saeed Doshi, Ausaf Sheikh, Dr. Mohsin Maghiana, Asnath Kanwal, Rashid Amjad, Salim Agha Qizilbash, Ali Tanha and Faisal Ajami. Shahzad Ahmad’s translation of Havelock Ellis’s The Art of Love, Partao Rohilla’s article on the Irani poetess Simin Behbahani (b.1927), Syed Mashkoor Hussain Yad’s Asateer aur Insani Zehn ka Karb – Aik Gawahi and Zafar Iqbal’s Andazay (Reprint) form the cream of the issue besides Dr. Anwar Sadeed’s enlightening literary dialogue and some poems of Aftab Iqbal Shamim, Dr. Waheed Ahmad, Iqtidar Javed and Mah Talat Zahidi. It is heartening to note that Zia Husain Zia is least deterred by financial constraints, often interrupting ventures of the sort he has undertaken. His single-minded concentration on the regular publication of Zarnigar is praise-worthy. Some of the burning socio-literary issues raised by the magazine in the recent past have caught the attention of readers, writers and connoisseurs of literature alike.
Sunday, 27 February, 2011
On a track less travelled
This bridge is not just a pretty piece of civil engineering, it is the highest rail bridge in Pakistan today
O
n the twentyfourth day of May 1883, the Sindhu River was bridged at Attock. The magnificent new steel structure stood within sight of the medieval fort built by Akbar the Great and over this bridge, the first through train from Lahore rolled on to Peshawar. Within the next two decades, new bridges spanned the mighty river again at Khushalgarh, Sukkur and Kotri and most of the railway network that Pakistan inherited at the time of independence was complete. There is the ‘main line’ that most of us know of that runs from Peshawar to Karachi through Lahore. And there are other lines that only the most ardent railway enthusiast has ever heard of. There is one line that I had long known from hearsay for its very fine railway architecture deemed to be well worth travelling along. This is the railway connection between the towns of Attock up on the Potohar Plateau and Daudkhel in the foothills of the southwestern part of the Salt Range near the more famous Kalabagh. Laid in the 1890s, the line passes through low hills traversing a number of tunnels, crossing several seasonal streams, some of which meander along the bottom of deep gorges spanned by handsome bridges. It had been said that this line has a full complement of some very fine examples of railway architecture. The most magnificent and dramatic among these was the Soan River railway bridge. Having spent a good
Peshawar. Had some of the crowd managed to get on board, it is certain that the driver and his assistant would have at best got the beating of their lives. And it could have been worse. Better still, our man had heroically saved a full train worth millions of dollars. Yet there was no appreciation, no recognition of the service done by the conscientious man. We rolled over the Shakardara Bridge. In March last year when I went over it in a motor trolley with Ashfaq, the river was like an elongated lake. The previous summer had seen good rains and the dammed river was full. This time around, it was drained with dry, cracked mud along the thin line of water at the bottom. Since we had ‘done trolley’ (to use railway parlance) as far as Besal, all this was déjà vu. Ahead of Besal was uncharted railway territory for me. Jand railway station with its landmark water tank of red walls, red pitched roof, sitting atop the brilliantly whitewashed square base that served as the Light Room was unusual. I do not recall a water tank sitting on the platform on any other station. Makhad Road Station was a treat, however. It still keeps its old world charm. And I say this because it is shaded by two blessed ber trees, two shishams, and a date palm that Kamran Lashari has nothing to do with. These are the trees we, the people of this good land, planted before the eucalyptus was foisted upon us. Of course, the date palms and other imported species that fetch venal horticulturists of the government huge kickbacks came much later. The station at Makhad is a single blockhouse with a shallow veranda on three sides. The front is draped with jasmine, which was in full bloom when we passed through. Behind the station are some ruinous buildings. Meant for station masters and passing railway officers, they are now mere hulks, disused and
aggressively forgotten by those who should have been using them. Yet they refuse to crumble to dust. No one pauses to admire their archways with the keystones, the corbelling beneath the ventilators, the stylised arches above them and the solid pillars that hold up the verandas. This was architecture built to last, yet we did not care for it. Sooner they will be replaced with new structures built by crooked contractors to last only two decades. A few kilometres south of Makhad Road sits the Soan Bridge Station on the left bank of the Soan. For some curious reason the British spelled the name ‘Sohan’ and so while the river, its valley, its other bridges and everything else connecting with it is spelled Soan (pronounced Swan with a nasal ending), the station continues to be Sohan here. The whitewashed station is a beauty with a central block flanked by two wings and a veranda curving in a half circle around the front. Its frontage has nevertheless been blighted by seven or eight eucalyptus. No one ever thought of planting the beautiful Acacia modesta (phulai) indigenous to the area, which grows so well here because corrupt forest officials have taught us to believe that eucalyptus is the only tree that will grow in Pakistan. My non-stop wheedling got the station master to promise to replace them with phulai and shisham. We shall see if the man keeps his promise. About fifty m e t r e s behind t h e station stand t h e
auxiliary buildings. The quarters for the lower staff and the two bungalows, one for the station master and the other perhaps for visiting officers. The buildings are identical to those seen at Makhad and equally derelict. The prize here is the bridge, however. Years ago when my dear friend Mian Mumtaz Ahmed was still in the Railways, we had promised each other to travel by his saloon, unhitch at Soan Bridge and spent the night there sitting under the stars watching them trace their courses across the vault and savouring the distant yelp of the fox and the hoot of the owl. That never happened, but the bridge, of which I had only read somewhere, never left my imagination. The river itself, which has for the past few decades sadly borne the effluent of Islamabad and Rawalpindi and perhaps a few more villages, is curiously coloured either sulphur yellow or a strange blue as it flows in a wide bed through a deeply cut gorge. But despite the poison its waters carry, its beauty remains untainted – even though the birds that would have haunted a pure waterway are no more. Would that, we as a nation had better sense and would let our streams run pristine so that one could swim in the Soan or angle for its once famed mahasher. The seven steel spans of the ‘Sohan River Bridge’ sit on six massive brick piers that taper to the top. Oblong in shape, the piers rise no less than fifty metres above the foul water of the Soan. The tops of the piers are deeply notched for the reinforcing cantilevers of the line to sit in while the bottoms rest o n
heavy looking bases. This bridge is not just a pretty piece of civil engineering, it is the highest rail bridge in Pakistan today. Years ago, this honour rested with one on the line north from Sibi. Beyond Khost, in the spectacular, yawning maw of the Chappar Rift, the Louise Margaret Bridge was among the most heroic feats of railway engineering in the entire subcontinent. When trains ran across it, they rumbled over the chasm sixty-five metres above the valley floor. But early in July 1942, Louise Margaret was done in, closed forever by a massive rainstorm that washed away a length of line in the Rift. We rolled on to Daudkhel past the Massan railway station. If ‘Sohan’ River Bridge station had seemed forlorn. Massan, south of it, was ever more so: just the whitewashed building gallantly sitting where it has for the past 120 years without any sign of human habitation within sight. The station master stood on the platform his green flag outstretched and our train clattered through. We did not pause to savour the romance of Massan. If young Ashfaq Tabassam can make things happen, this line will soon emerge from its ‘forgotten’ status. He has worked hard to run a train safari from Rawalpindi to Daudkhel and our ride with the freight train was a sort of reconnaissance. The first tourist train may not run before the end of summer, but there are ambitious plans for it. When that train goes, I will be on it, if only to spend some time at Massan. –Salman Rashid, rated as the best in the country, is a travel writer and photographer who has travelled all around Pakistan and written about his journeys. Pictures by the Author
By Salman Rashid
part of my life hunting railway heritage, I had harboured the dream of seeing this bridge. And so when young Ashfaq Tabassam of the Railways offered to take me for a ride in the guard’s brake on a Daudkhelbound freight train, I had no reason to pretend being caught up in more pressing business. We joined the train at the outer signal of Attock station and I got to ride in the locomotive with the hugely bearded Hameed Shah and his unshaven sidekick Hamid Nawaz. Hameed was a third generation Railwayman and a veteran of thirtytwo years on the line. His years in the service had been spent piloting trains in the Peshawar railway division where he said boys still routinely stone passing trains. The most harrowing experience of his entire career came the day after the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. He was marshalling a freight train at Taru Jabba railway station between Peshawar and Nowshera when an angry mob approached the yard. They meant business because they came armed with clubs and burning brands. Already behind them, Hameed Shah saw columns of smoke rising from their arson. He had a rake full of transit trade goods on their way to Afghanistan and if the mob were to have its way, Pakistan would suffer not only a bad name, but heavy fiscal loss as well. The signal had only just gone down when a rock came crashing through the glass window of the locomotive. With a bleeding forehead and several cuts on his face and hands from splintered glass, Hameed Shah shifted the throttle lever from notch 1 to 4. The engine roared and surged ahead. Even as the mob rushed forward brandishing lighted faggots and clubs, the train had picked up enough speed to deny them boarding. Some miscreants flung their lighted brands but none came into the cabin from the shattered window and no damage was done. Hameed Shah brought his train safely into