Two extracts from Joseph's Box
Extract 2
Skardu was a scrubby, brown place, set in an enormous valley formed by greyish mountains. By the time they got there the sun was setting, and the shadows seemed to Zuleikha to resemble strange alien beings with etiolated limbs who would be able to defy gravity and cover great distances in the stride of a single day. Unlike us, she thought. In spite of Zulfikar Ali’s driving skills, which now she recognised were indeed considerable, it had taken them the best part of three very long days to reach here from Rawalpindi. A mere fifty minutes as the crow – or rather, the propeller plane – flew, but over five hundred miles by road. And after sitting for all that time in the jeep, her back and limbs were aching as yet again they carried the box out and secreted it in the cupboard of the hotel room. With trekkers, climbers and miscellaneous travellers, it was end-of-the-pier season in Skardu, and the rooms had not been cheap. The town, the Old Bazaar, the New Bazaar and all the other bazaars seemed to be swarming not only with buses but also with jeeps, similar to their own but scruffier, and filled with local guys, Pathans, Punjabis and others, all hanging out of the windows or else perched precariously on the rear running-board.
Balti sounded quite different from the other languages she’d encountered over the past two days. In its assonance, in the gaps between words, in its short monosyllables, it was clearly much more like Chinese or Thai, say, than Urdu, Persian or Pashto. She realised that somewhere back there, around the time Zulfikar Ali had begun to open up and talk about Baltistan instead of hip-hop, Hollywood and heavy metal, they had crossed an invisible frontier. A frontier not merely between language groups – though that was profound enough – but also between continents, music and the conception of the sacred. Zulfikar Ali had told them that his real name, his full name, was Zulfikar Ali Lobsang. He had reclaimed the latter of those names in the manner of many of the younger educated people of Baltistan, as a statement of his cultural ties with Tibetan and Ladakhi culture. Ali, of course, was the name of the Holy Prophet’s son-in-law, himself a pre-eminent prophet of Islam and, for Shias, the first of the Imams. Zulfikar meant ‘lightning’ and Lobsang meant ‘brightness’ – and so, he explained, his name spelled illumination.
In the old days, this whole area had been part of a single kingdom. The kings had made their winter capital in Skardu and their summer capital in Leh, and Mahayana Buddhism and Islam had co-existed largely peacefully. In fact, most people had not become Muslim until the sixteenth century or later. Even now, most Muslims belonged to either the Shia (of the Twelver or Sevener persuasions) or Nurbakshi Sufi sects, both of which effectively had become targets for the Wahhabi and Salafi nutcases who seemed hell-bent on turning Islam into a religion bereft of love, tolerance, humanity, philosophy, theology, common decency or even common sense. But over the preceding thirty years they seemed very successfully to have infiltrated the army and security services, to the extent that every single one of these organisations played a double or even a triple game between the Americans, the Chinese, the Indians and God knows who else.
Or rather, Zuleikha had thought to herself, probably He doesn’t. Actually, she thought, the fact that all these shit-heads behaved in the way they did probably served as proof that He didn’t exist at all. Either that, or God had smoked a large dose of crack cocaine on his famous day of rest. Heresy! Blasphemy! Shirk! Yes! So fuck it. The people around here, in their dark valleys scarred with both poverty and the discarded rings of Coke cans – what kind of God did they have? A God who tore the children, dead and blue, from their bellies? Kids cretinized by the simple lack of iodised salt or else destined, one in ten of them, to perish before the age of five? If God had been living in Glasgow he’d be on the fucking paedophile register, she thought. He’d be locked up for eternity in a State Hospital. This was a land of dead children. The earth seethed with their tiny bodies, the rocks echoed with the resonance of their cries, their cat-yawls. It wasn’t more God that they needed, these folk: it was sewerage, education, health provision, the opportunity to sustain their fields as they had managed to do for centuries, and the chance to prosper without having to abandon everything for the hubristic, cannibalistic, suicidal economics of capitalism.
But Zuleikha had come to distrust narratives, potted explanations framed with neat borders. You shouldn’t believe everything you read or hear, she thought. There’s always an agenda. This thing about Baltistan – or Baltiyul – and its heavy Tibetan-ness had probably been dreamed up by some nineteenth-century roaming aristocrat. And now the young hotheads of the Baltistan Students’ Federation and the Baltistan Cultural Foundation knew that the West would swallow anything from a tin with the label Tibetan plastered on it as though it was the new manna. Whatever had happened to ‘Bod yul’, the ‘Land of the Buddhists’? Well, she thought, Baltistan is no longer a ‘land of Buddhists’ and hasn’t been for five hundred years, since the time of England’s Henry VII, the Huguenots of France or Scotland’s James IV. ‘Tibet’, or ‘Nub Ti-bat’ – ‘Western Tibet’ – was as much a construct as the Ghàidhealtachd, or ‘Scotland’, ‘England’, ‘Pakistan’, ‘Italy’, ‘Sicily’. It was not the new manna, it was just another tall tale. Nothing was as it seemed, a blade of grass was no longer simply a blade of grass (as the Red Lamas might have said).