Reflections on the Road: Conversations on a Pakistani Bus

It was dusk now and the bus continued its rumble west on the Grand Trunk Road.  We were two hours out of Rawalpindi and still an hour from Peshawar.  It was about then that Mian Mohammed, a policeman on his way home from work, leaned into me and delivered a most earnest question: "Do many people in Canada use heroin for sex?"

I was confused and ashamed:  Confused because in all my years of schooling and education nobody had told me about a relationship between heroin and sex and so now I had to plead ignorance before a fellow bus passenger.  Ashamed because thirty minutes earlier, in fear for my life, I lied to Mian and told him I was from Canada.  Now it was too awkward to tell him the truth and so the charade continued.  But so did a most interesting conversation.

"Why would a man inject heroin for sex?" I asked.

Mian was patient in his response, like a gentle teacher accustomed to students in need of remedial learning.  "A normal man does sex for five or ten minutes," he said.  "A man with heroin can do sex for five, maybe six hours.  Many in Saudi Arabia do this.  Many here too."

I was making my second bus journey from Rawalpindi to Peshawar and felt much more comfortable this time around.  The first time, six days earlier, I had spent the morning with a bad stomach and debilitating fever, not at all wanting to be on a bus later in the day.  In a traffic jam on the way to the station, my taxi got caught behind an open-cab truck filled to the gills with just-butchered cow carcasses.  At least for a moment I forgot about Islamic fundamentalism and my fever -- rotting flesh in late summer heat has the potency of a stun grenade.  When I finally reached the station, so weak I could barely walk, a grandfatherly security guard asked my nationality.  His eyes nearly popped out of his beard when I said America.  He vigorously shook his head, either in denial or as a signal for me to try again.  I smiled and said Australia.  He nodded happily.

 
The bus to Peshawar.  It would fill up shortly after I took this photo.

 
Pir Wadhai bus station (Rawalpindi)

The Grand Trunk Road stretches from Calcutta to Kabul, the impressive creation of a sixteenth-century Mogul ruler of India (it has since been paved).  The route from Rawalpindi to Peshawar covers some 100 miles and is shared by buses, bullock carts, chauffeured luxury cars, and pedestrians.  To drive it is to witness multiple near misses.  On this second journey my driver was particularly wild, and it seemed fitting to enter Pakistan's infamously unruly North West Frontier Province with such a man at the helm.  He sped and swerved with admirable fatalism.  He loved his horn like others loved their guns (the province is home to an estimated seven million Kalashnikovs).

The passengers were a rugged lot, with faces both independent and rooted.  Most of the men had beards and almost everyone was Pashtun, that group of 12 million people who live along the Pakistan-Afghan border.  They sat or stood quietly, unmoved even when our driver careened around other moving vehicles and brought us to within a hairbreadth of meeting Allah.  Near-death was not an event to get ruffled over.  Few men spoke at all, and as I looked into their furrowed faces I wondered if chatter was for the weak.  When a young man gave his seat to an old man, it was done with a minimum of words, if with any at all.  As the bus charged on toward Peshawar and there was nothing to do but be patient, the men simply stared.  They looked not at a particular thing but rather beyond things, as if they were seeing their own thoughts and weighing them.

The bus shook incessantly, sometimes violently.  I thought of a mother rocking her baby, only in this case the mother had the intent of nurturing the child's ruggedness.  I couldn't imagine these men in a bus with comfortable seats and good suspension; it would have been too soft.  Strength, I began to think, does not come from being coddled, it comes from being rattled.  The seats were torn and peeling, and the hot outside air blew through the open windows.

Several women sat toward the front of the bus and children played on their laps.  The women were vanished beneath their burkas -- expressionless, faceless, and completely unapproachable.  Elsewhere to speak to a woman is natural; here it would be to risk a violent confrontation.

I remembered how on my first trip to Peshawar I had been more nervous than I was now.  The sense of danger I had days earlier had not vanished -- that's why in meeting Mian Mohammed I had lied about my nationality.  But it had given way to familiarity.  I now had the feeling of being a little bit rugged, and with a degree of pleasure I anticipated what unexpected things the day would bring.  It was in this context that Mian and I continued our conversation.

"Do you have many homosexuals in Canada?"   Sex is a beloved topic of conversation in every part of the world, and Pakistan was no exception.  I guessed that we in Canada had a gay population of 2 percent, and then I prepared for Mian's moral chastisement for the sins of the West.  But his reply caught me off guard.  "That is all!  In Pakistan we have 25 percent homosexuals.  And we have 5 percent female homosexuals.  We call them lesbians."

"The graph is growing," Mian continued with a sigh.  He meant that cases of sexual misconduct were on the rise.  As a policeman, Mian possessed an anthology of anecdotal evidence which he proceeded to share.  Just this week he had questioned a young man and woman caught having sex in a video store.  When he asked them why they did this they helplessly replied, "Because we did it once and now we cannot stop. We can last a week then we must do it again."

Everyone, he said, was having sex in his jurisdiction south of Islamabad -- the pharmacist, the mechanic, the man who grills kebabs.  Mian continued to offer multiple illustrations.  And since I was heading to Peshawar he gave me examples from there too:  Almost all the madrassas are plagued with sexual abuse.  The teachers are having sex with the students and the senior students are having sex with the junior students.  Mian spoke with near objectivity, but occasionally his sentences ended with a ring of disgust at the hypocrisy and unfaithfulness he saw undermining society. 

A week earlier I had gone to the cinema in Lahore and saw a movie that was spilling over with sexual tension (like its Indian counterpart, Pakistani cinema excels as suggesting the act without actually doing it).  I told Mian I was surprised to find these things in an Islamic nation.  He chuckled at my description of Pakistani film but spoke seriously when he suggested that Pakistan's most troubling addiction today is the pornographic VCD.  They are illegal yet available everywhere, sometimes for as cheap as forty cents.  Police, he said, are always raiding video shops that sell them.  They confiscate the material, fine the shop the equivalent of about ten dollars, and then allow the business to reopen the next day.

Pakistan was perhaps the most hospitable country I would visit in Asia, but much brokenness lurked in the shadows, in its history, in its cities and villages.  In the 1971 war in which East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) broke away from West Pakistan (now Pakistan), Pakistani soldiers raped an estimated 200,000 Bangladeshis (this number is debated, some saying it was much lower, other higher).  And in Lahore today there are some 10,000 trafficked women (most from Bangladesh and Burma) involved in the city's sex industry.  In addition, according to the Asian Partnership for Human Development, several thousand child sex workers operate near the city's train station.

 
Signs of a hot day (Rawalpindi)

In our hour together Mian and I talked about other things as well.  A thick cloud of dust occasionally rolled into the bus.  Once he said, "You do not have this dust in Canada, do you?"  And when a man lit a cigarette near us, Mian told me, "I don't like this smoking."  It had killed his dad, who had served under the British in both Iran and Iraq during World War II.  Mian postulated that the smoke and dust along the highway contributed to the eczema in his family.

As we talked I could feel Mian's physical strength through his shoulder, which prodded into mine since the small seat could not quite contain him.  He was a big man, both tall and muscular, with a thick black moustache and a heart of gold.  He felt sorry for India because it is, from his perspective, a poorer country than Pakistan.  Thus, he explained, there is more rape, crime, and corruption in India.

As we neared his stop, he invited me to spend the night at his home.  He married in 1995, at the age of twenty-five, and now has four children.  I would have enjoyed meeting his family, but I needed to continue on.  Plus, I knew he was tired.  He gets up at 4:00 each morning, jogs five kilometers for exercise, and then takes the 5:00 a.m. bus to work, where his shift begins at 7:00 a.m.  It ends ten hours later, and then he boards the bus for the two-hour journey home.  He earns only $100 a month as a sergeant -- a miserable salary, he says, but better than what many others get -- and does his best to provide for his family.

Click HERE for part two

For more photographs and commentary from Pakistan, click on an old article of mine entitled IN PICTURES: FACES OF PAKISTAN.

		Joel Carillet, Gather Travel Correspondent
	Joel's column, "Reflections on the Road," is published every other Thursday to Gather Essentials: Travel. His articles, based on extensive travels in Asia and the Middle East, seek to shed light on humanity, both our own and that of others.   They aim not merely to entertain and inform but also to develop a sense of connection between the reader and the world. Joel's writing and photography have appeared in several publications, including the Kansas City Star, Christian Science Monitor, and The Best Travel Writing 2008.   Currently his agent is seeking a publisher for a book manuscript entitled Sixty-One Weeks: A Journey across Asia. If interesting in purchasing photographic prints, check out jcarillet.imagekind.com. When not on the road, he happily calls Tennessee home. Keep up with Joel's article series by joining his network, or subscribing to his content.