Imran is in a meeting but three amiable dogs rise to greet us, tails wagging vigorously, until that becomes too much of an effort and they collapse, bellies flat against warm stones or on their backs in the shade of the verandah, legs spread-eagled in abandon.
After a half-hour or so, Imran, unheralded by minders, secretaries or advisers, slips quietly onto the verandah, wearing a light blue shalwar-kameez. His complexion is clear and unlined and his long face has a few interesting angles, which makes him more than conventionally handsome. When we ask him if he minds us filming the house he waves his arm agreeably. He’ll only be here another three months, and his wife Jemima is back in their house in London.
Tea and soft drinks are brought out. When I tell him of our visit to Skardu, his face lights up.
‘The most beautiful country,’ he says with feeling. ‘The Baltis are friendly and decent folk.’
Imran scratches the luxuriating Labrador with his foot. He talks carefully, as economical with words as he was with runs, seldom raising his voice, but relying more on expressively graceful hands to emphasize or illustrate a point. His soft-voiced, unemotional delivery masks bracing views.
On matters of religion he feels the clergy, rather than the scholars, are the big problem. The Koran, he maintains, quoting from it with confidence, is an example for life, but the mullahs seek to reduce its message to fit their own interpretations.
‘And some of them are decadent, you know,’ he says with a real touch of anger.
He feels the Taliban began as a genuine people’s movement, a reaction against the summary justice and tyranny of the warlords.
‘But they were taken over by extremists.’
We talk about the British influence. He thinks it not only strong, but fundamental. India and Pakistan were created by the British, who saw the plethora of tribes, small rulers, languages and customs as unwieldy and difficult. By playing them off against each other they created a centralized administration that India had never known before. It was a classic case of divide and rule.
I ask him if many of the old institutions aren’t still in place, or in the case of his alma mater, Aitcheson’s College, the Eton of Pakistan, positively thriving.
‘For the elite we had what’s called the “English medium education” and for the masses the “Urdu medium education”, so the elite became quite Westernized and the rest of society was not that much touched by Westernization, as you’ve seen as you travel around.’
‘Are you tolerant of these schools still existing?’
‘No, I think it’s terrible this educational apartheid.’
I press him on whether a bright lad from the bazaars would ever make it to the top in Pakistan, and he shakes his head quite vigorously.
‘Highly unlikely.’
He says he made the transition from cricket to politics because he felt that, with the way things were going, his country faced a bleak future. The population growth was the highest in the world, people weren’t being educated and governments were corrupt and unconcerned with investment in human beings.
‘It was pretty tough because I had to stand up to the status quo, which is very strong in this country.’
He doesn’t mince words. ‘Money in Pakistan is in the hands of crooks. The majority of people who go into politics make money through illegal means.’
Our government minder is listening in to all this and I fear the worst, but at the end of the interview all he asks of us is that we take a photograph of him with his hero.
Unlike the locked and barred Gulbar at the hotel in Peshawar, there is a place in the bowels of the Marriott where non-Muslims can enjoy an alcoholic beverage. It’s called The Bassment, which may or may not be a spelling mistake, and we agree to meet down there after work. I’m the first to arrive. Disapproval, in the forbidding shape of an unsmiling hotel bouncer in a suit, begins at the top of the stairs. He stands, arms folded, legs apart, resolutely avoiding eye contact, guarding the heavy door that opens onto a dank stairwell whose walls give off a pervasive odour of tobacco smoke, long since exhaled. At the bottom two swing doors open onto a long, apparently empty chamber sunk in Stygian gloom, pierced only by tiny disco lights sunk into the ceiling. Concrete walls increase the atmosphere of being in a bunker. At the bar is a Norwegian. We exchange a wary grunt of greeting, like two people who’ve come together to commit the same crime.
I order a beer. They have no international brands, only beer brewed in Pakistan.
Which is how I begin my acquaintance with the life-saving products of the Murree Brewery.
Day Twenty Four : Rawalpindi
Islamabad, its critics say, is 12 miles outside Pakistan, and this morning, as we drive out past the well-fenced government buildings and onto the wide, landscaped, highly under-used modern highway that surrounds the city I know what they mean. Everything is discreet, tidy, straight and planned, and it’s not until we reach the outskirts of Islamabad’s twin city, Rawalpindi, affectionately abbreviated to Pindi, that Pakistan comes back to life.
Not far from the airport, we’re diverted off the main road by hundreds of police. After some time a convoy of outriders, some in open cars with gloriously conspicuous scarlet berets, races by on either side of three blacked-out Mercedes, any one of which, or possibly none, contains President Musharraf. Significantly, he doesn’t live with the civil servants in Islamabad but in Rawalpindi, where the army is based, and this whole extravagant process, an entire six-lane highway closed for a half-hour, is a reminder of where the power lies in Pakistan.
At Independence in 1947, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, known to all as the Quaid-e-Azam, Father of the Nation, wanted Pakistan to remain a secular state but, divided as the country was into West Pakistan and East Pakistan (later to secede and become Bangladesh), the only real bond that held the disparate tribal groups together was religion. In 1956 the Constitution accepted this and declared Pakistan an Islamic Republic. The army, seeing power drifting away from them, staged their first coup two years after that and, despite various attempts to hand power to democratically elected leaders, Pakistan still is a military state, and one of the most hotly debated issues is whether or not Musharraf should give up his uniform and run for democratically elected office.
Turning off the Grand Trunk Road we pass the high, blotchy walls of the old barracks behind which one of Pakistan’s experiments with democracy came to a grim end, when Zulfikhar Ali Bhutto, a populist, secular prime minister, was hanged on the orders of General Zia, leaving Zia free to accelerate the process of Islamization.
At the heart of this nerve centre of the Islamic Republic, sandwiched between the barracks and the military headquarters, is the Murree Brewery, Pakistan’s largest purveyor of alcoholic beverages.
Originally established in 1861, up in the Murree Hills, north of Islamabad, by Henry Whymper, brother of the first man to climb the Matterhorn, it’s a place steeped in irony. Ninety-five per cent of the brewery’s 450-strong workforce is Muslim and officially not allowed to touch the product their lives depend on. The owner, Minoo Bhandara, is a scholarly Parsee who writes regular newspaper columns and his business card notes that he was ‘adviser to the President 1982-1985’ (that same President who hanged Bhutto). His office, dominated by a 150-year-old mahogany table, feels as if it would be more at home in an Oxbridge college than a brewery.
Minoo would make a good don. He is slightly stooped, and a large pair of glasses with thick lenses gives him an owlish air. He’s soft-voiced, courteous, a touch pedantic and very much at home in a well-worn rattan chair.
His Muslim brew master, Muhammed Javed, has been here 17 years. More in the mould of the modern executive, he’s a genial, youthful-looking man with degrees from universities in the Punjab and America.