It’s picturesque and soothingly quiet, but as we walk through the village there are signs that all is not well. Children have runny noses and dirty faces, their clothes are grubby and their eyes often red and watery from the wood smoke that fills the houses. Faces show the effects of in-breeding and for each smile we get there will be another dull, dejected, vacant glance. Though Saifullah is proud and protective of his community, he can’t disguise the problems. The Kalash, infidels, squeezed to the very edge of their country, are neither powerful nor numerous. Rumbur consists of 50 families, about 300 people, and the combined population of the Kalash villages is around 4000.
Their best hope of survival is tourism. Aware of the potential, the government has given them better roads and schools that teach Urdu and English, but of the money charged for permits to visit the Kalash valleys Saifullah reckons only 5 per cent finds its way through to the community.
In a stone hut with an irrigation channel running through it, an old man on his haunches watches barley being ground between two stones turned by the force of water. A few yards further on there is a handsome new suspension bridge that allows vehicles right up into the village. The road passes a long, low building with a high wall snaking around it. This is the menstruating hut. Kalash theology has very strong notions of purity and impurity. Menstruation is confirmation of women’s impurity, and when their periods begin they must leave their homes and enter a communal house.
Mothers must give birth in the hut and remain there for 20 days afterwards. Only after undergoing a purification ceremony can they return home and rejoin village life.
We climb a hill above the village through glades of juniper and mulberry. Halfway up, I catch the sharp, sweet smell of something rotten. Ahead of me are small piles of wood and glass and I realize we’re picking our way through a graveyard. Saifullah seems unconcerned as he points out decomposing coffins on top of the ground. That’s the Kalash way of death, he says. The bodies are never buried and the tops of the coffins are often left open to let the souls escape. I fear souls must have escaped quite recently.
At the top of the hill the modern world intrudes again in the shape of a long, open-sided building that looks like a bus shelter. This is another government perk, provided for the village as a permanent arena for the music and dancing for which the Kalash are renowned. Every year there is a music festival here that pulls in the tourists, many of whom come to see something unheard of in Pakistan: women dancing together in public. The emancipation of Kalash women has brought them the unwelcome attention of men from outside, seeking a sexual freedom denied to them in the rest of Pakistan.
Supper is very jolly. Saifullah’s cooked some locally caught trout for us and produces a bottle of his home-brew, grape juice from last summer, which is still fermenting and tastes like fortified sherry.
Day Nine : To Chitral
Wake to the sound of water and the smell of wood smoke. After a couple of nights here I no longer feel cut off from the world, but protected from it, and not particularly anxious to move away. I can understand why Saifullah values the isolation that has shaped and strengthened this tight-knit community, and why he loves visitors so long as they don’t want to change anything.
As our jeep rolls over the bridge and down the hill, the Rumbur valley narrows behind us until the village and the thin strips of green fields that sustain it disappear altogether, and we find ourselves descending through a tight, treeless gorge onto whose steep sides the track hangs by its fingernails. Nadir Begh, my driver, anxious at the best of times, never unfurrows his brow. He’s less concerned by the precipice below than the rock wall above. Recently descended loose grey shale lies scattered across the road and he peers up in the air, accelerating forward at the slightest trickle of dust.
We’re all relieved as the valley widens and reveals a perspective of broad mountain slopes that lead the eye remorselessly upwards to the solitary bulk of Tirich Mir, 25,228 feet (7708 m), the highest mountain in the Hindu Kush and, I realize, the highest mountain I’ve ever seen.
As we near Chitral, orchards and tranquil stretches of woodland cluster beside the road. We pass groups of men shaking mulberries from the trees with long sticks, and a line of very small children coming out of school, all dressed in vivid green shalwar-kameezes and looking like a procession of parrots.
The Hindu Kush Heights Hotel is set on the side of a hill with a fine view of the valley and Chitral town. Recently built, the emphasis is firmly on local design and craftsmanship at the expense of televisions and mini-bars. In the garden the heat smells of rosemary and jasmine.
The owners and creators of this remarkable hotel are both of that great Chitral dynasty, the Ul-Mulk family. Siraj, a man of my own age and a one-time Pakistan Airlines pilot, is one of several sons of the last ruler or Mehtar (Persian for prince) of Chitral. His father was married to Siraj’s mother for 80 years.
‘They were two and four when they got married.’
Clean-shaven and soft-spoken, and wearing a Western shirt and trousers, Siraj is pale enough to pass for a suntanned Suffolk farmer, except for the flat, felt Pashtun cap, the pakol, which perches on top of the head in summer and rolls down for extra protection in the winter.
Though the Mehtar surrendered all his political powers to the Pakistani state in 1972, Siraj is still technically a prince and his wife Ghazala, with the piercing, dark eyes and intense good looks of the Pathan, a princess.
Three pet dogs help complete a sense of sharing a family house, rather than an impersonal hotel, and their guest book shows that they are by no means cut off up here in the valley. A framed photo shows the staff posing next to General Musharraf and on the wall by the door hangs a signed photo of thanks from Robert De Niro.
Ghazala is much amused that when De Niro came to stay, Siraj asked him what line of work he was in.
Despite their international clientele they observe the local custom. Ghazala, for instance, has elected to observe purdah and cannot walk into the town uncovered.
I join her and Siraj as they walk the dogs on the hillside behind the hotel. She enjoys this walk because she doesn’t feel trapped by having to wear the veil. As we pick our way through artemisia scrub we talk about the two standards of behaviour. Though Pakistan’s constitution makes no discrimination on grounds of gender, for traditional reasons most women choose to remain behind the veil. This cannot but result in some inequality, however self-inflicted, and it shows up in national literacy figures. For men literacy in Pakistan is around 60 per cent; for women, 35 per cent.
Day Ten : Chitral
Chitral, a compact riverside town and centre of a close-knit valley community, has grown and prospered in recent years with the influx of Afghans, who came over the mountain passes during the Taliban years. Siraj reminds me that the border is less than 50 miles (80 km) to the west.
‘You see, in winter we’re cut off from the rest of Pakistan, but we’re not cut off from Afghanistan.’
He’s complimentary about the Afghan influence. They rejuvenated the sleepy town, bringing new cafes and restaurants, improving the choice of food in the shops, opening butchers, greengrocers, carpet-weaving and other businesses and generally demonstrating their talent as entrepreneurs. Now many of them are returning home and Chitral is once again reverting to its natural sleepiness.