In addition to the scrap of paper where the 113 schoolbooks are scribbled down, Sultan also has books he wants to print on his own account. Following the stream of journalists, aid workers and foreign diplomats into Afghanistan, came the demand for English-language books about the country. Sultan does not import books from foreign publishers, he prints them himself.
Pakistan is the piracy printers’ paradise. No control exists and few respect royalties and copyrights. Sultan pays one dollar to print a book he can resell for twenty or thirty. The bestseller Taliban, by Ahmed Rashid, Sultan has reprinted in several editions. The favourite amongst the foreign soldiers is My Hidden War, a book written by a Russian reporter about the disastrous occupation of Afghanistan between 1979 and 1989. It was a reality diametrically opposite to the one experienced by today’s international peace-keepers patrolling Kabul, who from time to time drop in and buy postcards and old war books in Sultan’s bookshop.
The bus trundles into Lahore bus depot. The heat hits him. The place is heaving with people. Lahore is Pakistan ’s cultural and artistic stronghold, a busy, polluted and confusing city. Lying in a plain, lacking all natural defences, the town has been conquered, destroyed, rebuilt, conquered, destroyed and rebuilt. But in between conquests and destruction many of the rulers entertained leading poets and writers and Lahore thus became the town of artists and books, in spite of the fact that the palaces the artists visited were constantly being levelled to the ground.
Sultan loves the Lahore book markets; he has pulled off several coups here. Few things warm the cockles of Sultan’s heart more than finding a valuable book in a dusty market place and buying it for next to nothing. Sultan is of the opinion that he owns the world’s largest book collection on Afghanistan, a collection of about eight or nine thousand volumes. Everything interests him: old myths and stories, old poetry, novels, biographies, recent political literature as well as dictionaries and encyclopaedias. His face lights up when he happens upon a book he hasn’t got or doesn’t know.
But now he has no time to trawl the book markets. He gets up at dawn, puts on his clean change of clothes, arranges his beard and places the fez on his head. He stands before a holy responsibility – to print new textbooks for Afghanistan ’s children. He goes straight to the printers he uses most. There he meets Talha. The young man is a third-generation printer and only mildly interested in Sultan’s project. It is, quite simply, too big.
Talha invites Sultan to a cup of tea with thick milk, strokes his mouth and looks worried.
‘I don’t mind taking a few, but a hundred and thirteen titles! That will take us a year.’
Sultan has a two-month deadline. While the sound of the printing presses reverberates through the thin walls in the little office, he tries to convince Talha to put all other jobs aside.
‘Impossible,’ says Talha. Sultan might well be an important client and printing schoolbooks for Afghan children might well be a holy undertaking, but he has other commissions to take care of. Nevertheless, he makes a quick calculation and reckons the books can be printed for as little as 3 pence per copy. The price will depend on paper quality, colour quality and binding. Talha calculates all combinations of quality and size and makes a long list. Sultan’s eyes narrow. He does mental calculations in rupees, dollars, days and weeks. He lied about the deadline to get Talha to speed up and put aside other assignments.
‘Don’t forget, two months,’ he says. ‘If you cannot make the time limit, you’ll ruin my business, do you understand?’
When they finish talking about the schoolbooks they negotiate the new books for Sultan’s bookshop. Once again they discuss prices, numbers and dates. The books Sultan has brought with him are reproduced straight from the original. The pages are taken apart and copied. The printers stamp them on large metal plates. When they print coloured front-covers a zinc solution is poured over the plates. They are then laid out in the sun, which brings out the right colour. If a page has several colours the plates must be exposed one at a time. Thereafter the plate is put on the press and run. Everything is done on old, semiautomatic machinery. One worker feeds the press with paper; another squats at the opposite end and sorts what emerges. The wireless drones in the background; a cricket match between Sri Lanka and Pakistan. On the wall hangs the mandatory picture of Mecca and a lamp swings from the ceiling, full of dead flies. Streams of yellow acid run on to the floor and down the drains.
After the inspection-round Talha and Sultan sit down on the floor and consider book covers. Sultan has chosen motifs from his postcards. He has some strips of border which he likes and he makes up the pages. After five minutes they have designed six book covers.
In a corner some men sit and drink tea. They are Pakistani publishers and printers who all operate in the same shadowy piracy market as Sultan. They greet each other and get talking about the latest news from Afghanistan, where Hamid Karzai walks a tightrope between the various warlords, while groups of al-Qaida soldiers have launched an attack in the east of the country. American Special Forces have come to the rescue and are bombing caves by the Pakistani border. One of the men sitting on the rug says what a pity the Taliban were driven out of Afghanistan.
‘We need a few Taliban here in Pakistan too, to clean up a bit,’ he says.
‘That’s what you say. You have no experience of the Taliban. Pakistan would collapse if the Taliban came to power, don’t believe anything else,’ Sultan thunders. ‘Just imagine: all the advertising posters will come down, and there are at least one thousand in this street alone. All books containing pictures will be burnt, and the same will happen to the whole of Pakistan ’s film archive, music archive, all instruments will be destroyed. You’ll never again hear music, never dance again. All the Internet cafés will be closed, TV is prohibited and confiscated, and all you’ll get on the wireless will be religious programmes. Girls are taken out of school, all women are sent home from work. What will happen to Pakistan? The country will lose hundreds of thousands of workplaces and sink into deep depression. And what will happen to all the superfluous people who lose their jobs when Pakistan is no longer a modern country? Maybe they’ll become warriors? ’ Sultan was working himself into a frenzy.
The man shrugged his shoulders. ‘Well, maybe not all the Taliban, just a few of them.’
Talha supported the Taliban by duplicating their pamphlets. For a few years he even printed some of their Islamic textbooks. Eventually he helped them set up their own printing works in Kabul. He got hold of a secondhand press from Italy, which he let them have cheaply. In addition he provided paper and other technical equipment. Like most Pakistanis he found it reassuring to have a Pashtoon regime next door.
‘You are unscrupulous,’ Sultan teases him good-naturedly, now that he has vented his spleen on his loathing of the Taliban.
Talha squirms, but sticks to his guns. ‘Taliban is not in conflict with our culture. They respect the Koran, the Prophet and our traditions. I would never have printed anything that went against Islam.’