The View from Islamabad

Shona is here this weekend, down out of the mountains of Bagh in Pakistani Kashmir. She is a bubbly Scot, a former nurse and the daughter of a farmer. We are in the dining room, waiting while Paul makes dinner. Paul is Afghan, but his family left their home in the 70s, after the coup that forced the king into exile and led to the coming of the Soviets in the 80s. An interesting fact about Paul is that he’s the second cousin of Hamad Karzai, the president of Afghanistan. Paul’s in charge of finance, but tonight he’s also in charge of dinner. He loves cooking and it’s impossible to stop him, or help, so I’m sitting at the table playing my guitar. I finish the song and Shona is looking at me and past me to where Paul is steaming broccoli in the kitchen. ‘Look at you both,’ she says in her accent that makes everything sound like a song. ‘Ye’re both so content, doing what ye’re doin’.’ She says it and it rolls through my heart like an ocean swell on a hot day. Because she’s right.

I’m happy. It surprises me. I’ve become so used to loneliness and longing in this kind of work – or really (who am I kidding?), in my life – that I’m astounded now that it has slipped away quietly and without notice. I keep looking for it to come back, like a freed prisoner who keeps looking around the guns and the guards – ‘pinch me, for I must be dreaming.’ But so far it seems I’m not.

Islamabad is the kind of city you could be lonely in, if your soul was tipping in that direction. It is not like Kabul, ancient and tangled as an old oak, built of layers of dust from the time of Cain, and filled with all the restless passion and romance that humanity has shouldered since we were sent east of Eden. Islamabad is built neatly on a grid of numbered streets, and is fitted on the West side with a diplomatic enclave, guarded by lethargic security men and home to the embassies of the nations of the world, from Canada to Egypt to the Holy See of Rome. It is a city designed to turn the good face of Pakistan to the world and hide its soul from sight. Stay long enough and, if you are bored, you may turn to loneliness as a way to find your own soul.

But if your soul is not collapsing that way, if your soul – by good fortune, by unexplained blessing – is brimming instead, then the heart of Islamabad reveals itself, slips through, runs crossways and zigzag to the tidy streets, spills over the straight lines. We are still in Central Asia, after all, still at the crossroads of culture and history and race and empire - a place of bizarre combinations.

There is Jean-Luc’s, a Chinese restaurant with a French name, hidden in the upstairs of a private home, unsigned and unmarked like a speakeasy during Prohibition. Here you will find relief workers of all stripe, eating jumbo prawns, smoking like hard-boiled detectives, shooting pool, and drinking Muree’s beer. Muree is a town, only two hours from Islamabad, where there is a brewery. Pakistan, officially an Islamic country that forbids the use of alcohol, brews its own beer. And it’s not bad.

There is the traffic, and there are the traffic police, happily coexisting without ever seeming to affect each other. The traffic piles up and sounds a thousand klaxons like a tribe of angry geese. It colours outside the lines and spills off the road and tangles itself in hopeless knots at intersections, while the traffic police stand cheerily in the middle of the road with their blue uniforms and white belts and gloves and gaiters. They blow their whistles and wave their hands and display signs with such information as your chance of being hit when going through a red light (100%) and slogans like ‘No Honking, No Horn’ and ‘While You Were Finding Your Way Some Others Lost Theirs.’ It took us days of discussion to agree on what this last one meant. We finally decided that it was a friendly abstract reminder to not drive with your brights on. (‘What is that guy doing?’ Paul asked a couple of days later, as I was driving and the oncoming driver had his high beams on like a spotlight at a rock show. ‘While he was finding his way, we lost ours,’ I said. Paul was in stitches for five minutes).

As usual in Asia, a motorcycle is family transportation, and as in Kabul, safety helmets are a curious fashion addition instead of safety equipment for the operator. Men ride motorcycles wrapped in the type of brown Robin Hood cloak called a pattu, looking like fleets of bandits from the ancient world, mounted on buzzing 75cc Japanese imports, cloak tails flapping in the wind.

And I’ve found a church to go to. Our Lady of Fatima Catholic Church in Sector F7 has an English mass at 9:30 Sundays. There is a convent next door and the nuns sit front and center with their song sheets and guitars, belting out the sung parts of the service in peppy tunes … ‘Glory to God in the highest, and peace to His people on earth …’ Last Sunday I arrived a bit early and was there for the flood of Pakistani Catholics pouring out of the earlier Urdu mass. A friendly English-speaking man named Albert appeared at my elbow and chattily began telling me that the priest gave inspirational sermons in Urdu and was bringing people in by the truckload. ‘He is better in Urdu than English,’ Albert said, but I thought he was pretty good in English, too. He said it was up to us Christians to show God’s peace to the world, and he stopped in the middle of what he was saying once for a full minute to carefully blow his nose on a tissue, which he then folded and returned to a pocket under his vestment. I shook his hand after, but I didn’t mention how impressed I was with his nose blowing because I wasn’t sure I could explain it very well. What I thought in my mind was that he was an unhurried, peaceful man, untroubled by the passing of time, and so closer in that way to God and our true nature, for in heaven we are not bound to time.

Back in the realm of time, Albert whispered to me that the man sitting with his family in the row in front of us was the French Ambassador. (If so, then the daughter of the French Ambassador to Pakistan is quite cute). Looking around, there were several countries represented in the church – Italian ladies and African delegates in full, bright Sunday best. ‘I always sit with the Sisters,’ Albert told me. ‘To help with the singing.’ He has a point. If you sit behind them you can look over their shoulders and see the words. There are not very many song sheets. I borrowed one from a guy next to me who didn’t seem that interested in using it. I loved the mass, every last bit.

Sometimes at the end of the day I go up on the roof of our house and look north to the foothills, where the lights of army bases and other buildings remind me of the North Shore of Vancouver, and I think fondly of home. Paul usually joins me, and we talk about the work, about girlfriends we may or may not have after a year, about why we are here. We tell the stories and jokes of the day, then fall quiet and go downstairs again. Bedtime prayers: ‘… and may the Lord bless us, protect us from all evil, and bring us to everlasting life.’ Then under my new Taiga down sleeping bag and into the arms of Morpheus until morning.

All this, but not sad, and not lonely. Pinch me.