Of Lovesongs, Earthquakes, and Evergreens

It may actually be impossible to explain this. It’s closing in on nine o’clock at night and I’m in a Mercedes minibus on the highway headed from Lahore toward Islamabad, playing every love song I can find on my iPod for a 35 year-old man. I’m going through them alphabetically, but every now and then when I see he’s getting bored I play ‘Annie’s Song’ by John Denver again and he lets out this appreciative little, um, moan. It’s times like these when I wish I could bring everyone along on one of these trips so that I wouldn’t have to say anything but let them soak it up like I am. These are unbelievable times.

The man’s name is Qasir, which is a Muslim name, but he wishes he had a Christian one like John or Peter or something. He told me that once. He’s married. Three kids. ‘What is your idea about Marriage?’ he asks me as we vibrate along the highway. The Mercedes lets out a warning tone every time the speedometer needle nudges past 120 and our conversation is perforated with irritating beeps. ‘My idea?’ I ask. I know what he means, but I’m stalling. ‘Yes … I mean to say … what is your idea about the restrictions of Marriage,’ he says. ‘Is it better for married or for to be Single?’ The other guys in the van lean forward. They’re all single. ‘Well,’ I say. ‘My idea about marriage is that if you have the right person then it is good to be married, and if you don’t, then it’s not.’ This pronouncement has the weight of my 31 years behind it and everyone nods sagely and gives it a moment of silence before ignoring it. ‘The restrictions are very bad,’ Qasir says. ‘Pakistani womens are very badly difficult. If you look at a girl, I mean to say, they will be very in some angry mood: Why you look at this other girl?’ I stare at him. He’s serious. ‘Qasir, my friend, that’s not just Pakistani women.’ He seems surprised. Later, when the topic changes to music, he tells me he likes English love songs because he is a romantic. Tell that to your wife, I think, but I play him ‘Annie’s Song’ anyway, to keep him happy – and awake – until we get home.

We’ve gone to Lahore to look at some portable cabins for the team up in Bagh. Right now they sleep in tents and work in a building that stood up to earthquake but now has cracks in the walls that are steadily widening from pencil lines to crevasses you could put your fist into. We have declared this situation ‘unsafe’, and then ‘very unsafe’, and then ‘so unsafe we should do something about it’, which is why I’m looking at porta-cabins.

I was up in Bagh last week. It is beautiful. This is real Pakistani Kashmir - off limits to foreigners until now – in the foothills of the great mountain ranges of the Hindu Kush and Himalayas. Bagh spreads up the steep slopes on either side of the river, which runs as a brown ribbon through a wide bed of stones, a constant reminder of its grander days. I arrived by UN helicopter and got a ride to the Tearfund office with a doctor from the American Rescue Committee. He looked Pakistani but spoke with a British accent so colonial upper class it sounded fake. ‘Bagh was famous before the earthquake for its cakes and pastries and confectionary,’ he said like he was a tour guide for a museum. He actually said ‘confectionary’ and I had to look it up later because I didn’t believe him – not that Bagh was famous for it, but that it meant what he meant. It does. He dropped me off at the Tearfund office with a firm handshake and some more very slippery sounding words.

The next day I went with Sardar and Mohammed on a survey for ‘watsan’, the fancy euphemism for ‘water and sanitation.’ We were looking at springs. Sardar is like a small French slapstick comedian from the 1940s and Mohammed is a good straight man. Whenever we got to a spring box or a reservoir, Sardar would plop himself down on it like a kid having a tantrum in a supermarket and bark out orders for GPS coordinates, which Mohammed would read out to him. Then he would pop up again like he was spring-loaded. ‘Move,’ he’d say, and we’d move. I got an enormous kick out him and he knew it.

The country we were walking through was amazing. There were huge pine trees with long needles hanging in sweeping tufts like the tassels of a thousand Persian carpets, and juniper trees twisting up with their dark green waxy leaves, and a tree that looked like a fig tree but wasn’t. The scent of evergreen was everywhere and the warm air was mixed with cool mountain gusts from the snowy peaks above us. Below, the valley spread out with cottages dotting the slopes. We stopped by some lumberjacks who were cutting up a tree with an old double-handled saw that they kept carefully oiled. Sardar sat on the newly cut log and got sap all over himself.

When the day was over, Ismail the driver, took us down the road a little ways, wheeling his Toyota delicately around the hairpin turns with the palm of one hand, reminding me for some reason of an expert horseman. We stopped at a grassy place and Sardar and Mohammed took out the gas stove and the rice and beans and bread and we had lunch and tea looking out over the valley.

In Bagh, I would play my guitar in the evenings for a madly appreciative audience, fumbling my way through my five-song repertoire to rapturous applause. I’m learning ‘Annie’s Song’. The favourites are always the love songs. Because Shona was leaving, I learned a Scottish heartbreaker about missing home, and sang it badly at her leaving party. The others sang or recited poems as well, and one of the women sang a shy, strange song in her haunted ululating voice. At the end, Shona taught everyone ‘Auld Lang Syne’ and we crossed arms and held hands in a circle and sang it in a hideous din to say goodbye and send her off.

At night, I fell asleep in a tent with six other men, as if we were lumberjacks or miners, and their soft voices whispered in Urdu and slid on and on through the night.