Conversations On A Pakistani Bus (cont.)

And since I was heading to Peshawar, he gave me examples from there too:  Almost all the madrassas are plagued with sexual abuse.  According to Mian the teachers are having sex with the students, and the senior students are having sex with the junior students.  Mian spoke largely without inflection, but occasionally his sentences ended with a twinge of disgust. 

A thick cloud of dust occasionally rolled into the bus.  “You do not have this dust in Canada, do you?” Mian asked. And when a man lit a cigarette near us, Mian confessed he didn’t like smoking, It had killed his father, who had served under the British in both Iran and Iraq during World War II.  Mian postulated that the smoke and dust along the highway contributed to the eczema in his family.

As we talked I could feel Mian’s physical strength through his shoulder, which prodded into mine since the small seat could not quite contain him.  He was a big man, both tall and muscular, with a thick black moustache and a big heart.  He felt sorry for India because it is, from his perspective, a poorer country than Pakistan.  Thus, as he explained, there is more rape, crime, and corruption in India.

As we neared his stop, he invited me to spend the night at his home.  I would have enjoyed meeting his family, but I needed to go on. 

Mian said goodbye, and the bus continued on toward Peshawar.  It was completely dark outside now.  I began to think more about Peshawar and recalled the things I had read about it, among them this passage from Karl Meyer’s The Dust of Empire:

“Peshawar is the hub of a thriving black market in drugs and weapons; its slums and refugee camps the recruiting ground for jihadists who would happily kill every infidel anywhere.” 

I thought of Osama bin Laden, who most observers believed was hiding somewhere in this border region of Pakistan.  There was something mystical about a place where the world’s most wanted man could disappear, and something mysterious about the people who would hide him.

Another man took Mian’s seat, and for some minutes I could see his mind churning.  I waited for what it would finally spin out.  He asked where I was from, and I told him America. 

His mind continued churning.  I awaited a political statement—some sort of condemnation or challenge—but nothing.  After a few minutes he began small talk—his name was Munir and he lived in a village outside of Peshawar.  Then he cut to the crux of the matter, “Do you watch many sex videos in America?”  He had said nothing about Bush, terrorism, or religion, but he could barely hide his urge to talk about sex.  He was smiling and hunched over so that others could not hear us.

We spoke about pornography, morality, and family values.  Munir was shocked to hear that some people in the West actually wait until they are married to have sex.  “This is good news!” he said.  Yet, I wasn’t convinced he really believed that—at least not his dirtier side. 

The bus swung south of the highway to run through the center of Nowshera, a town on the Kabul River.  We dropped off several passengers in front of a string of gun shops that bristled with automatic weaponry.

Looking at the guns glaring under fluorescent light, I thought about Pakistani history.  One of the most fascinating non-violent movements of the twentieth century originated here in the North-West Frontier Province.  Beginning in the 1920s, a most popular Pashtun leader, Abdul Ghaffar Khan, a pacifist, struggled against British rule.  His non-violent principles were derived from his concept of jihad, and it stirred the imagination of other Pashtuns.  In this land of rugged mountaineers so wedded to their guns, Ghaffar Khan raised a nonviolent army of 100,000 men that excelled in acts of civil disobedience.

As the bus again picked up the main road and began the final stretch to Peshawar, the land around me, hidden by the night, seemed mystical.  Here in a region so famous for its fighting, a historical Gandhi-like social activism was hiding in its furrowed hills and faces. 

Munir began to moan about my safety.  “This is not good.  Not good at all.  You are alone.  You have no mama, no wife, no friend.  What if you are alone at night and get fever?  Who will heal you?  Oh, this is not good at all.”

Munir spoke as if he were on the verge of tears.  I assured him I would be back in America soon where I would be well fed and looked after.  I found it amusing that he did not seem worried about the potential safety of a lone American in a fundamentalist hotbed, only about that simpler threat called a fever.

We arrived in Peshawar and together stepped off the bus into the dirt lot and chaos of the province’s largest bus station.  I had the sensation of being born again.  It was as if the bus had released me from its womb, and Peshawar now held me in her arms.  They were not the smoothest or safest of arms, but there was no doubt that they held me, that it felt right to be here.  The horns and exhaust, the beards and burkas, the movement of people upon solid ground—how wonderful it was to be alive and walk in such a world.

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