In August 1991, when I first saw it, the house was in perfect fettle. This was surprising for it was constructed around the year 1830 and was then fully 160 years old. The marble plaque on the façade, fixed by some thoughtful British civil servant after the annexation of Punjab read, “Summer residence of Maharaja Ranjit Singh, AD 1830-1837”.

Inspired by European architecture, the house was unlike a traditional vernacular residence. It had verandas on two sides with rooms on the remaining two and a central atrium. The side rooms and the verandas had lower roofs while that of the central foyer’s was higher. The rafters, door and window frames and every other timber fixture were first class teak.

The house sat on the east bank of the Chenab River, just outside Rasulnagar (Gujranwala district), right by the ancient ferry where a young Ranjit Singh had deprived the Afghans of the Zamzama that now sits outside Lahore Museum. Here, long after he had defeated the Afghans and put an end to their predatory raids, the Maharaja would have reposed with his customary glass of strong drink, watching the brown waters of the Chenab roll past forever and ever.

This house became part of my book Gujranwala: The Glory That Was (1992). It also featured in one of the episodes of my PTV documentary series “Nagri, nagri ghoom musafir” produced during 1998-1999. I returned to the house a number of times thereafter when I was pressing for it to be taken over by the district administration to turn it into a library or a museum so that it may be preserved forever.

But we, the people of Pakistan, have no connection with the dharti. We have severed the umbilical that would bond us with the motherland to give us a sense of belonging and pride. Without the connection, we drift aimlessly in a wasteland harbouring vague and false notions of Arab or Central Asiatic ancestry. The disconnect is so strong that nothing that belongs to this land turns us on. We simply do not care.

Last August, I returned to Rasulnagar again to digitally preserve Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s house. What I beheld left me in tears. The house that had withstood every vagary of nature until about 2004, was a ruined hulk. The roof was gone; every single door, window and ventilator removed. What was once the interior of the house was now a pile of debris.

Until 2004, the house stood in open fields. But this time round, there was next to the historical building, a semi-permanent house inhabited by what seemed to be a family of gypsies. They had plastered the walls of the Maharaja’s house with cow dung patties.

No one seemed to know who had laid low this historic building. Neither the gypsies nor the men minding the nearby tube well. In fact, one man even ventured that the building had been in that state since the time of his ancestors!

Though I do not know who to blame for the crime, I know the teak fixtures of the building now adorn the house of some well-connected thug. When he or his men started to dismantle this historic building which should have been part of the national heritage, the DCO and his minions simply looked away. No one bothered as it went down bit by bit.

Rasulnagar is historically a very interesting place because it sat on a busy ford. An elderly ferryman once told me that until well into the 1950s, there used to be fully 100 boats catering to the back and forth traffic. Moreover, this was the very place where Ranjit Singh, just 19-year-old and leading a small force, had routed a much larger Afghan army to bring their periodic raids to an end.

This also is the place where the Sikhs under Sher Singh Atariwala, 15,000-strong, fought a desperate battle against the British in November 1848. The British prevailed, the Sikhs withdrew to the west of the river to fight and lose their final battle two months later at Chillianwala.

All this — and more — makes Rasulnagar a tourist destination for the history buff. But we do not belong to this land, so what do we do with our heritage? We destroy it.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 9^th, 2013.

Folks do not like the new film Zero Dark Thirty. This film is about the 10-year long hunt for the most evil terrorist the world has known since Hasan bin Sabah, the Old Man of the Mountain — the two having much in common.

I am not a movie fan and know little about films, but the gripe of most reviewers is that this film features Arabic being spoken on the streets of Pakistan in the year 2011. One reviewer even ridiculed the scene of a camel train somewhere in Abbottabad. This poor reviewer may actually never have left his TV lounge where he writes his reviews because we have camels aplenty in this country.

I have no idea what director Kathryn Bigelow and her team had in mind when they put Arabic in the mouths of men who should actually have been speaking Hindko, but I fear this film may well turn out to be prophetic: that one day, we will totally succumb to Arab imperialism and actually make their language the official language of Pakistan. That we will then be seen running around with bed sheets for clothes with our heads bound with fan belts.

This is no unfounded fear, mind. The change has begun. In Punjab, it is creeping in. And it is coming by car. Or, at least, by car registration plates. Ever since the incumbent chief minister banned the official registration plates that came encrypted with every detail of the car and the owner, we have once again reverted to plates of all patterns and colours.

The new one, very likely paid for by the Saudis as they pay for most seminaries in this sorry land, is now in Urdu lettering. The red band on top is marked ‘Al-Bakistan’. Mind, it is not ‘Al-Pakistan’ but BAKISTAN. At the bottom, another red band reads ‘Al-Bunjab’. In between are the alphabets and numerals of the registration number in Urdu. By the way, that was how Ibn Battuta pronounced the name of this province.

While ‘Bakistan’ and ‘Bunjab’ have been sold, for some curious reason, alphabets like ‘p’ or the palatal ‘d’ continue to be written in Urdu as they should be. That is, they retain their sounds. I suspect the sluggish Arab mind behind this sneaky move to colonise us in terms of language did not realise this snag. But, sooner than we know, this will be changed with ‘p’ on the registration plate replaced with ‘b’. And if that throws everything out of kilter at the registration office, so be it.

Now, as this assault on language continues (and grows, as all evil must), we will soon have some idiot wanting to banish the hard and aspirated sounds that make Punjabi (and Urdu) the languages that they are. True, Lahoris from the inner city who simply cannot pronounce the palatal ‘r’, and with some difficulty, the palatal ‘d’, and for this handicap are made fun of by the rest of us, will be delighted. They may even claim that having embraced the one and only true religion, they knew the way the language would ultimately change and had adjusted their language accordingly centuries ago.

But why Bakistan? If ‘Falisteen’ (as it is pronounced in Arabic) can become Palestine in European languages, why can Pakistan not be ‘Fakistan’?

Every time I see a car with the ‘Al-Bakistan’ and ‘Al-Bunjab’ plates, I want to stop the louts to ask them why they should corrupt the name of their land. But the ugly, thuggish characters driving these cars make me desist. Because as things stand in ‘Fakistan’, it is impossible to attempt to talk sense to anyone, least of all to a yahoo.

In Karachi, they shoot you before you have delivered the first admonishing word. In ‘Bunjab’, they first abuse you and then ask if you are the mama (maternal uncle) of ‘Bakistan’. Since everyone except you is known either to some politician with a bogus degree or some thug of a police thanedar, you decide discretion and cowardice really are the best part of valour and withdraw.

‘Bakistan’ zindabad.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 2^nd, 2013.

“There is no quiet place in the white man’s cities. No place to hear the unfurling of leaves in spring or the rustle of insects’ wings … The clatter only seems to insult the ears.” Thus wrote Seattle to the president of the United States in 1854. This piece of prose, all 1,900 words of it, should be the environmentalists’ bible.

Now, Seattle was chief of the Suquamish Red People of North America when the president of that new country offered to buy the Red Man’s land and put him on reservations. Now, also, the letter is somewhat of a controversy because there exist two versions of it — quite alike in essence, however. Some attribute the prose to a 1970s screenwriter instead of Chief Seattle (also spelled Seathl); others to an earlier writer in the 1930s.

But whatever the case, it is a piece of earth literature, an ode to the good earth, a celebration of its bounties that we humans have ravaged and ravaged and which it continues to give. The intense feeling for the earth and what we have done to it is moving. It brings tears to the eyes. I do not think there is a human being firmly rooted to the earth who can read the entire piece aloud without the voice cracking and the eyes misting.

But this is not about Chief Seattle’s poignant letter, much too long for my word limit. This hangs on his assertion that there is no quiet place in the cities we have built for ourselves. And Lahore, if I may venture, must be the noisiest city of its size in the whole wide world.

Until the early years of this century, the noisiest (besides the air pressure horns that are illegal but which are tolerated by the public and condoned by an inefficient and corrupt bureaucracy) demons were the Vespa rickshaws. Since some moron had floated the idea that removing the original silencer made for greater fuel economy as well as more power, removal was the first done thing. In place of the original, they fitted a steel pipe that multiplied the noise.

Some years ago, the government introduced CNG rickshaws which, for some curious reason, seemed to work well with their silencers on. For the first time, the people of Punjab took a sigh of relief. But good things last the shortest in this blighted land and sooner than we knew, all hell broke loose with that accursed contraption spelled Qingqi and pronounced Chingchi.

Some moron once again asserted that in order for this 70cc machine to carry 12 grown men loaded on its heavy steel superstructure, it was necessary to replace the silencer with a steel pipe. Sooner than we could imagine, every single Qingqi that hit the streets of Punjab was devoid of the silencer. The result is a nerve-shattering ‘tunk-tunk-tunk’ that can be heard for miles in the quiet of the very early morning (when I incidentally wake for a certain reason).

And, mind, this plague afflicts only the province of Punjab. I have travelled across the four provinces, Gilgit-Baltistan and Kashmir. Everywhere I have seen these rickshaws hauling more bodies than they have the power to haul. Everywhere they pass you with just a breath of a ‘putt-putt-putt’. Across Pakistan, they retain their original silencers. But Punjab is the province with the curse where they must operate without.

The bright young spark, Sonia Malik of this paper’s Lahore bureau, who writes on matters of the environment with admirable feeling, tells me she has spoken in this regard with several worthies of the departments that should be concerned with environmental pollution. All of those babus tell her that they cannot banish the rickshaws fearing divine retribution for depriving poor people of their daily bread. Not one of these unworthy gentlemen has ever considered ordering silencers back on the curse that blights this unhappy land. That notion of silencers is simply alien to them.

The chief minister has threatened to turn Lahore into Paris. The Lord have mercy! It would serve him and all of us better if he were to simply turn Lahore into the city it once was. A city where one could have peace and quiet in one’s home.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 23^rd, 2013.

The Kech Bund hills run in a dusty, jagged east-west line just north of the Kech Valley. Here, the Nihing River coming down from the west and the Kech from the east join to flow south as the Dasht River. The town of Turbat sits 30 kilometres east of this junction.

Just north of the junction of the two rivers, the small village of Shekhan is where one leaves the Turbat-Mand high road and goes north along the dry bed of the Shorma stream. The country is wild and desolate and possessed of a savage beauty. Views to the north are limited by the bleak, treeless crags of the Kech Bund that nowhere rise higher than 1,166 metres above the sea; to the east and west, the valley is fairly wide and dotted with trees and bushes that grow only in arid conditions.

But once one enters the folds of the Kech Bund, the sense of claustrophobia is overpowering. At some point, one’s guide will leave his motorcycle and lead one into a narrow chasm. Climbing upward through this dry water channel, one notices ruined stone turrets positioned at short intervals.

About an hour after leaving the transport and grinding ever upward through a confined and dusty gully, one heaves oneself over the lip of the hill and into a bowl-shaped depression. This is not just any old mountaintop; this is Kussui Kalat — the Castle of Kussu — perhaps, a long forgotten Baloch chieftain.

The entire bowl, about 50 acres, is strewn with baked bricks and dressed stone that mark past dwellings. The bricks measure 23 centimetres square and are well fired: they were carted in from afar because there are no trees in the Kech Bund to fire baking kilns. The blocks of stone are of variable sizes. Here are walls and foundations of houses; a mosque that simply cannot be mistaken because of its mehrab in the western wall.

Though there are some 15 to 20 distinct buildings (besides those that have crumbled to dust), there are two remarkable ones: one, for its huge size, which probably was home to the chief of this citadel; the other, for its dramatic setting at the very edge of a sheer fall with clear views in every direction. This latter was very likely the house and office of the chief of security, who needed to keep an eye on the surrounding country at all times.

There is yet another interesting remnant: a water channel that receives run-off after it is slowed by two stone piers. It apparently trained the water into a tank, now lost beneath the debris near the mosque.

Sometime in the mid-1990s, a team of French archaeologists carried out a cursory investigation here. From the meagre surface collection, they concluded that this site dated to the early Muslim period.

I believe, this was the safe haven of the Alafi fugitives, fleeing the unbridled wrath of Hujaj bin Yusuf for having killed his representative Saeed Kilabi in Makran. The Alafis had been hiding in Makran since 684, when the Kilabi incident occurred and they needed a haven. Remote and accessible from only one side, Kussui Kalat was it.

As the security chief saw the cloud of dust rising in the Shorma stream, heralding the approach of imperial troops, he alerted his outposts in the gorge leading to the castle. The attackers were caught unawares as they rode in and were beaten back with much loss. This is an action we do not read in any history, but surely, this would have occurred.

And then one day in the year 704 CE, when Mohammad bin Haroon was appointed governor of Makran with a large army under his command, the Alafis in the citadel would have known they were outnumbered. There may have been resistance initially, but then one day, they quietly melted away into the intractable folds of Kech Bund.

Taking the old high road east, they eventually ended up at the court of Sindh. There they found employment under Raja Dahir. And so, it was that seven years later, when Mohammad bin Qasim invaded Sindh, a large body of Alafis was in the pay of the king of Sindh for whom they fought with great courage and loyalty.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 16^th, 2013.

The Alafi tribe of western Hejaz were among the earlier converts to Islam. Since before 680 CE, a large body of them frequently travelled back and forth between their country and Makran. Now, Makran at that time seems to have been very much like modern day Fata. Though part of the kingdom of Sindh under Raja Chach, it appears to have been only loosely held with a substantial foreign element running wild in the country.

In 684, when Abdul Malik bin Marwan took over as caliph, his deputy in Iraq, Hujaj bin Yusuf, appointed one Saeed of the family Kilabi to Makran. The man was entrusted with collecting money from this country as well as neighbouring regions wherever he could exercise pressure.

Somewhere in Kirman on his way east, Saeed met with one Safahwi Hamami. The Chachnama is not explicit about this man, but gives the understanding that while he had “no army under (him)”, he was nevertheless a man of significant social standing. The man may, therefore, have been a merchant.

Armed as he was with caliphal fiat, Saeed ordered Safahwi to join him in his raids. Upon the latter’s refusal, an altercation ensued in which Safahwi rebuked Saeed: “I will not obey your command; I consider it below my dignity to do so.”

An incensed Saeed killed the man. Then he had the body skinned and beheaded, sending the two trophies to Hujaj in Iraq. We hear echoes of this activity today in Fata where beheadings are commonly exercised by foreign ‘guests’. Thereafter, arriving in Makran, Saeed established himself and began his plundering raids.

One day on his travels, he was perchance met by a party of Alafis. Now, these people, distantly related to the Hamamis, harboured a grudge against Saeed for killing their kinsman. What began as a squabble quickly degenerated into a full-blooded melee in which Saeed was killed and his cortege repulsed to Iraq.

Hujaj was infuriated at the loss of a trusted lieutenant. More so, when his party, fearful of punishment, expressed ignorance about Saeed’s fate. Hujaj, well-known for his ruthless cruelty and predilection for torture and murder to elicit information, beheaded a few of the men, upon which the remainder told him of the clash with the Alafis. In retaliation, the governor executed one Suleman Alafi, a local resident who had nothing to do with the affair other than belonging to the same clan as Saeed’s killers.

Hujaj now passed a decree to persecute the Alafis. When he appointed Mohammad bin Haroon as overseer of Makran, he expressly instructed him: “Find out the Alafis, and try your best to secure them, and exact the vengeance due to Saeed from them.” This was the year 704.

With Arab hold consolidated on Makran, the Alafis fled east to Sindh, where their leader Mohammad bin Haris became a close and trusted confidante of Raja Dahar’s. Seven years later, in 711, when the Arabs finally came calling to stay for good, this man became the king’s advisor on all matters concerning the invading army.

So great was the trust reposed in the Alafi that when Dahar placed the man under his son Jaisiah’s command, he instructed the prince to follow every advice forthcoming from the Arab “whether it be (for) an advance, or a retreat”. Living up to this trust, the Alafis gave a fairly good account of themselves in the final battle for Alor (east of Rohri). However, one of their number betrayed the castle in the end: as Jaisiah abandoned the fight and stole away from the fortified city, an unnamed Alafi tied a note to an arrow saying the castle was undefended and shot it into Arab lines.

The Alafi leader with a large number of followers, however, had already fled to Kashmir where he petitioned the ruler for asylum. This seems to have been granted because we read from the Chachnama that the Alafi built many mosques in Kashmir and that he was highly respected in the court.

Now, between 684 when the Alafis murdered Saeed Kilabi and 704 when they fled Makran for Sindh, they would surely have known they were marked. And so, they built themselves a safe haven secreted away in the dusty brown gorges of the Kech Bund.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 9^th, 2013.

The Chachnama tells us that in the year 632, during the reign of Caliph Omar (RA), Mughera surnamed Abul Aas, then stationed at Bahrain, led the first assault, a naval expedition, on Debal. He died fighting outside the city’s walls. When Abu Musa Ashari, the governor of Iraq, received news of this debacle, he wrote to the caliph that “he should think no more of Hind”.

In the caliphate of Hazrat Usman (RA) one Hakim bin Hailah Abdi, a poet and orator, was sent out to reconnoitre the approaches to Sindh. From him came this report: “Its water is dark; its fruit is bitter and poisonous; its land is stony and its earth is saltish. A small army will soon be annihilated there, and a large army will soon die of hunger.”

Now, Makran and Gandava (below the Bolan Pass) were already under tenuous control of the Arabs. However, Abdullah bin Amir, the governor of these regions, was advised against an attack on Sindh by the caliph after the reconnaissance report had been received. And so, years were to pass until the next attempt was made during the caliphate of Hazrat Ali (RA) in 660. Coming by way of Panjgur, the Arab force was successful at Kalat, but news of the assassination of the caliph resulted in withdrawal without the expedition reaching its logical end.

The third attack took place during the reign of Muawiya in 664. A force under Abdullah bin Sawad comprising 4,000 men attacked Kalat. The battle was long and hard, which went this way and that between the two sides until the mountaineers of Kalat routed the Arabs who fled to Makran.

Rashid bin Omar leading the fourth attack in an unnamed year (probably 668) also came against Kalat. Once again the contest was hard. The commander fell in battle and the invaders were routed with great loss of life. So far as Sindh was concerned, 12 peaceful years ensued. In 680, the commander of the army in Makran, one Manzir bin Harud, was sent by the caliph on plundering sorties against Sindh to make good the expenses of the failed expeditions.

This unfortunate commander succumbed to diseases, dying in a town named Burabi by the Chachnama. The book does not mention the locale of this place making identification difficult.

In the reign of caliph Walid bin Abdul Malik and governorship in Iraq of Hujaj bin Yusuf, the fifth expedition was undertaken against Sindh. The commander, Buzail bin Tahfa, led a small force by sea and, we read, marched to Nerun (Hyderabad). At this time, the country was firmly in the hands of Raja Dahar and this inland march is clearly an inconsistency. Particularly so because we later read that Buzail died in combat outside the walls of Debal where he had been joined by 4,000 troops from Makran sent by governor Mohammad bin Haroon.

While Ahmad Bilazri (Futuh ul Baladan) confirms this expedition, he tells us in addition of another attack not mentioned by the Chachnama. This being the expedition led by Obaidullah bin Nabhan and his death in battle causing the invaders to withdraw.

Now, as a result of these various battles, while many Arabs had been killed, many more languished in Sindhi captivity. Consequently, appointing Mohammad bin Qasim (MbQ) the general, Hujaj petitioned caliph Walid that it was necessary to free these prisoners. Walid demurred, however, saying that there had already been too many casualties and that the expedition was bound to be ‘a source of great anxiety’. There was, besides, the consideration of the large outlay.

Hujaj wrote back, “I undertake to pay back into the royal treasury double the amount spent on provisions and other items of expenditure for the army (in Iraq)”. The rest, as they say, is history.

Aside: There was a large body of Arabs already in the pay of Raja Dahar. These were the Alafis who, having fallen out with Hujaj, had rebelled and fled some time before. They fought with desperate courage against the Arabs under MbQ. Desperate surely they were because they knew if Dahar fell there was no returning for them to the west where only execution awaited them at the hands of Hujaj and his kinsfolk.

So, who were the Alafis?

Published in The Express Tribune, February 2^nd, 2013.

The Chachnama takes its name from Raja Chach of Sindh, whose son Dahar stood against the Arabs under Mohammad bin Qasim (MbQ). It comes down to us in its Sindhi, Urdu and English versions. In 1216, one Ali bin Mohammad Kufi, then being a resident of Uch in south Punjab, wishing to learn about the history of his adopted country sought out true sources.

His search brought Kufi to Bhakkar (the fort midstream between Sukkur and Rohri) where the Qazi, Ismail bin Ali of the tribe Sakifi became his mentor. Among his collection, the Qazi had a manuscript that he said was written by one of his ancestors and which detailed the account of Sindh at the time of the Arab invasion. Now, Sakifi was the tribe that MbQ also belonged to, so the Qazi was a descendent from the conqueror’s line. The book, therefore, was the version of the victor — something that we always tend to hold against history.

Impressed by the book “adorned with jewels of wisdom and embellished with pearls of morality”, Ali Kufi resolved to translate it into Persian, then a better known language in Sindh than Arabic. Indeed, Kufi’s impetus may have been Qazi Ismail’s lament that the book being in its original Hijazi Arabic, its content was virtually unknown in Sindh.

It was from Persian that the book came into English in 1900, by the learned pen of the remarkable Mirza Kalich Beg. The Chachnama opens with a very detailed account of the Rajput King, Sahasi Rai, and of a young Chach, a Brahman, joining his staff. The author’s source for this part was clearly native oral or written tradition, whereas the account of the invasion is from Arabic sources.

Segueing again at the end, Ali Kufi reverts to local sources. He tells us how the virgin daughters of Raja Dahar upon being presented to Caliph Walid bin Abdul Malik misrepresent out of malice: that they have already spent time with MbQ. Upon this, the incensed caliph orders for the hero to have himself sewn in a fresh cowhide and dispatched back to the capital. He arrives dead and Walid gloats over the corpse. “The Caliph had a stick of green emerald in his hand at that time, and he placed it on the teeth of the dead body, and said, “O daughters of Rai Dahar, look how our orders are promptly obeyed by our officers …”’, the Chachnama tells us.

This is clearly a Sindhi dramatisation of a different event. From Ahmed Al Bilazri’s Futuh-ul-Baladan we know that upon his return to Iraq, MbQ hardly received a hero’s welcome. His kinsman and mentor Hujaj bin Yusuf had fallen from favour and on the orders of Walid, MbQ was imprisoned where he succumbed to torture. Sifting between the two versions, one has to admit that it is nearly impossible to piece together the exact truth. Nevertheless, it is clear that owing to political rivalries, the young conqueror did not return home to accolades.

Now, the Chachnama has been billed variously, either as a romance or as authentic history. We know that Mir Masum Shah, the governor of Bhakkar (where Ali Kufi was tutored by the Qazi) during the reign of Akbar the Great, writing his famous Tarikh-e-Masumi in the early years of the 17^th century, drew heavily from Kufi’s translation. Likewise, Ali Sher Qanea of Thatta for his Tuhfa-tul-Kiram, a century-and-a-half later. Modern researchers would not altogether dismiss the Chachnama as balderdash: it has to be looked at critically but it, nevertheless, is authentic in parts.

Until I read the book in 1984, I, too, believed that the Arabs invaded Sindh because a ship en route from Serendip (Sri Lanka) to Arabia was plundered by Sindhi pirates and the wailing of the captive Muslim women passengers raised the ire of Hujaj bin Yusuf, the governor of Iraq, causing him to send his cousin MbQ to teach the Sindhis a lesson.

The truth, and it has to be taken as that because it comes from the pen of a kinsman of MbQ’s, is that this invasion of Sindh in 711 was the sixth. Five earlier attempts were routed with great loss of Arab life and investment.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 19^th, 2013.

The common misconception is that, because he attacked Debal (Bhambore) on the seaboard, Mohammad bin Qasim (MbQ) came by sea leading an armada. This fallacy came up again when my friend Husain Qazi returned recently from a road trip in Makran. Among his collection of images is one of a sign declaring a cluster of graves “Tombs of the soldiers of Mohammad bin Qasim … ”.

This sign sits near village Aghor in the lower reach of the Hingol River, about 10 kilometres (km) upstream of the river’s mouth. The ruinous tombs are crafted with slabs of worked sandstone in the same style as the Chaukundi tombs of Sindh — tombs that can also be found at several sites in adjacent parts of Balochistan.

I do not know who caused that sign to be put up but whoever he is, he clearly is a moronic ignoramus. He has no idea of history and is too full of himself to ask and be informed. For one, we know the genesis and evolution of the Chaukundi style funerary art and we know that it originated in Gujarat and blossomed to exquisite perfection in the hands of Sindhi craftsmen in the 16^th century. We know that the Arabs were simply incapable of making such ornate burials in the early eighth century.

Secondly, and more importantly, MbQ did not come by the sea because the Chachnama, the history of the Arab conquest of Sindh, clearly spells out his route. Now, this book is the oldest extant history of the conquest of Sindh considered authentic as a record of those distant times.

The Coastal Highway, today a first-class artery for which we are beholden to the Frontier Works Organisation, follows an ancient alignment, but the Chachnama very clearly tells us that this was not the way MbQ came to Sindh. Since we are debunking fallacy, this road, as commonly believed, was also not taken by Alexander on his exit from his Indian Campaign.

As he set out of Iraq, MbQ was instructed by the governor, Hujaj bin Yusuf, to travel by way of Shiraz (Iran) in order to collect forces already stationed there. Thence his route was just south by east by way of Kech (Turbat), where Mohammad bin Haroon was the Arab overseer. Though the latter was unwell, he obeyed orders to accompany the invading army to Sindh. When they arrived at Armanbela (today’s Lasbela), his illness aggravated and the man died. His tomb is remembered today as that of Ari Pir and sits in what used to be a quiet place just outside town.

Now, this great east-west axis was a much-travelled road since prehistory. It was this way (and by another route that went through Gandava to Besima and Panjgur and into Kerman), that trading caravans from Mohenjo Daro plied en route to the cities of Mesopotamia. Alexander went through Lasbela to Turbat and then down to Pasni and Gwadar. Likewise, MbQ came east by this artery, but not through Gwadar. He made Turbat direct from Shiraz.

As he marched south from Armanbela to Debal, MbQ received further instructions from Hujaj: at his objective, he was to dig a protective trench to safeguard against surprise attacks. This would surely not have been an order had MbQ sailed to the battle of Debal and was anchored outside in the sea. The Chachnama explicitly tells us the order of march on the 230km journey from Armanbela to Debal, giving out the names of the leaders of the various divisions of the army.

The alignment followed by our Coastal Highway was a very hard way for the infrequent traffic that ever ventured on it. Beyond Sonmiani Bay, the route passed through a terrible desolation of waterless sand dunes until it reached the Hingol River 70km distant. Thereafter, though there are several streams draining the dry stony slopes of the Makran Coastal Range, water was hard to come by all the way to Gwadar.

Because the ignorant spread ‘knowledge’ in this country, the fallacy persists about the Arabs having come by sea or by the coastal route. However, this is not the only untruth we love to believe about the Arab invasion. We also believe that they just upped and came because some kidnapped woman screamed for them.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 12^th, 2013.

I first saw this magical place in 1987. The Saruna River (Lasbela district, Balochistan) breaks out of its narrow rocky gorge and, before going on to run into the Hub River, spreads out to form a tarn. Said to be very deep (so far as I know, no sounding has been done to determine its depth), the water is of a striking deep green shade. And the setting is so uncannily beautiful that it does cause a sharp intake of breath.

The lake teems with crocodiles. Local legend has it that one accused of theft or mendacity thrown into the water will either be taken or rejected: the guilty, so they say, will be eaten. The innocent can swim and gambol in the water even as the crocs look on unconcerned.

In 1987, there was one grave said to be that of Ari Pir along with its ancillary burials of lesser saints and one little tea shop and eatery. Ari Pir, so I learned, was a staging post on the route from Sehwan to Lahut Valley that became active in the month of Ramazan when hundreds of bhang-quaffing malangs passed through from the former to the latter. But there was no story about Ari Pir.

In 2000, a legend had been invented and the grave was under a dome; there was a hostel for visiting pilgrims and the shrine was big business. Visitors sacrificed goats and fed the innards to the crocodiles in the lake that were now as overfed as those of Manghopir in Karachi.

They believe Ari Pir was a son of Mahmud, the Turkish (not Pathan) king of Ghazni, who gave up the luxuries of the palace embellished by plunder, to become a peripatetic mendicant. In the course of his wanderings, he ended up in Saruna Valley and liking the place, resolved to make it his home.

Now, the king of Saruna had a right beautiful daughter who somehow old Ari caught sight of. He petitioned the king for the princess’s hand. But the king would have nothing of it. Why, how could he give his lovely princess to a lice-infested beggar who had no fixed abode and no source of income? He told his soldiers to drive the man out of the country. As he was being led away, Ari Pir called down the curse of God on the land. The country that was rich with farmland and orchard, of a sudden withered.

The story has several parallels in history. The most well known being that of prince Siddhartha (Buddha) and 500 years after him, Raja Bhartari of Ujjain, both of whom gave up the throne to spend their lives as saints. But their stories are singularly devoid of malice; they are paragons of compassion for all living beings. In the quasi-Islamic lore of Pakistan, we have dozens of saints who were downright malevolent and I always wonder what holy man would wish to harm his fellow beings and yet claim to revere the Maker. In all these cases, I see a queer strain of Stockholm syndrome spread across generations.

Incidentally, Ari is a rather common name. We have Ari Jam, the king of Kech whose son Punnu, besotted with the dazzling Sassui of Bhambore, refused to return home until his brothers drugged and kidnapped him. The story, immortalised by the great Shah Latif Bhitai, is so haunting and beautiful that it raises goose bumps and mists the eye. The graves of the two lovers lie some way off the Hub Dam Road north of Karachi.

Then we have the shrine of Ari Pir in Lasbela. This was none other than Mohammad bin Haroon, the Arab governor of Makran, who acted as guide to the army of Mohammad bin Qasim. According to the Chachnama, Haroon died of the ague in Lasbela. The shrine, in a quiet corner of town, is a place frequented by seekers of their hearts’ desires. It seems that in Balochi or Lasi (the dialect of Sindhi spoken in Lasbela), Haroon elides to Ari.

There is yet another Ari Pir somewhere in the foothills of the Khirthar Mountains west of Sehwan. This place I have only visited on an army one-inch map. I wonder what tales it holds.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 5^th, 2013.

I met Rehmat Khan Buzdar in 2003. He was playing host on the trek to the peak of Bail Pathar (2,328 metres) in the Suleman Mountains of Dera Ghazi Khan district. Despite being forewarned of our vegetarianism, he had prepared lamb sajji for my friend Raheal and me. And he was duly indignant when Raheal produced a bag of fresh okra to be cooked for us.

After a wonderful starry night on the summit, as we walked down to his village, for the tenth time did Rehmat try to convince me that hospitality was not such a bad thing after all. And for the tenth time I returned that it was not such a hot idea to slaughter a sheep for vegetarians and that if he and his lot kept at killing their flocks the way they were doing it, their tribal name of Buzdar (‘buz’ for goat and ‘dar’ for owner or keeper) would soon be a misnomer. I said hospitality could just as easily be a nicely done dish of vegetables or lentils. But that, he argued, would not become Baloch hospitality. Then he told me the story.

There was once a Baloch of kind heart and generous spirit whose door was forever open to all comers. It was a rare mealtime that the man ate by himself; always there would be a passing traveller pausing to partake of whatever the man’s hearth could offer. But not so the man’s wife. A shrewish woman of niggardly disposition, she lamented the drain the hospitality caused on their larder and the trouble to her.

One day as she stood by her door she saw two men approach. Withdrawing, she informed her husband of what she looked upon as trouble. Later that evening when her man asked for the company to be fed, she refused. She gave him food just enough for one person saying he could either eat it himself or feed his visitors and the matter was left at that. The following morning as she looked out of the door she saw three persons walking down the path into the wilderness. Mystified, she asked her husband how food just about enough for one person could have sated him and his three guests.

There were not three guests but one, said the man. It was the guest’s naseeb she had seen as the second person the evening before. For no man, said the generous Baloch, comes to this world without his naseeb – his predestined lot. As he walks the long and lonely road upon the good earth, he is kept company by his naseeb. What he eats and drinks, what he earns or loses, his pleasure and grief, are all as they have been laid down for him in advance. Not a jot more nor less than his naseeb is what he will get. And so the visitor partook of whatever had been predestined as his naseeb. For him that day just half a meal was decreed.

What then of the third man that left in the morning with the guest and his naseeb, the woman asked.

“The ways of the Lord are strange, simple woman,” said the man. “A calamity waited in our humble home to strike when its time was come. The hospitality that you offered, albeit begrudgingly, has won us merit with the Almighty Lord. We are delivered of that mishap. The third person you saw leaving our home with the guest was misfortune.”

The story of the generous man and his stingy wife may just be a story and no more, said Rehmat Khan. But he believed it had a point. If it were not for hospitality, how could anyone survive long journeys in a land where no inns exist? When one fetes a traveller, it is not long after that one finds oneself on the lonely road in need of hospitality.

No number of sheep slaughtered to feed the traveller will ever lessen the herd, said Rehmat Khan Buzdar. And so, true to form, even before we were in his home, the smell of roasting meat hit our senses. And Raheal and I were out of our supply of okra and squash.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 28^th, 2012.