AMRITSAR

Within hours of crossing the border, we are wandering barefoot in the warm night air around the waters edge, listening to the soft chanting from inside the Golden Temple. Shoes are off, hair is covered...but so are the men's. The faces are friendly, semi-naked bodies bathe in the waters around the pool: Amritsar means Pool of the Nectar of Immortality. The shinging gold of the temple melts into the liquid gold reflection on the water.

Gigantic pots, echo their clangs around the clock...the 24 hour kitchen feeds over 30, 000 pilgrims a day. Sitting in rows of hundreds on the marble floor, we wait humbly whilst men scurry up and down with great buckets of dahl to slop onto our chappati. Food and a bed, or a marble floor, is free for thousands upon thousands of pilgrims daily all year round.

Built by the Sikhs around the 16th Century, it houses the 11th Guru of Sikhism. Amidst the marble echoes of shouting, washing, running, we rose at 4am with everyone else to see the 11th Guru, the Holy book, being carried into the temple. Gold, silk, deep blue velvet, rich warm voices chanting, bodies huddled tightly on the floor, incense and rose water fill the air.

After the man's world of Lahore, the streets of Amritsar open to me as a woman...I feel safe. I am walking alone, lost in crowds of families and groups of women enjoying the hot night, drinking tea, shopping, enjoying....And we are never alone, at every corner a god is watching, tucked and hidden in little closets on street corners, house walls, in tea-shops, lit by light, lit by candle, amidst the chaos, amidst the smells, amidst the cacophany of noise, the sacred in the everyday...

The temple of fertility...like a fair ground walking ride, I wind up and down and round again through caged walkways, past shining gods with flashing lights, mirrors of endless me's mix with the deities, cocounuts brought for blessings abound (are they the symbol of the desired unborn?) whilst young girls follow me, shyly giggling and practicing their English. Why are young pre-pubescent girls swarming a fertility temple?

Mirrored walkways round corners, mingle my reflections with images of the gods..

We wade through a water tunnel, surrounding by paper mache walls of cow print, and find the udders dripping onto fresh flowers at the end. The tunnel, the heat, the fragant smells, the water....is this meant to be a recreation of the womb?

An old Hindu temple in derelict state stills provides shelter for one man and his family. Instead of a high wage, his employer gives him a 'home' to live in. Dripping water from broken pipes, dimly lit stairways to balconies of clothes lines. Children on roof tops giggle and wave.

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The glitz and the glam of our first Indian wedding shining bright in the hot sun. Trumpets and drums surround the groom on the horseback-the days of elephants are gone.

From the blood of over 1500 injured men, women and children, from the insanity of one man, from the unthinking fingers of British soldiers...Jalliawalah Bag, once a site of masacre, has become a peaceful garden. April 13, 1919, Brigadier Reginald Dyer gave the command to open fire on a peaceful protest of civilans...ten minutes and 1650 rounds over a thousand lay injured or dying on the ground. Two minutes later he ordered his soldiers out and congratualted them on a 'jolly good job'.
Now, the memorial is almost obsolete at the back of a public park. The bullet holes are all marked on the wall, but people were more interested in us than the Brits of the past. Strangely upbeat Bollywood music was played loud around the site of massacre like some kind of twisted Disney land attraction...

It was only a simple line of children's shoes, yet it haunted me more than the memorial itself. I think of the empty shoes I have seen in other places, other times, other lands where blood has been shed, where children's innocence has been left lying as empty as the shoe waiting for the asbent owner never to return. I think of the everyday objects-the shoes, the bags, the children's toys, the objects of the everyday defunct and left empty in the bloody aftermath of one's man's command to shoot and kill. Reading further about Amritsar we realised what a significant place it was in the period around India's independance in 1947.

The border between Pakistan and India that divides Amritsar and Lahore was the sight of unimaginable atrocity. It was an area where the border divided a state of Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs on the basis of religious majority...sometimes the majority of a mere 1%. The border, cut an abstract division through the land, forcing millions to leave their homes, the land their ancestors had cultivated for centuries in search of the relative safety of religious majority. The border was drawn by a British lawyer who'd never been to India before, never visited the lands he was to carve up and was given less than a month to permanently slice the land in two. Amidst the hysterical propganda of extremists on all sides, inevitably mass communcal violence erupted with militant factions from each of the three religious communities slaughtering whole villages of people who unfortunately found themselves on the wrong side of the border. Fourteen and a half million people crossed the borders and an estimated 500, 000 people were killed. Refugees moved in large groups through the countryside constantly threatened by ambush, food shortages and disease. Amritsar station saw the arrival of many of those refugees and is described in 'Freedom at Midnight' by Dominique La Pierre and Larry Collins as a 'kind of refugee camp, a clearing house for thousands of Hindus who'd fled from Pakistan's half of the Punjab...They swarmed around its waiting room, its ticket office, its platforms, ready to scrutinise each arriving train for missing relatives and friends.'

The trains themselves became an equally dangerous means of travel over the border. Many passengers were slaughtered mid journey. On the 15th August 1947 a train arrived at Amritsar station on which almost every passenger had been killed. Freedom At Midnight describes the story recounted by the station master Chani Singh, "The babbling multitudes packing the platform were petrified, frozen into an eerie silence by the sight before them. Singh stared down the line of eight carriages. All the windows were wide open but there was not a single human being standing at any of them. Not a single door had opened. Not a single person was getting off the train. They had brought him a train full of phantoms."

We arrived at Amritsar station in the hot evening, a red brick Victorian building, strangely redmniscent of rail stations all over England. I remember the excitement I felt to observe the seeming chaos of the platform and ticket office, people swarming around, groups crouched eating from cloths spread on the waiting room floors, lines of people asleep or slumbering next to enormous packages. At the time I didn't know much about the history of the area...but now the memory of those huddled groups are like the ghosts of the horrors past, still haunting the lives of India's mass of multi-religious communities.

INDO-PAK BORDER

'Hidu-stan!'
'Paki-stan!'
Voices shouting slogans rent the air like the sounds of Partition once did.
But the air is light and the faces smile amidst the melodrama of the soldier's dance.
Like a military pantomime, they overact their roles-frowning, pouting, strutting, shouting.
Legs kicked to painful heights
Shoulders back
Heads a-cocking, to flare the plumes.

And deep amidst the maddening crowds
the green men wander.

Raising chants and fists when silence threatens to reveal any sign of inferiority.
On the side of the smaller Pakistan, the passion runs higher,
as if they could outshout their obvious geographical disadvantage.
....and I remember tartan faces in sweating pubs, convinced they were meeting King Edwards army once more on the football pitch.

PAKISTAN: Lahore- lady, lady, toot, toot, toot...

A rickshaw ride in Lahore...

Man carries a tray of coconut dripping on his head
Donkeys idle, their coloured pom poms mask protruding ribs
A cow roots through a dustbin
A sheep with drooping ears the size of a horse, is sprawled by the road side
A bicycle with umbrellas tied front and back

spirits balloon animals up the main street at midnight

Rickshaws rickshaws rickshaws
Tooting tooting tooting
Shawled women clutching babies draw in as we stop at the lights
Eyes dark and hard
Their empty hands reach mournfully through the doors
These gritty women sit on street corners, perch in the alleyways
The others hidden at home, streets are the mens domain
Boys weave at waist height, trays of tea cups in hand

The Azan trembles at first tentatively through the heavy smog.
With time it becomes riotous, a holy war of chanting beckons us to mosques

Lit by flashing florescent strips. Dried fruit stalls- dates, raisins, figs strung Like the marigold necklaces on Sufi tombs. A small donkey hurtles up the main street, its cart jumping, two boys lolling atop. Pomigranite stalls beating off flies, a skip askew amidst mounds of waste.

Men sort it into sacks,
A bloated cat seems to slumber on the pavement

staring with dead eyes through swarms of flies
The severed head of a goat is disguised as a pile of mud,

Chapati ovens like underground caves,

Dough balls flattened on sacks of straw

like pin cushions thrown against oven walls
Dishes washed in bowls of brown water on the street
Armed guards at the churchyard ask where we stay,
In the bishops garden a man squats, potting plants


Women in burqua, eyes pearing, women loosely scarved, women not scarved at all
On the TV they writhe, scantly clad, hair flailing
Celebrities and prostitutes.
No man would bear the shame to marry a women who has appeared on screen like this

But the cinemas are full.

we sit on the stone cold of the empty mosque's floor.

we sit and we watch.

we watch and we sit.

he murmurs low into his tightly clasped hands,

not to the Lord,

but some girl on his mobile.

we sit and we watch.

we watch and we sit.

Thursday is Sufi holy day.
Thursday smells of pungent flowers freshly picked.
Thursday feels like rose water sprayed on my body hot under headscarf thick.
Thursday sounds like rhythmic clapping and pleading cries of song.
Thursday looks like orange men, in spinning revery gone.

and Thursday nights, are nothing like Thur's Day....for at night the drums emerge, the hash flows freely, the spinning is harder, faster and time is no longer here but steps outside reality all together- spinning off into its own moment....

Swarms of police idle at intersections
Barbed wire barricades cluster
Court buildings hazy and languid
Beneath a blanket of smog and silence
Rumours of Bhutto, rumours of suicide bomb alert, whispers of fighting in the streets
Silence amidst the tumultuous noise of the city.

A lawyer in subway with a bright eyed wife has not slept at home for two nights for fear of arrest.
500 lawyers taken into custody 315 later released on bail

M. was a journalist. The hostel, once clacking with the hurried outpour of hungered for news, now sits slow in the smog of travellers chain smoking.

M. was a journalist, his life an action packed movie America could never write.

M. was a journalist, until he got too close to publishing a story that would ruin the government.

M. was a journalist, until they smashed his head with a brick and left him for dead....

PAKISTAN: Karimabad

Marched to the front of the festival to be given seats of honour in full view of the crowds. We'd arrived in time for the speaches...the arabic tones, harsh and guttaral shouted. The hands waved and pointed with fists curled...the picture perfect of the 'Muslim fanatacist'. Until we learned the speach was a cry and call for unity in the face of a crumbling country. "It doesn't matter whether you are Sunni, Shia or Ismaili." Above all, we are human and we must stand in peace together.

A little bit of Monty Phython style humour was also on the cards...a trio of youths dressed as Islamic fundamentalists, fake beards included, and a hash smoking old man depicted the dangers of both extremes and the need for a moderate line.

And then in true Pakistani style, the slow dance, the 'strut' as I like to call it, began. Arms raised, a frown and a pout, chest out and head high. The dancer and the drummer speak through raised eyebrows, a challenged duel to match each rhythmic move. If the crowd approves the peacock dance then money is thrown at the dancer or curled under his hat.

Baltit Fort...high on the hill over Karimabad, the old palace of the 'Mirs' who once ruled the valley.

Mr Kanjudi led me up the stairs to the fort and through a battered wooden door that my tour guide had rushed past the first time I visited. Smelling of wood and sagging with age, the office was over the old prison. I imagined the groaning that must once have been heard from the prisoners locked in the dark below. From the mud walls hang several old frames displaying hotch potch old photos of British generals who controlled Hunza for almost a hundred years before the partition in 1947. Mr Kanjudi pointed them out to me proudly- told me he gathered them himself and typed the little labels beneath each face.

The entrance to the library is concealed- a small door, no bigger than a chair. Inside, shadows hang deep into the spaces between the shelves. In the far corner a desk is illuminated by the thin light of a skylight and Mr Kanjudi stood in his red sweater curling the corners of his moustache and shuffling papers anxiously while I fingered through the rows of aged books.

I was looking for folk tales. Lots of the stories were about witches, several of whom the residents believed had been pinned into boulders by local Shamen. There is one rock which juts out over a cliff that the locals believed held the spirit of a Dadi, a female Shaman or witch. The people used to go every year to sacrifice twelve goats at the rock and pour the blood over it to feed her. As they did this, some said the steel peg which had been driven into the rock by the Shaman, would twist in its spot. Looking at the enormous boulders littering the river bed in the valley later on, I could imagine why people felt they contained some kind of untamed power.

Munulum Dado (From 'The Burushaski Language- Vol II, Texts and Translations' by Lt. Col. D Laurimer)
One day a man named Derbesho was grazing his goats far from his home. Leaving the goats he lay down to sleep and was awakened by a beautiful woman who had come up to his head. 'My Father is calling you', she said, and led him to the foot of Hunamun Mun, a small spot in the next valley.

As he approached a door openned in the mountains. Inside a man with a golden moustach was sitting accompanied by seven beautiful maidens with sitars. The man asked the women to play a tune for Debesho, and instructed him to dance. 'Dance my Son, do not fear', he said, 'I am your grandfather. My name is Munulum Dado.' Pointing toward the woman who had led Derbesho to their house he explained, 'This is my wife, and these seven are my daughters.'
Debesho danced to the music of the Sitars and when he had finished Munulum Dado asked his wife to make him a loaf of diram bread with ibex fat. Having eaten the bread Debesho was led back to the pasture, where he became unconscious for some time. When he awoke and described his story to the other herders they were astounded.

This story was printed with another about Munulum Dado, who was rumoured to inhabit the 'Shisper Nala', a valley very near the fort. There was a legend that each evening a cry of 'hulloo' could be heard from the valley, which was once lived in by herdsmen, but became long ago the passage of a glacier. The storyteller claimed to have heard the cry which the locals beleived was a signal from Munulum Dado.

These stories are also linked to a series of stories about the hero 'Kiser'. Stories about Kiser can be found in Tibet, Mongolia and around the Lake Bakail region of Siberia.

As Kiser was preparing to marry Bubuli Gas (which means princess), his Grandmother asked him to bring her a husband to marry as well. 'In the Shisper Nala they say there is a man with a golden moustache. You fetch him for me and we shall celebrate our marriages at the same time.' she said. Kiser went off and found the man, Munulum Dado, weaving a peice of pattu (a long thin woolen scarf). He threw him over his shoulder and carried him home.

His Grandmother was on the roof drying corn as Kiser approached bearing her future husband. Trying to climb down to greet them, she fell off the roof breaking three ribs. Kiser applied remedies to her (the traditional method was to apply paper with paste, herbs and gum to broken bones) and after some time she recovered. The two couples were married happily together.

The fairy tale is the story of the surreal amidst the every day...we went to a bank were invited to lunch by a local 'natural healer'. Over the spice of dal, we were taken across the history of mystical practices in the great religions: the laying of hands, healing prayers, reiki, the kaballah, spells, the use of herbs and the power of belief. Ejaz called himself a natural healer in a Muslim community. At first he said there was mistrust, suspicion and fear. But through his strict avoidance of asking for any money for his services, and through his positive results, he says he has gained the trust and respect of the locals. From headaches to depression, Ejaz claims he has cured it all through prayer, hands, thought and spells. No matter what you believe, don't believe, agree, don't agree...his dream of healing had a power to it. As he talked we sat beneath a television blaring news of bomb blasts, mass arrests and street violence.