Mound of the Dead 2

                    “Asia is not going to be civilized after the methods of the West. There is
                      too much Asia and she is too old.”
                                                                                               Rudyard Kipling


The baby-blue beekeeper, sitting across from us in the crowded heat of our half-ton, couldn’t have been smiling behind the mesh. Julie and Robyn stared too. Dressed in full metal niqab, playing goalie for Team Mohammed, she was our first introduction to the veiled threat of Islamic influence on women in Pakistan. The next lesson was coming inside the waiting rooms at the railway station in Larkana, the Eden of Sind. But first we had to negotiate around the camels, off through the driver’s ludicrous ransom demands, and onto a more commodious government van.
We were actually going to Lahore, but you couldn’t get there from Quetta directly, only 700 kilometers away, because of the Sulaiman Range. All northeast-bound trains needed to first travel south, over 350 kilometers to Rohri, before turning north to Punjab, and the Khyber Pass. Mohenjo-daro had been on the way.
The next train to Rohri wouldn’t leave Larkana station for another six hours. The chief local object of interest, outside the station’s first class waiting room, was the tomb of Mir Shahzaib Khan Jalbani, but we needed to get out of the blast furnace, and the girls were all rubbled and bobbled out.
The chief local object of interest, inside the station’s first class waiting room, was about to be me. While Robyn and Julie slumbered on rattan, I spent the time killing flies, drinking mango juice, and cursing the temperature and the country. Inevitably, as my stupor got the better of my torpor, I lost my battle with the flies. Much later, when the girls were out trying to buy our onward tickets, the crashing door startled me awake.
“What is going on here?” It shrieked. I detected that something wasn’t happy, in the rapid ascent to consciousness. My vision picked up an indignant railway official on the perimeter, head bobbling in overdrive. Outside the screen door, was a screen wall of baby-blue beekeepers.
“This first class waiting room is a ladies first class waiting room.” He fumed, gritting his teeth in righteous indignation, protector of the faith, hero among infidels. There would be no defiling the sanctity of the separation of the sexes on his watch.
“Where’s the first class mixed waiting room?” I asked.
“Don’t be so foolish. There is no such thing.” He spat, incredulous at my ignorance. I had been totally prepared to be accommodating, but the ‘foolish’ part was hurtful, and unnecessary. I put my legs back up on the rattan, and pulled my red baseball cap, back down over my eyes.
“Well, I’m not leaving my friends, so you’ll just have to find one.” I muttered.
His screams drew a crowd of spectators. Julie and Robyn’s faces reappeared among the beekeepers. I had just trumped the tomb of Mir Shahzaib Khan Jalbani. Oh, East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet, till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgment Seat.
Clearly, some form of mediation was required. It arrived in the form of the local doctor, stethoscope dangling, divining for rapprochement. I apologized for taking him away from his duties, and the railway official and I made peace. Julie and Robyn celebrated with me, across the street, with coconut ice cream, another mango juice and six raw eggs, which I set to boiling on our return to the platform.
Larkana had not quite finished with our lesson in Pakistani railway etiquette, however. There was still the matter of securing the right onward tickets from Rohri, and the main leg of the long journey to Lahore. For this we were required to meet the station manager, and for this, after sundown, we were required to wait the appropriate amount of deferential time, in his antechamber. When enough spectators had joined us, we were ushered into his office.
He was a short, moustached man, greased between the last few whisps of hair glued to his head, shining under the fluorescent light. Geckos sprinted behind him, catching and eating flies. Bureaucracy had been both kind and cruel to him. This was his universe, and he needed us to appreciate his omnipotence within it. He leaned over his collection of glass orb paperweights to find his lighter. Leaning back into his chair, he pulled a long drag from an Embassy cigarette.
“You are wanting to train to Lahore.” He exhaled. It was an authoritative statement, a sign of his understanding our request. I hadn’t realized that ‘train’ was a verb. Our heads bobbled in unison. In exchange for my commitment to future enhanced cultural sensitivity, he provided us with bad information, and worse ticketing.
We boarded through the spectator steam on the platform to the prying pressure cooker confines of our third class carriage. There was no relief from the heat, or the invasiveness of the staring moustaches. As the train lurched to life, one of the outside onlookers sang a song, and another threw a toffee into my lap. I unwrapped it, as we crawled out of Larkana. It was another lump of hashish. I looked back at smiling teeth. If these people would have just stopped throwing all the other stuff at us, they could likely have dispensed with the railyard formalities.
It was a hot, drenching, stinking, miserably slow, black trip. At every stop we stumbled out onto the tracks, gasping for whatever was available in the way of air. Three hours later, we detrained in the Indus floodplain town of Rohri, and humped our packs the length and breadth of the station, looking for our carriage on the overnight Shalimar Express. The conductor told us our documents were ‘incomplete,’ and directed us to the ticket office.
“You must go to the Reservation Office.” Bobbled the vendor behind the bars. We went to the Reservation Office. It was padlocked. The whistle sounded on the Shalimar. We looked at each other, and ran back the length of the train to the one conductor we could see near the engine.
“There are only first class sleepers left.” He said. We looked at each other again.
“Good enough.” We said in unison. A friendly assistant helped Robyn and Julie onto the train, while I settled with the conductor. A few moments later, I heard a thwack and a wallop, and the friendly assistant jumped off the coach running, holding his face. The girls told me he had helped himself to breasts and bottoms while showing them where to
stow their packs. In exchange, he received a commitment to future enhanced cultural sensitivity.
There was a lot happening within the edges of my upper berth but, despite the growl of the ceiling fans, and the clanking of the traintracks through the deep corrugations of my rattan mat, I slept like the mound of the dead.
An attendant woke us for breakfast at sunrise. He asked if we would like to change to a sitting car. We asked him why. His head bobbled.
“Air conditioning.” He said. Not a few moments later, we were consuming bad fried eggs, bread, butter, jam and chai, and basking in the breeze from the machine. The Seven-up was complimentary.
Kurt Cobain used to say that he’d rather be dead than cool, but Kurt didn’t die in Pakistan. In the early morning aircon of a first class carriage, on the Shalimar Express to Lahore, he might have found Nirvana.