The Looking-Glass Voyage: Memoirs of a Pakistani Surgeon

By Tariq Khan

Tariq Khan invites readers on a geographical, historical, political, and personal journey in his riveting memoir, The Looking Glass Voyage. A Pukhtoon from the Peshawar region of northwest Pakistan, Mr. Khan lived through the historical events of the 1950s and 60s in Pakistan, and he documents the unrest of those years as he experienced them as a young man. Tales of his family and school years reflect the circumstances of the times and reveal an ambitious student committed to his loved ones and possessing valuable physical and intellectual aptitudes.

The memoir chronicles Mr. Khan's medical school studies and preparations for establishing his practice. His experiences in various cities and hospital settings shine a light on the cultures he lived in as an adult—from Saudi Arabia to England to the UAE. Accompanied by stories of an adventurous youth, a romantic liaison, and an arranged marriage, this autobiography will educate and entertain readers.

In Mr. Khan's own words, The Looking Glass Voyage gives a first-hand glimpse into times past and the significant happenings of that era: "I was witness to great events in the history of the world in real-time: the dismemberment of my country of birth, and the formation of Bangladesh, in 1971; experiencing Iran in the heady days, at the peak years of the Shah of Iran ..." This "witness" is engaging and welcoming to readers of all ages and backgrounds as he makes history, his story."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tellwell Talent
• Release date: Oct 26, 2021
• ISBN: 9780228860600

Tariq Khan

Tariq Khan was born in 1950 in Rawalpindi to Pukhtoon parents. His father at the time was a major in the armored corps of the Pakistan Army, stationed in 'Pindi. He lived in various cantonments of Pakistan, and finally ended up as a boarding school student in the elite Burn Hall School in Abbottabad, run by European Catholic missionaries. This was to be a major turning point of his early life, as he threw himself into the rough and tumble of life at Burn Hall, playing sports like football, basketball and athletics.He went to England in 1978, and after passing the FRCS examination, trained in orthopaedic surgery. He has retired from surgery and is living in Canada, and divides his time between that country and Pakistan.

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The Looking-Glass Voyage

Memoirs of a Pakistani Surgeon

Tariq Khan

The Looking-Glass Voyage

Copyright © 2021 by Tariq Khan

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Tellwell Talent

www.tellwell.ca

ISBN

978-0-2288-6061-7 (Hardcover)

978-0-2288-6059-4 (Paperback)

978-0-2288-6060-0 (eBook)

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Epilogue

DEDICATION

For my daughter, Khadeeja

Disclaimer

The content of this publication is based on actual events. Names may have been changed to protect individual Privacy.

Chapter One

"Behold me now: mourning for the city of my Desire,

Little knowing, the mirror that I shattered in my arrogance

Was my only Reality."

(Translation from Mirza Ghalib’s poetry)

April 3, 2020: I am in Canada, in the Province of British Columbia.

Walking on the shores of a small lake, I contemplate the situation confronting me and the rest of the world. What we thought of as a minor virus infection, a flu, in far-off China, is suddenly causing a world-wide scare. The World Health Organization declared it a pandemic on March 11, 2020.

In this beautiful scene by the lake, where all of nature, and even the ducks, appear happy and untroubled, it’s hard to imagine that death stalks us.

The duck-calls are so familiar and transport me mentally to a distant place, to the banks of a far-off river in the land of my birth and childhood. The river Indus is mentioned in texts and chronicles of the Aryan peoples of ancient India from 1500 BCE. It flows from the north of Pakistan to the south, through gorges 1,500 feet deep, and then into the plains of the Punjab, where it spreads in places to 16 miles wide, running through the length of Pakistan.

It is one of the longest rivers in Asia, taking its origins in the Tibetan plateau in the vicinity of Lake Mana Sarovar, a high-altitude freshwater lake revered as sacred in four religions. Flowing for 2,000 miles to Southern Pakistan and the province of Sindh, the Indus finally forms a delta spreading over 19,000 square miles and 130 miles across before it empties into the Arabian Sea. On its banks rose an ancient Bronze Age civilization, the Indus River civilization. My people, the Pukhtoons (or Pathan), live on the banks and vicinity of this great river.

***

Allow me to introduce myself. I am a Pukhtoon (or Pathan), belonging to the Peshawar region in the north west of Pakistan, where our ancestors had been settled for centuries. Fortunately, my family didn’t have to go through the horrors witnessed by many in other parts of the Indian subcontinent during the Partition of 1947.

The Pukhtoon is fiercely independent and has an open and fearless nature and is famous for lasting friendships and sincerity, but also for being a tenacious enemy if provoked. A tradition called badal runs like a hot seam through Pathan society. Badal means revenge: they believe in an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth, which describes this vengeful nature. Decidedly, it is not the best of human qualities, but if you wrong a Pukhtoon, retribution will follow. That reputation may have been a deterrent to the wanton killings that took place in the eastern parts of the subcontinent during Partition—that and the fact that the whole of Pukhtoon society was armed to the teeth, each home bristling with guns and weapons of all varieties.

The Khyber Pass is a narrow, natural military choke point in the Spin Ghar mountains, close to the Hindukush (Hindu Killer) Range. To the east of it is the ancient city of Peshawar; to the west, the small border town of Torkham, and beyond that is Afghanistan.

Few passes, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica, have had such continuing strategic importance, or so many historic associations, as the Khyber Pass. Through it have passed invaders, such as the Persians, the Greeks, Mughals, Afghans, and the British, for whom it was the key point in control of the Afghan border. It has seen much fighting and bloodshed.

In the days leading up to the Partition in 1947, in the seething unrest and turmoil of the masses of India, the founding fathers of Pakistan, Muhammad Ali Jinnah and Liaqat Ali Khan, among others, coined the phrase The Two Nation Theory. They argued that Muslims were a separate nation from the Hindus, and this became the raison d’etre for a separate country for the Muslims, to be called Pakistan.

To this day, I can’t fathom why whole populations turned against each other at the time of the Partition and killed one another with such unrestrained cruelty, after having lived in relative peace and tranquility for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. At the end of this frenzy of wanton killing, over a million souls were dead, and a much larger number maimed, plundered, and rendered homeless.

They say cultural differences of religion and language boiled over like lava.

For my immediate family, though, 1948 and onwards must have been a happy and exhilarating time and a time of hope. My dear mother, whom we called Ami, told me I was born in the early hours, about 3:00 a.m., on a Friday morning.

In the Muslim belief as practised in the subcontinent, any natural phenomenon, such as a birth or a death, that occurs on a Friday is auspicious. Religion and spirituality suffuse the subcontinent. All over this vast country of Pakistan, carved out in the name of Islam, one is reminded of all-pervasive religion, as the Adhan, the muezzin’s mournful call to prayer, reminds us and summons the faithful to the mosque five times a day.

My birth took place in the Holy Family Hospital, today still known by the same name, in Pakistan. In March of that year, Holy Family Hospital was on the outskirts of a placid city called Rawal Pindi, abbreviated to Pindi for some reason, in the Punjab province of Pakistan. It was a place for the privileged, mostly for the British military officers and their families stationed at this garrison city.

My father, Abba to us, was then a young military officer serving in the elite armoured corps of the newly created Pakistan Army; the army itself was an offshoot of the great British Indian Army, and for many years followed the traditions of that vast Imperial outfit.

My early childhood and growing up years were spent on military bases, called cantonments. I remember military officers’ messes while accompanying my parents, with my Ayah (maid-cum-governess) in tow, and formal dinners and functions, with glimmering bars serving alcoholic beverages, and bartenders who were natives but trained to perfection and able to make a chota peg (a small whiskey drink). Pictures of Military bands with trophies and regimental colours, and paintings of great battles fought in the past, hung on the walls. The room was full of shiny coats of arms and handsome officers in smart military uniforms with military campaign medals of gallantry hanging on their chests.

The smartly dressed waiters, wearing traditional turbans and cummerbunds in different regimental colours, waited upon us discreetly.

The architecture of the colonial buildings was mostly red brick, with arches and verandahs and bougainvillea plants, designed by the planners to keep cool in the long hot summers of the plains.

Colonial rule had ended in August 1947 to much fanfare and chest thumping; the Great Imperial Power had withdrawn, and Desis (a slang name for local people) were at the helm at all levels. The undermining of the foundations of the great colonial infrastructure that had been laid down with such meticulous care had begun.

It must have been intoxicating days for Ami and Abba, as my birth could not have been an ordinary occurrence. Newly married, and their firstborn being a son, a male heir, was no mean feat in itself and of huge cultural significance in a society that reveres sons over daughters. It would be difficult to imagine the happiness my mother would have felt; a warm glow must have pervaded everything.

Holy Family Hospital was staffed by Europeans and American Christian missionaries. The midwife who eased my natal journey was an impressive and devout Christian nurse named Lillinsky, God’s gift to humanity according to Ami. Probably hers were the first human hands to touch the new arrival.

Oh, a real boy! A real boy! she is said to have told my mother, as, in my mind’s eye, she carried the infant to her, wrapped up after the ordeal, all scrubbed and pink.

Ami had been educated to tenth grade in an English medium school, a great achievement in the day when girls were forbidden to go to school. Women were considered vital to the honour and dignity of a family, but how the women should behave was dictated by the culture and Pukhtoon tradition, its rules influenced and written mostly by men. Women kept themselves out of sight, in purdah, as that was the respectable thing to do, dictated by tradition. She had a brilliant brain and could not only speak English but read and write it too—something that would have been frowned upon. No feudal household worth its salt would look kindly on a female who was able to read things the infidels wrote.

Ami never tired of repeating to me, over and over through the years, Lillinsky’s first words to her: A real boy! She repeated it when I was older, as a child and then as an adult. It was Mother’s habit of repeating things; maybe she wanted to relive those happy moments.

You sounded so different too, from the other children born that day. Much louder, and with a more manly voice, she would say.

Years later, I came across a hardcover book in our house. It was called Mothercraft. Clearly, Ami had been preparing for her pregnancy and the arrival of her new baby. It looked like a very detailed book. It had pictures of breast feeding and nappy changing techniques, and also various kinds of buggies and prams in various styles for transporting your new baby.

I did have a rather posh and up-market buggy, with a retractable hood for the weather, four pneumatic spoked wheels, and springs and white tires. After I started to walk, it graduated from being something that was once central to my existence to an unwanted fixture collecting dust in a verandah, and then in various stages of decay over the course of a year or two. It was minus a wheel one year, then two missing wheels, and finally turned into a piece of junk that gradually disintegrated in plain sight and disappeared from my life forever.

You always somehow got to undo the wingnuts inside. We could tighten the nuts all we liked, but you always succeeded in undoing them again, she would say, unable to hide the pride in her voice.

It was a Made in England buggy. A Made in England stamp meant ultimate quality, whether it was a buggy, a bicycle, or a car. A lot of my toys were made in England, like the Pan American Airways Super Constellation with four propellers, and my favourite handmade English shoes with brown leather on the sides and white on top. It must have been quite the craze in those days. Even the Quaid e Azam (Great Leader of Pakistan) wore them. But I didn’t wear mine on my feet for quite a while; I just carried them around in my arms, and even slept with them in my bed, which Ami disapproved of strongly.

***

The incident of the ornaments happened around this time. Being the daughter of a prominent feudal Khan (Tribal Chief), Ami was naturally given lots by way of dowry at her marriage. Among other things, she got a large amount of jewellery, mostly heirlooms from over a hundred years earlier, belonging to her ancestors. It was a suitcase full of gold ornaments, diamonds, and precious stones.

In those days, we lived in a military cantonment in the town of Risalpur in KPK. Father decided that we needed a car, so my parents settled on a British made Morris Minor. They travelled by bus to Peshawar, and from the bus station they got into a horse drawn peoples’ carrier, called a tanga.

Tangas were an important means of transportation in those days. They had two wheels and were drawn by a horse in the front. They had a bench seat such that passengers in the front faced forward, and those at the back faced backwards, with one shared back-rest in the centre—a rather uncomfortable arrangement, but I doubt if anyone ever gave a thought to comfort. People travelled for miles on tangas.

The tanga driver brandished a whip in one hand, and sometimes the driver used it quite cruelly on the poor horse. Most kochwans (tanga drivers) were scoundrels. Poor and illiterate, and hailing from the surrounding local villages, they were considered to be low on the evolutionary scale.

Abba had suggested to Ami to bring along some of her ornaments, just in case they ran short of money for the car. Mother brought along the whole suitcase-full of jewellery.

I was afraid the servants at home would break in and steal it if I left it there, she explained later. That was, indeed, an ever-present probability.

Moving about in public in those days wasn’t easy for high-born ladies. In public, Mother had to wear an outer garment called a burqa, and she had to keep every part of her body covered and out of the public’s gaze, including her face. This was called purdah. In addition to this, Mother carried one-year-old me in her arms on inside the burqa. Not an easy task for a young mother to juggle so many things at the same time!

We were accompanied by Mother’s younger brother, my maternal Uncle Halim, who had just joined the Pakistan Air Force and was himself stationed at Risalpur in those days.

We were to stay the night in the house of a doctor friend at Peshawar. As we got to the good doctor’s house, confusion set in. My father, ever hot tempered, started shouting at Ami to cover her face and disappear into the house at once, in case someone should see her face exposed in the burqa. Her purdah was all-important to him. So, Mother ran into the house with me, expecting the men to bring in all the luggage.

We were all met with great gusto by the doctor and his family. They offered tea and refreshments, as is the norm, until Mother asked Uncle Halim if they had brought all the stuff from the tanga. It was then discovered that her suitcase of jewellery was missing. Someone had placed the suitcase under the seat in the tanga for safety and then forgot to take it out. The kochwan was paid his fare and had departed already. Uncle Halim ran willy-nilly trying to locate the tanga, which of course by then was nowhere to be found. All tangas looked the same.

The police were called, a report laboriously written and filed, but mother’s jewellery was never found. Ami had lost a fortune, but she never talked about this incident much through the years, and she never showed any regret or sadness. A person of lesser mental resilience and character than mother would have been psychologically scarred.

My parents later got a second car, a larger British made Vauxhall Velox, in 1952 to add to the Morris. They bought it new from Peshawar. Father was in Kohat by then. It had a six-cylinder engine, and I heard all the grown ups saying how smooth and quiet the engine was while they looked at it in awe.

Ami had been brought up in a close-knit family and was particularly close to her two aunts, her mother’s sisters. They had a lot of influence on her, and by extension, on us, Ami’s children. Me being the firstborn, I had to bear the brunt of their strange advice for bringing up children.

For example, there was a phenomenon they called toudh soudh, which meant getting exposed to heat and then cold immediately following—an event to be avoided at all costs, according to them. The rule was simple and easy to understand: consuming a hot cup of tea made you hot or toudh, and this called for a cooling down period by sitting somewhere at room temperature before going outside. According to them, no greater calamity could befall a human being, let alone a child, than toudh soudh. The seed of this idea took firm root in Ami’s brain. In the cold northern winters, when it was the season for oranges, I could only have one that was baked in the small clay ovens that were a part of kitchens of those days. Everyone else could consume their oranges in the normal way, cold and tangy. Obviously, they survived, but mine had to be served to me steaming on a plate straight out of the fire!

In about 1954, Abba was posted at Lahore as Martial Law Administrator, five hundred kilometres from Peshawar in the province of Punjab. The military was called out to control, once again, rioting in this city. The rioting wasn’t between Hindus and Muslims now, because the fires of Partition had about burned themselves out, but between two sects of Islam: the Ahmadiyya community and the larger Sunni sect. This was the problem with the Two-Nation Theory that the Partition had been based on. There’s no end to the number of divisions and nations that can arise from that premise.

There have been some very prominent Ahmadiyya Pakistanis, among them Pakistan’s first Nobel Laureate, the physicist Professor Abdus Salaam, and Pakistan’s first Foreign Minister, the highly qualified and talented Sir Choudhary Zafarullah Khan who, at one stage, was also the President of the UN General Assembly and also presided over the International Court of Justice—the only South Asian and Pakistani to do so.

In Lahore in 1954, we lived in a sprawling red-brick colonial mansion, with many rooms. We had a garden spread over several acres of lawns, and many servants. As children, we played hide and seek in the vast lawns, climbing the great banyan trees in the grounds and hiding amongst their leafy branches.

My mother’s mother, whom we called Babi, was visiting us once with her sister, whom we called Shino Massi, because she had green eyes. Shin in Pashto means green.

Our neighbour was a military general who was also from the province of KPK and spoke the same language, Pashto, as we did. Babi, Shino Massi, and Ami were invited to dinner by the general’s wife, known to have spent some years in the US. After a hearty and sumptuous dinner, dessert was served. It was ice cream! The general’s wife had even hinted to them that she had a little surprise in dessert.

Ice cream wasn’t unheard of in those days, but it wasn’t a common item in the food chain by any means. And, of course, you have to keep in mind the concept of toudh/soudh (heat and cold). So when Shino Massi gently poked her finger into the creamy mound in her cup, she was shocked at how cold it was. Icy cold! But they had just consumed hot food!

She cast a glance, loaded with meaning, at her elder sister, Babi. Babi knew that something was amiss, so she checked the icy mound in her own cup. A silent telepathic signal went around the three ladies: my mother, Babi, and Shino Massi.

Do not eat the ice-cream! shrieked the signal. It’s too cold!

The general’s wife, having spent several years in the land of ice cream and cola, and having recently returned, had forgotten about the Pukhtoons’ ways. She asked them if all was to their liking. Babi, the diplomat and the more intelligent one, to whom many of us turned for counsel, said to her: The food was excellent, and we enjoyed it so much. The only thing is, the dessert is too cold. We could still have it, she added hastily, if it’s warmed up a little. We all have such sensitive throats.

So, the general’s wife called out to her servant and ordered him to do as these ladies wanted.

Yes, ma’am, he said obediently, and he respectfully withdrew to the kitchen with the three ice cream cups. The ladies had much to talk about and forgot all about it.

Finally, their dessert arrived. Ami said they were shocked! This wasn’t what we expected. The dessert had transformed into liquid sweetened milk! Her word for this liquid was firnee.

Years later, we would quote this incident and have a good laugh at it. It had finally dawned on us: ice cream melts when you heat it!

Later, in my boarding school years, after taking a forced icy shower, I lost all fear of ice cream.

At that time in Lahore, murderous riots were taking place in the city’s many bazaars and shopping districts. The Sunnis were indulging in looting, plundering, and arson of Ahmadiyya businesses, killing as many Ahmedis as they could lay their hands on. The army was called in to maintain the peace. To control rowdy crowds, my father informed me many years later, the army didn’t fire shots in the air; they shot to kill.

We spent our days, months, and years in Lahore, blissfully unaware of all that was going on around us. Before the British came to India, it had been ruled by Mughal kings for over five centuries; these were Muslim kings who were absolute monarchs and ruled with great pomp and show … and cruelty, if you got on their wrong side.

Before the Mughal kings, the Muslim kings of the Delhi Sultanate reigned for over three centuries. They had their origins in the violent, swirling hordes of Central Asia who attacked and pulverized the Hindu kings of India and their armies. The Hindu kings by then wanted nothing but peace.

The British initially came in as merchants and gentlemen with the East India Company around the eighteenth century, dealing in, among other things, the spice trade. The Company, as The East India Company came to be known, spread and conquered. They employed local Indians as foot soldiers for protection; these were known as sepoys.

In 1857, resentment grew amongst the native soldiers. The sepoys rebelled and killed some English military officers. Many convicted mutineers were caught and punished by being made to stand in front of a cannon to be blown up in front of large crowds. News travelled slowly in those days, but it finally reached English shores. Questions were raised in parliament, leading to heated debates, as to what the East India Company was actually up to in far off India.

The Crown took over after the 1857 fiasco, and India became a full-fledged British colony with a viceroy. For a while, India came to be known as the brightest jewel in the English Crown. But the Indian polity became increasingly unruly and difficult to govern, and by the end of World War II, the British leadership had decided that it would be best to let go of their star colony. It made economic sense.

The Partition took place because the leaders thought that Hindus and the Muslims could no longer live alongside each other. The last Viceroy of India, Lord Mountbatten, a relative of the present Queen of England, was hastily brought over in 1947 to oversee the Partition. The actual map for the Partition was drawn by a British lawyer Cyril Radcliffe. He was told by Mountbatten to make the division so as to leave the maximum number of Muslims in Pakistan, and the maximum number of Hindus in India.

Overnight, almost fourteen million people suddenly found themselves either in India or in Pakistan without knowing it, and many of them against their will. Radcliffe did the job hurriedly and then left, never to return again. He had divided a nation of 400 million indifferently and without empathy. He burnt all his notes and maps before he left.

Pakistan adopted Urdu and English as its two official languages, and English as the medium of official communication. It’s interesting to note that neither of these languages were the ethnic languages of any of the people who lived within the boundaries of either West Pakistan or East Pakistan.

The national anthem of Pakistan, stirring music and wonderfully composed, is entirely in the Persian language. Persian is not one of the languages of Pakistan either. As children, we sang it at school without comprehending it.

In KPK, where the majority of Pathans or Pukhtoons live, the language we speak is Pashto. The capital of KPK is Peshawar. It’s an ancient city situated in a valley and dating back at least to 537 BCE, having undergone several transformations and many sackings.

In the old days, from ancient times, the city was encircled by four walls to protect it from attack. Inside the four walls of this city is the famed Kissa Khawani bazaar, or the Street of the Story Tellers. In bygone days, it is said, caravans (kafilas in the local vernacular) arriving from Kabul and Central Asia, laden with goods, would stop at the caravanserais for rest and refreshment, and people of different nationalities exchanged stories of their travels over hot cups of green tea. Hence the name Kissa Khawani. or the Story Tellers’ Bazaar. To this day, the tradition of drinking green tea continues; local hospitality demands that you be offered green tea in the Kissa Khawani Bazaar.

In the Kissa Khawani is a monument erected to the memory of those who fell to British bullets while protesting colonial rule on a certain day, the Chowk Yadgar. Yadgar means remembrance. It’s ironic that few of the inhabitants of this city would have any inkling now of what it commemorates.

Kipling described the ancient route from Kabul to Peshawar and beyond, for more than three thousand miles, passing through the Khyber Pass. It has come to be known by the name the British gave it: The Grand Trunk Road. However, it was the great Buddhist king of antiquity, Chandragupta Maurya, the founder of the Maurya Empire (321 to 298 BCE) who ruled parts of Afghanistan and almost the whole of India and present-day Bangladesh, who started it. He named it Utterapatha, The High Road, which at the time extended from the mouth of the Ganges River in the east to the northwestern frontier of his empire (now known as KPK). Ashoka, the great Buddhist King, was his grandson.

The Grand Trunk Road, commonly known as the GT Road, has been considerably rebuilt through the centuries, particularly by the Pathan King Sher Shah Suri (1486 to 1545), who realigned it to pass near Rohtas in central Punjab of Pakistan, where he built a fort of considerable beauty. He constructed drinking water wells and rest places at intervals along the whole length of the GT road for the benefit of travellers.

Accompanying the River Kabul for a while, the GT Road winds its way through the dusty and ancient city of Nowshera, finally reaching Khairabad. From 1833 to 1860, the road was modernized by the British, and its surface metalled. In present day Pakistan, it is known as the N 5, which is a four-lane highway, two lanes in each direction, carrying heavy modern traffic of all kinds.

Khairabad is dusty and boasts a few ramshackle huts as the GT road passes through it. However, it was the scene of some bloody skirmishes between the Pathans of this area and a foreign occupying force from the Punjab called Sikhs in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, under the self-styled king of the Punjab, Ranjit Singh. Ranjit Singh and his band of vicious fighters belonged to a rather new religion called Sikhism. He was blind in one eye and was the first warrior king from the eastern parts of India to turn on the traditional attackers from the west, such as the Pathans, and turn the tide somewhat.

At Khairabad, the River Kabul, after its over two-hundred-mile journey from Kabul city in Afghanistan, meets with the River Indus coming down from the north. One can see clearly the waters of the two rivers flowing separately for about ten miles or so. The Kabul River waters are muddy and brown, whereas the Indus is blue because at this point it has flowed through the mountainous terrain of the Himalayas.

At Khairabad, the River Indus, now fattened by the Kabul River, enters a narrow but deep gorge in the Neelab mountain range. The GT Road traverses some spectacular scenery from here on: to the right, the Neelab Mountains and the railway line carved into its side, mostly rock and sparse vegetation, and on the left, far down below, the river, deep and swift. A few miles downstream you come upon the Attock Bridge.

This is another landmark of the infrastructure the British built for India, and it’s a marvel of engineering. The River Indus acts as a demarcating boundary between the provinces of Punjab and the KPK. The bridge, designed by Sir Guildford Molesworth, was opened to traffic in 1888. It’s a double decker, with the railway line on top and the road below. It acts as a gateway to the KPK, Afghanistan, and beyond. It was always heavily fortified. At the opposite eastern end stands a quaint railway station, almost as if picked right out of England and deposited at Attock.

Alexander of Macedon crossed the Indus into the Punjab about ten miles upstream from here at a village he called Ohind (currently known as Hund), using a bridge constructed for him by Perdiccas and Hephaestion. This area became the Kingdom of Edratides the Greek, following Alexander’s departure, and later it came to be known as the Indo-Greek kingdom. The Indo-Greek kings held the country, including parts of neighbouring Punjab and most of Afghanistan, for about two hundred years until 80 BCE.

Having left the plains behind us at Nowshera, the road winds through gorges and valleys, playing peekaboo with the river on the left far down below. After fourteen miles, through the green wheat fields if it’s summer, we finally reach a small settlement—the Village of Mandori.

The great warrior poet, Khushal Khan Khattak, was an ancestor. Evelyn Howell and Sir Olaf Caroe jointly translated and published The Poems of Khushal Khan Khattak in 1963. Here is an example of this endeavour:

"My sword I girt upon my thigh,

To guard our nation’s ancient fame;

Its champion in this age am I,

The Khattak Khan, Khushal my name."

The word Khan originated in Central Asia, and there was more to being a Khan than owning lands. These lands were taken by force of arms and kept against all attacks from other intruders. A Khan had a certain following of men and equipment. You wouldn’t command much respect if you lost any local skirmish against your opponents. Deaths and murders did take place, and sometimes vendettas, leading to the wiping out of whole families. After the Partition, one dubious freedom that the people of this region got was the ability for anyone to call themselves a Khan. Every second Pukhtoon now has Khan as his last name.

A local saying is that three things can lead to trouble and are best avoided: zar (gold), zan (women), and zameen (land).

My mother was very protective of me. I was her lone child for almost seven years, before Taimoor came along. Her aunts’ stories and criticism had quite undermined her confidence in her mothering capabilities, and I suspect she didn’t expect me to survive, although I was a healthy child. There was also the threat of child kidnapping, and