The police are your friend. I've always thought it a pretty high standard to set yourself, but in Pakistan the police really do their best to live up to it. Even though I was a stranger on a bike they fed me, listened to me, gave me a bed and protected me from invisible threats. And what did I do in return? I scowled and devised ways to get rid of them.
Our first encounter was in the busy junction town of Rohri, right across the Indus River. During my ten-day stay in Quetta, a frontier city full of bushy beards and black burkas, I had imagined Rohri to be some sort of gateway to freedom. All I needed to do was hop on a Lahore-bound train, watch the last part of Balochistan glide past and then, on the other side of the Indus, I would be able to cycle again. The mere thought made me giddy with anticipation.
Life, however, is rarely as straightforward as we would like. Procuring the right train ticket was easy enough, and I even managed to show up on time early next morning. Unfortunately, the same couldn't be said of the Jaffar Express, the diesel-powered turtle on wheels that was supposed to take us to Rohri. At nine o'clock, the time indicated on my ticket, nothing happened. At ten, still no train.
The people around me remained composed. As the hours passed no one lost his temper or even so much as complained. On the contrary, people laughed and talked, sat down for lunch and on the whole seemed to be having a jolly good time. The sheep someone had brought along seemed equally unfazed as it continued to nibble on some freshly cut grass. It was an admirable display of calm acceptance. I thought of what happens back home if a train arrives ten minutes late—the buzz of frustration shooting across the platform, the whispered obscenities as people realise that they will miss their connecting train. Here in Quetta, a mammoth delay was accepted as a fact of life.
'We can't spend our life in perpetual frustration,' a young business man I met on the platform told me. 'This is Pakistan. The only thing you can rely on is that nothing works properly.' He then went on to explain the dynamics behind the frequent power outages that cripple the country—a phenomenon called 'loadshedding'. What it comes down to is that the national government, tied up in various embezzlement schemes, simply can't foot the monthly energy bill, leaving the power companies no other option but to take entire cities off the grid for up to twelve hours a day. To make matters worse, an estimated twenty to thirty percent of electricity is stolen.
At five pm our train came rumbling in. Having lifted all the boxes, crates, pieces of furniture, motorcycles plus one bicycle and one sheep into the luggage compartment, we found our seats and finally took off. The journey was blissfully uneventful. I shared my cookies with the man sitting next to me, he gave me some of his peanuts, and that was about it. At nine we retired to our berths, where I spent a couple of sleepless hours imagining which parts of my bike would be bent beyond repair by the unsecured motorcycles in the luggage compartment.
We got to Rohri in the dead of night. The town, however, was up and about. The ubiquitous hole-in-the-wall shops selling biscuits and soft drinks were open, and an old man behind a cooker was whipping up one egg-filled pancake after the other. I found myself a dank little room with a charpoy (a wooden bedframe strung with rope), returned for one of those greasy pancakes and then tried to catch some sleep.
Someone must have tipped off the police when I put the panniers on the bike a few hours later, because they caught up with me before I had the chance to turn the first corner. For a moment I feared I would have to relive the entire parcel experience again. 'I'm here to cycle,' I told them coldly. To my relief they just wanted to keep an eye on me. It must have been a dreadful bore for them, having to watch my heaving back all day long. Then again, I never asked for a police escort. I so desperately didn't want one that I kept hoping one of their tyres would blow out.
That didn't happen, of course, and as the sun crept back towards the horizon I tried to make it clear that I needed to find a place for the night. 'Next town,' they smiled. 'Guesthouse.' This soon became some kind of magic spell to keep me on the bike. Each time we reached that 'next town', my armed friends would tell me to keep at it a bit longer, until I realised they were trying to push me out of Sindh and into the next province.
It was pitch dark when we reached the provincial border. My police escort stopped and clearly wanted me to do the same, but, smelling freedom, I shot straight past the checkpoint only to nearly crash into a waiting delegation of the Punjabi police force. These fellows tried to pull the same trick on me with some vague promise of a hotel thirty kilometres down the road. Had I listened to them, I would have ended up in China without ever stopping for the night.
Too exhausted to feel any real anger, I knew I had to raise my voice. Somehow, a fit of rage always seems to work in Islamic countries, so I thundered that they could either take me to the nearest police station or bugger off to let me pitch my tent in peace. It worked like a charm. I was swiftly escorted to a nearby police station, a lovely little courtyard affair with a trellised gate and a few tables and benches under the open night sky. Two inmates watched me from behind the bars of their cell door. I collapsed in a chair and had to make a conscious effort not to break down in tears. The long wait on the train platform, the eleven-hour journey to Rohri, the lack of food and sleep, the frustration of being followed and misled. Something snapped.
I woke up the next morning feeling my same old self again. We agreed to make a try for Chani Goth, a small village where I would be able to stay at another police station. Knowing what to expect made the 170-kilometre ride a breeze, although it isn't easy to pace yourself with four pairs of eyes prodding you on.
The Chani Goth police station turned out to be a near-perfect replica of the one I had left that morning. Even the bathroom fittings were the same. There weren't any inmates this time, only a man with a gash in his head the size of a tennis ball. He was filing a report. The man sitting next to him looked as though he wanted to hide under the table. Not too difficult to figure out what had happened there.
The next day was the last of our uneasy coexistence. A few kilometres before Bahawalpur I felt something wasn't right. I looked over my shoulder. No police. For a moment I was confused. What had happened? The flat tyre I had been praying for? Had they crashed their car into a lamp post out of sheer boredom? Frankly, I couldn't care less. I whooped so hard I nearly flew over the handlebars.
Our first encounter was in the busy junction town of Rohri, right across the Indus River. During my ten-day stay in Quetta, a frontier city full of bushy beards and black burkas, I had imagined Rohri to be some sort of gateway to freedom. All I needed to do was hop on a Lahore-bound train, watch the last part of Balochistan glide past and then, on the other side of the Indus, I would be able to cycle again. The mere thought made me giddy with anticipation.
 |
| At last... |
The people around me remained composed. As the hours passed no one lost his temper or even so much as complained. On the contrary, people laughed and talked, sat down for lunch and on the whole seemed to be having a jolly good time. The sheep someone had brought along seemed equally unfazed as it continued to nibble on some freshly cut grass. It was an admirable display of calm acceptance. I thought of what happens back home if a train arrives ten minutes late—the buzz of frustration shooting across the platform, the whispered obscenities as people realise that they will miss their connecting train. Here in Quetta, a mammoth delay was accepted as a fact of life.
'We can't spend our life in perpetual frustration,' a young business man I met on the platform told me. 'This is Pakistan. The only thing you can rely on is that nothing works properly.' He then went on to explain the dynamics behind the frequent power outages that cripple the country—a phenomenon called 'loadshedding'. What it comes down to is that the national government, tied up in various embezzlement schemes, simply can't foot the monthly energy bill, leaving the power companies no other option but to take entire cities off the grid for up to twelve hours a day. To make matters worse, an estimated twenty to thirty percent of electricity is stolen.
At five pm our train came rumbling in. Having lifted all the boxes, crates, pieces of furniture, motorcycles plus one bicycle and one sheep into the luggage compartment, we found our seats and finally took off. The journey was blissfully uneventful. I shared my cookies with the man sitting next to me, he gave me some of his peanuts, and that was about it. At nine we retired to our berths, where I spent a couple of sleepless hours imagining which parts of my bike would be bent beyond repair by the unsecured motorcycles in the luggage compartment.
We got to Rohri in the dead of night. The town, however, was up and about. The ubiquitous hole-in-the-wall shops selling biscuits and soft drinks were open, and an old man behind a cooker was whipping up one egg-filled pancake after the other. I found myself a dank little room with a charpoy (a wooden bedframe strung with rope), returned for one of those greasy pancakes and then tried to catch some sleep.
Someone must have tipped off the police when I put the panniers on the bike a few hours later, because they caught up with me before I had the chance to turn the first corner. For a moment I feared I would have to relive the entire parcel experience again. 'I'm here to cycle,' I told them coldly. To my relief they just wanted to keep an eye on me. It must have been a dreadful bore for them, having to watch my heaving back all day long. Then again, I never asked for a police escort. I so desperately didn't want one that I kept hoping one of their tyres would blow out.
 |
| Yes, it really says 'elite' on their shirts |
It was pitch dark when we reached the provincial border. My police escort stopped and clearly wanted me to do the same, but, smelling freedom, I shot straight past the checkpoint only to nearly crash into a waiting delegation of the Punjabi police force. These fellows tried to pull the same trick on me with some vague promise of a hotel thirty kilometres down the road. Had I listened to them, I would have ended up in China without ever stopping for the night.
Too exhausted to feel any real anger, I knew I had to raise my voice. Somehow, a fit of rage always seems to work in Islamic countries, so I thundered that they could either take me to the nearest police station or bugger off to let me pitch my tent in peace. It worked like a charm. I was swiftly escorted to a nearby police station, a lovely little courtyard affair with a trellised gate and a few tables and benches under the open night sky. Two inmates watched me from behind the bars of their cell door. I collapsed in a chair and had to make a conscious effort not to break down in tears. The long wait on the train platform, the eleven-hour journey to Rohri, the lack of food and sleep, the frustration of being followed and misled. Something snapped.
I woke up the next morning feeling my same old self again. We agreed to make a try for Chani Goth, a small village where I would be able to stay at another police station. Knowing what to expect made the 170-kilometre ride a breeze, although it isn't easy to pace yourself with four pairs of eyes prodding you on.
The Chani Goth police station turned out to be a near-perfect replica of the one I had left that morning. Even the bathroom fittings were the same. There weren't any inmates this time, only a man with a gash in his head the size of a tennis ball. He was filing a report. The man sitting next to him looked as though he wanted to hide under the table. Not too difficult to figure out what had happened there.
The next day was the last of our uneasy coexistence. A few kilometres before Bahawalpur I felt something wasn't right. I looked over my shoulder. No police. For a moment I was confused. What had happened? The flat tyre I had been praying for? Had they crashed their car into a lamp post out of sheer boredom? Frankly, I couldn't care less. I whooped so hard I nearly flew over the handlebars.
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