Salman Rashid
“The Kohistan - bare, harsh, arid land of gravel wastes, torrent beds filled with boulders, pebbly slopes leading up to range after range, razor-edged and crowned with precipices. Under a June sun at midday refracted from the rocks, the mirages dancing along the maidans, it is indeed a penance to be there. But visit it in the cold season; see, when night is nearly ended - when the eastern horizon begins to glow, and above towards the zenith deep blue pales to steel, and the stars are fading out - see the dim bulk of the Khirthar put off the veil of sleep, awakening to the delicate touch of first light; from gray to lilac, from lilac to pearl and opal, the tracery of cliff and crag and chasm begins to show, and before we, far below, can see the first fiery edge of the sun, that high range bursts into a golden glory, seeming to throw back on us the lower ridges that darken awhile from the contrast.”
Such is the poetry that the Khirthar Mountains inspired in the mind of H. T. Lambrick. He was the man who served in the 1940s as Deputy Commissioner Jacobabad and wrote the definitive biography of John Jacob, the founder of the town that carries his name to this day. It was in those days that Lambrick visited the Kohistan region on hunting trips with Nawab Ghaibi Khan, the chief of the Chandio tribe of Balochis who live in the districts of Larkana and Dadu along the eastern foothills of the Khirthar. And it was in those days that he fell in love with this harsh mountain country on the border of Sindh and Balochistan.
Indeed if it were not the stark beauty, it is the name of the mountains alone that thrills. Khir Thar: “Milk Cream” in Sindhi. Like the bony spine of the southern part of Pakistan, this range, with its highest peak cresting at 2171 metres, stretches almost from Karachi to north of Khuzdar where it blends into the slightly higher Central Brahui Mountains. For a range that is largely a waste of arid river valleys, dry scrub plains, treeless slopes and sparse population, the evocative title of Khirthar sounds a trifle far fetched. But that is exactly what it isn’t. In a long ago moment now lost in the mist of time, some hardy mountaineer travelling through this austere land would have thought of this title in antithetical frivolity. Or perhaps it was one whose generations before him had fought long and hard to survive in this grim land and who remembered well the stories told around the hearth - stories of the grinding struggle that was called life in these harsh, dry mountains. Or perhaps the name had been given by one who had hunted the wild sheep and goats that once ranged freely through this country. Whatever the case, the title surely must have come in a light hearted moment many, many years ago as an anti thesis to the severe, unforgiving reality of the Khirthar Mountains.
After ten years of the so called “dacoits’ rule” the district was once again peaceful and I could once again travel in the area without fear of abduction. The fact of the matter, however, is that there are men in the district administration whom I can call my friends. Between them Badaruddin Ujan in Larkana, Ajmal Kamboh in Shahdadkot and Wasim Chaudhri in Kambar, had everything sorted out for me even before I arrived. Without them this outing would have come to nothing like four previous attempts to get into the Khirthar from this side. Consequently, up in the mountain, it was on more than one occasion that I sent up a silent prayer for these wonderful men.
In Shahdadkot I was introduced to the pot bellied Wali Mohammed Manganhar, a lawyer turned journalist. He wanted to spend “a few days” planning such a “major expedition” as ours; I was desperate to get into the hills before someone came around to scare me off yet again. In the end my agitation prevailed and he did whatever preparations there were in a hurry. But a journey into the land of the Chandios (most “dacoits” carried this name!) could not be made without the blessing of Nawab Shabbir Chandio and his younger brother Ali Nawaz. Wasim took care of this and we were picked up from Shahdadkot by the Nawab’s secretary. At Kambar we changed to a beat up old jeep and set off for Rahu jo Aitho where Wali’s friend Raees Hasil Khan Chandio lives. The village was a collection of huts dwarfed by the stark, eroded lump of rock called Bikhor that is washed by the blue green waters of the Khenji Nai (river). In the west the first great ridge of the Khirthar Mountains looms darkly.
Arriving in the early afternoon we were told that Hasil Khan was away attending a saint’s festival and that we might have to wait three days for his return. He was, they said, the only man who new this part of the mountains well. Also because he was the Raees (headman) of a number of neighbouring villages, and well known among the population, we would be well advised to travel with him. I resigned to the enforced hold up and made the best of the chicken curry his household served up. After the meal Ali Akbar of our party prepared bhung for Wali who is given to its pleasures and must have his fix twice a day. It was only then I realised why Wali had been so insistent about bringing Akbar along. While Akbar ground the dry marijuana leaves to a paste, Wali sat by patiently, occasionally helping by adding a little water. With undisguised eagerness he raised the aluminium pan containing the sickly green liquid to his lips and took a long draught. Then he let out a series of loud burps, rubbed his bloated belly and smiled. The remainder was polished off by Ali Akbar who said he was now ready for the world. This was to be the standard procedure for the next five days that we spent together.
The question of how we were going to employ the next three days of inactivity (especially so because, not anticipating this situation, I had brought no reading material) was answered when Wali Mohammed in consultation with Hasil’s relatives drew up a roster of the sites we could visit. Consequently, that evening we walked along the Khenji to see Lalan ji Mari - the Mansion of Lalan. In the middle of a low tableland about half an hour west of Aitho rises a small hillock girt with extensive ruins of stone walls, cubicles and what look like large rooms. The top was clearly a spacious turret - the citadel. Bits of the corners of this turret still stand to this day - the remainder having long since crumbled to a heap. From the top it is evident that the surrounding tableland was once a large settlement that would have been sustained by agriculture on the banks of the Khenji.
None in our party knew of any finds from the ruins and I estimated them to be from five to seven hundred years old. Later, however, browsing through my copy of Sind Through the Centuries I learned that Lalan ji Mari was a Bronze Age settlement. So much for my prowess as an archeologist! Nearby, they said, was a small peak called Lalu jo Jabal - the Mountain of Lalu. This man was either a brother or husband of Lalan. But there were no stories either of their exploits or the time Lalu and Lalan lived.
In the morning I was introduced to Hasil Khan who had returned some time during the night from the festival at the shrine of Shah Godrio, twelve hours away by camel. His sinuous, wiry frame stood no more than a metre and sixty centimetres and had a face to match: hawkish, hollow cheeked and thickly bearded, off set by bright black eyes that burnt with incredible intensity. In fact, the sharp eyes lent him a fierce countenance. But this, I was to learn, was just a facade. Behind it was a quick smile and a hearty laugh coupled with a generous and warm nature and the ability to win friends. As the Raees of several villages, he was the Nawab’s deputy in the outback and had spent two very busy weeks. He was tired, he said, from a fortnight of hard travelling. Nonetheless, he would take us to the village of Sita ji Dath and put us in the charge of one of the Nawab’s trusted men.
In his late forties Hasil Khan could only speak Sindhi: he had had but two years of schooling. But he could fend for himself in Seraiki and Balochi and could easily understand my Punjabi interspersed with Sindhi words. Our relationship began rather coolly, but as we walked together he talked and the cool facade peeled off to reveal the real Hasil Khan Chandio. His favourite phrase was “Ji, Sir!” and every time he uttered it his eyes twinkled merrily as memories of a period that was not the best in his life came flooding back. This phrase he had picked up from the army during the anti dacoit operations of the late 1980s. Upright and law abiding Hasil Khan had no reason to flee into the hills when operations began, consequently it was on more occasions than he cares to remember that he played host to the army.
Mostly there were only questions about the whereabouts of dacoits who may have passed through his village. But there was also the time on a cold winter evening when they came asking for some Chandio outlaws and threatened to give him a dunking in the river that flows past the village. “You know how cold winters can be in our Kohistan and I was terrified I’d freeze to death. They took me to the water’s edge and questioned me. I said I had nothing to do with the bandits and prayed to the Lord like I had never prayed before.” He was, however, spared the dunking. Amid fits of laughter he waxed eloquent on his own discomfiture and I marvelled at this wonderful man possessed of the rare capacity to laugh at himself. Again it is a measure of his magnanimity that he remembers Colonel Bajwa who headed the anti dacoit operations as a good man. Repeated attempts to get him to revile the army could only draw the comment that “they were doing their job and some of us may not have liked the way they did it.”
The camel ride to Sita took three hours and a half. En route we stopped for tea at the waterhole of Phung. One hot and humid August afternoon in 1986 a group of bandits headed by the fearsome Manzoor Burro and Janu Arain too paused here for a bit. With them they had three men kidnapped for ransom from the road between Kambar and Shahdadkot, one of whom was a young athlete, Munir Sheikh by name. As the dacoits dozed off, Sheikh, confident of his own fitness, took it into his head to escape. But without any idea of the topography and the knowledge that the best thing in such a situation is to follow a watercourse, he struck off due south across the low, broken hills. He was never to be heard of again. Three months later when the other kidnapped men were released against ransom news of the lad’s escape bid reached his family. The father refused to believe that his son was dead and approached the dacoits who only confirmed what he had already heard. But the loss of a son is hard thing to reconcile with and the poor man sought the intercession of a Syed from a nearby town. This supposed holy man said he knew where Munir was being held and relieved the elder Sheikh of some money to be paid as ransom to the bandits. But at that point the son had been dead for four years; now the father was also poorer by ten thousand rupees.
At Sita ji Dath the bad news was that Misri Khan Chandio, the Nawab’s man, was not willing to go into the mountain with us. The Chandios and the Chhuttas have a ten year old feud over land and now, he said, there was a great Chhutta lashkar waiting in the mountain to fall upon any Chandio who may venture there. I gave up. I knew this wouldn’t work and we would have to forego the journey. So I simply went to sleep while my companions pleaded and argued. When I was roused an hour later our party’s discussions had come to an end, but another pair, a young man and a withered old bag, was now shouting away at each other. It turned out that they were discussing the forthcoming visit of the older man to the free eye camp at Shahdadkot. Everybody else, our party and a bunch of locals, sat around smoking speechlessly. With great finality Hasil Khan ordered me to prepare to depart. That was it, I thought, we were going back.
Instead we went to the otaq (guest room) of Allah Rakhio Gaincho on the far side of the village. Sensing my commitment to get up into the mountain Hasil Khan had decided that Misri could go to hell and that he himself was taking us up despite his lack of rest over the last fortnight. My heart went out to him for his concern. From the way I had snored through the argument, I could have been as interested in the mountain as the next man. This only showed that Hasil Khan was a truly gifted man to have determined that I really, really wanted to go up. Then, while Allah Rakhio prepared his best donkey and the gear was transferred from the camels, I promptly went right back to sleep. Yet Hasil Khan still did not falter in his commitment. The camels were sent back to Aitho, I was roused and we set out along the Sita Nai.
In the bleak, treeless Khirthar Mountains Sita Nai is like a gift from the gods. Its rocky bed is a succession of waterfalls and ponds of the purest shades of emerald and turquoise. At a place called Pir jo Kumbh (Pond of the Saint) Hasil Khan pointed out a group of petroglyphs. The drawing depicts a hunting scene with human forms stalking mountain goats and deer. The most striking of these figures is the drawing of a humped ox with huge horns rather in the tradition of those on Moen jo Daro seals and a swamp deer or barasingha with its elaborate set of antlers. Earlier my companions had been talking of the time in the recent past when the barasingha was fairly common in this area, I had thought they did not known what the animal looked like and were simply using the term as a generic term for any deer. This drawing showed that swamp deer did indeed live here from very remote times. The remarkable feature, however, was that the drawings were at least fifteen metres above the valley floor on a vertical wall as plain as a sheet of glass, and over thirty metres below the crest. Hasil Khan said that they were made at a time when the valley floor was “up there”. There were no far fetched stories of giants that once roamed this land; there was just this plain and simple statement.
This was wisdom as scientific as it was ancient; this was what he had been told by the elders. Without any idea of the geology of this area, I estimated it would have been no less than fifty thousand years ago when the valley floor was as high as that. Later in Lahore a geologist was to confirm that the rate of uplift in these mountains is one millimetre per annum on the average, meaning that the valley floor was at the level of the drawings some fifteen thousand years ago. To my untrained eye, however the petroglyphs seemed to be about five to eight thousand years old, meaning that those early artists would have used five to six metre high ladders in order to get up there to propitiate the god of the hunt. If archeologists had ever visited this site my companions did not know of it. Consequently, the age of fifteen thousand years that we get from the geology of this area seems a reasonable enough guess.
Night fell and we plodded on in the dark behind Hasil Khan to a small settlement. Amid barking dogs and sniffling children they laid out bedding for us and brought on the tea. The fish that Allah Rakhio had shot (in the crystal water of the Sita it is easy to shoot fish with a rifle) earlier was broiled and served. A discussion about what time we should set off took place and after it was agreed that we would leave before sunrise, we turned in for the night.
At some point I was roused by an ancient man who shoved a lota in my face and said I should wash up for breakfast. I looked at my watch: it was 2 AM! Rudely I told him to get lost, but he sat down next to me and was presently joined by another. True to form, a debate began. There they sat hawking and spitting, hawking and spitting and yakking away without regard to the early hour and the fact that their guests had barely been asleep for four hours. Through all this my four companions happily snored on. Eventually I roused Wali Mohammed and asked him to tell them to go away and come back at a more decent hour. It took him five minutes to convince them that whoever in our party had said we would leave at sehri didn’t know what he was talking about.
We did leave before daybreak though. Through a broken, dry ravine we went southward leaving the reassuring ponds of Sita Nai behind us. Soon we were climbing up the hill of Kukker to the first great wall of the Khirthar. After about an hour Hasil Khan pointed out a small dark blotch on the khaki hillside. It was a tree with a pond that marked the southernmost limit of Hasil’s property. We were to halt there for lunch.
As we were making our way up to it, the surcingle came undone and our baggage fell off. Since Hasil had loaded the animal in the morning, Allah Rakhio turned on him saying he should have seen that the strap was done before setting off. “Now look here, you,” Hasil said wagging a finger in mock indignation, “I am a Raees and not supposed to be getting under the donkey. You do the menial work.” Then in a burst of laughter he secured the baggage properly.
Shortly afterwards we sat under the denuded tree and ate our meager lunch; but at 1400 metres above the sea even its patchy shade was cool. By three in the afternoon we reached the deserted houses of Ungor. This was now the domain of the Chhuttas and we all joked about the lashkar that had so worried Misri Khan in Sita.
While we collected firewood, Ali Akbar went about his preparation of bhung. Soon the green liquid had been polished off and Akbar and Wali Mohammed began their happy chorus of burps. Conversation turned to the marijuana that grows wild all over Punjab and Ali Akbar said he had tried it once and had no wish to do so again. It was lethal, an instant knockout, and because it came from Punjab, he had given it a name which he thought was rather suitable: Martial Law - for all martial laws habitually came out of that province.
We lounged outside the lean-to waiting for Ali Akbar's concoction of lentils and yesterday's chapaties to be served up. Overhead, in the crimson sunset every ten minutes or so a jet liner drew its plume of vapour across the sky. Hasil Khan handed me his binoculars, “Tell me which ‘kingdom’ this airplane comes from,” he said. A little later he told me that this was a busy “road” for aircraft of many “kingdoms”. He did not know the word for it, but Hasil Khan knew that we were under an international air lane.
Leaving early we walked along a great gash in the mountainside to our left. On our right rose a rock wall cutting off the view to the west. Two hours later we reached a wide flat expanse of clayey land where the wheat stood six inches high. For the first time we had views into Balochistan to the right: below the sheer fall of a thousand metres was a dry river valley speckled with green squares of cultivation. Through the binoculars we could make out the dwarf palm thatch of the Chhuttas’ shelters. Beyond this valley was an endless panorama of range after barren, treeless range stretching in three directions to the horizon which itself was a formless band of gray. To our left was a humpback ridge of bleached limestone. We climbed it to look into the wheat fields of Daryaro - the Bearded One, a summer settlement of Chhuttas. In the first week of March there wasn’t a soul in sight.
The Chhuttas, whose lashkar we had been warned against, own this part of the mountain. Just before the spring rains they had “braved the freezing cold” to come up to prepare the land and plant the wheat, as indeed they do every year. Then they fled to the lowlands again. In May, having harvested their low country crop, they will return with their herds for the summer to Daryaro and other settlements nearby. “Cold”, I knew, was the bugaboo for my Sindhi friends. On an earlier attempt to reach this mountain in December some years ago, I was warned of a cold whose intensity I could not even imagine. I had argued that it could only be as cold as a 2000 metre high mountain at this latitude, but that had made no impression. Now Wali Mohammed and Hasil Khan were surprised how pleasant it had been during the previous night and I took my chance of extracting the promise of them travelling with me to another peak nearby during the next winter. But so far as the Chhuttas were concerned, we were nobody to decide when they should come up to their mountain.
At 2000 metres above the sea the place was the second highest point in the Khirthar Mountains - the highest being a peak of 2171 metres some 35 km to the south. The wind whipping up the sheer wall on our left was pleasant as we sat down to tea. There was just enough water to give us a choice between bhung or tea, and since there were more votes for tea Wali had to forego his dream of creating a record of sorts by having his electuary on the second highest peak of the Khirthar. Over tea conversation turned to the possibility of making Daryaro a summer resort. It was a damn good place everyone agreed. We even sited the hotels, restaurants and shopping areas and chose the plots that we would like to own. There was also talk of the prosperity it would bring to the people living on both sides of the mountain and the shine in their eyes said that if Allah Rakhio and Hasil could do it, they would order the hill station tomorrow. Silently I thought of the unavoidable trade off: the rape of this pristine wilderness. No longer will the Sita and the Khenji be able to flaunt their pure turquoise waters. During the trek I had seen but two empty cigarette packets; after the resort the place will be littered. But at some point we will have to pick between the one and the other; ideally the resort should follow education and enlightenment. Whatever the case, if the resort was ever to be, we knew the road could not come through the Sita gorge. It would probably have to take off from the Shahdadkot - Khuzdar road running about sixty kilometres to the north.
Porcupine droppings, never infrequent earlier, now liberally covered the ground. Every dwarf palm and acacia tree we passed had been dug around, and the roots eaten by these rodents. I was surprised then that the wheat had survived at all. Once leopards roamed these hills and kept the porcupine population in control. But the cats have been hunted out of existence and the hyena and wolf, whose pug marks Hasil had pointed out, cannot dispatch these prickly rodent with the same efficiency as the leopard and will generally leave them alone. Consequently they have multiplied to pestilential proportions.
The return journey was fast. Hasil sang the ballad of Tillu Khan, the Chandio general and the goose bumps rose on his bare arms. Sometime in the 1820s the Magsis petitioned the Chandios, their sworn enemies, for help against the powerful Rinds. The Chandios under Nawab Wali Mohammed (d 1844) agreed but only after reconciliatory efforts failed. In the clash, that took place near the town of Jhal Magsi, the Rinds were routed and their chief, Sher Mohammed, slain. The ballad recalls the heroism in that battle of Tillu and his thirteen hundred warriors. The short, crisp verses clearly made it a marching song and I could almost hear the drums. In two hours of marching to this tune we had passed our overnight camp. At midday we stopped at Hasil Khan’s pond for an early lunch of baked beans and tea.
Thunder boomed ominously as we were coming down the last slope of Kukker. Looking back I could see patchy gray clouds over the mountain and thought it would rain during the night. I had not yet put a full stop to this thought when the first drops came. Within no time at all it was coming down in blinding sheets. Drenched, cold and miserable we hurried down the mountain and just as we reached a clump of deserted houses it stopped as suddenly as it had started. Everyone, including the donkey, was shivering violently, and so we decided to spend the night there. That night our meager bedding, having been dried over a fire, smelled horribly acrid. Several times during our journey Wali Mohammed had mentioned an aged friend of his who maintained that unless there was some adversity, a journey was never worth remembering. Now, said Wali, our little excursion had gained that status.
The last part was easy along the Sita Nai. We stopped for a wash in one of the most beautiful emerald ponds. Allah Rakhio shot some more fish and hurried on ahead of us to prepare lunch. As we lounged outside Allah Rakhio’s otaq waiting for the food, a cry went up: “Koonj”. High above us to the east a great black W inched across the pale sky. There were no less than fifty birds in the flight. As we watched we heard a faint, faraway shot and the cranes veered and broke formation. Happily none was hit.
A little later Hasil Khan asked me if I had enjoyed the journey and we discussed how the stark beauty of the Khirthar differed from that of the mountains in the north. “I showed you the airplanes’ road, and now you have seen the cranes’ road as well. This is a great country, isn’t it?” I said it was. “If only people who matter would do something about it.” Hasil Khan said it with an intensity that can only be mustered by a man who truly cares for his country.
Politicians, Hasil Khan was convinced, had prevented the building of roads and the provision of health and educational facilities to his people. “We ride out with a sick person on a camel. Half way to town the sick one dies; we tie the corpse on the saddle, turn right around and come home lamenting. Sometime the corpse even begins to smell. The fat bellied politicians come begging for our votes but when they get to the Assembly they do not even remember we live here like animals.” This was the only bitterness Hasil Khan ever showed.
Epilogue: We had returned earlier than planned and since the jeep wasn’t coming until two days later we decided to get to the roadhead by camel. I wanted to leave early the next morning, but Wali was not willing to forego Hasil’s hospitality. Consequently we had to wait for the rooster to be cooked so we could eat “lunch” at eleven. Afterwards, on full stomachs, none of us looked forward to the six hour camel ride and we watched without interest as our baggage was secured on the animals.
Just when we were about ready to leave someone said the Nawab’s jeep was coming. Wali was thrilled at the chance of getting a ride back; I thought the man had come hunting partridges and couldn’t be bothered about us. Presently the young Nawabzada Ahmed Nawaz Chandio was drinking tea with us. I could not believe that he had come out to collect us. But how did he know we would arrive a day earlier? He smiled a mysterious smile and said it was not for nothing they said he was a bit like his ancestor, Hafiz Wali Mohammed alias Ghaibi Khan who is to this day revered as a saint and a maker of miracles. I don’t know about Ghaibi Khan the First, but so far as we were concerned Ahmed Nawaz certainly had done what they say lies within the province of saints.
We left Ghaibi Dero a little before sunset. As we drove into the gathering darkness I observed that we were in a land where, three years ago, no one dared to drive at this hour. “It’s not as safe as you think,” said the driver, “Why, only last week they kidnapped two men from the road between Ghaibi Dero and Kambar.” That was a conversation stopper if I have ever heard one. I wondered what Wasim would say to my wife if such an eventuality befell our little caravan. At length, having read my thoughts, the driver said, “Don’t worry, nothing will happen to you. You can carry on talking.” I must admit it was with considerable effort that I got back into a conversation with Ali Akbar and Wali Mohammed.
