Deep Field by Tom Bamforth Read Free Book Online

designs against any one. We stand by the United Nations Charter and will gladly make our full contribution to the peace and prosperity of the world.
    The city of Islamabad was the incarnation of Jinnah’s view—a lawyers’ creation given form by a military love of order and right angles, thus giving urban expression to two of the dominant forces of Pakistan’s post-independence history: the army and the judiciary. Its order and tranquillity did not breathe the excitement of the midnight hour but reflected ‘an opportunity to demonstrate to the world how can a nation, containing many elements, live in peace and amity and work for the betterment of all its citizens, irrespective of caste or creed’, as Jinnah described the mission of his new nation. Islamabad did just this.
    I woke to wide empty boulevards and leafy suburbs. Vast houses lined the road next to the Margalla Hills, the foothills of the Himalayas, and a neatly trimmed cricket pitch with a gabled pavilion glinted in the early morning sun. The city, as I discovered, was one vast urban grid of order and logic, trees and gardens, and neat designated shopping zones whose air-conditioned shops sold rich fabrics, books, and knocked-off designer goods. Advertising hoardings promoted Coke and mobile phone companies offering to ‘connect the gentry’. I wandered round, slightly bewildered by this almost-empty Islamic Canberra, whose suburbs had been given alphanumeric sequences of sectors and subsectors instead of names. The main shopping centre was in F10, while my hotel languished in the obscurity of E7/2. The vast government boulevard named after the former Chinese premier Zhou Enlai was a modern concrete rendition of Lutyens’s Delhi. Ever grander buildings culminated in what was known as Benazir’s house, or the Pink Palace—a colossal pseudo-Mughal building in soft pink marble and sandstone built to accommodate the political aspirations and realisations of the Bhutto family. Where in Britain and Australia the mark of the arriviste financier was mock-Tudor, in Pakistan it was mock-Mughal; not quaint homeliness but the mausolean splendour of the Taj Mahal.
    After a morning walking around and talking to nobody, I returned to my hotel room, with its exceptionally loud and ineffective air conditioner, the soothingly bland predictability of BBC World and pictures of eighteenth-century English rural scenes—pheasants taking flight, a man (with top hat and tails) and a woman (in a lacy dress) admiring a swan. There I pondered my findings. Thinking I would use this momentary reprieve to try to learn some Urdu, I had a look at a teach-yourself language book but was slightly put off by such chapter headings as ‘I do not have a reservation’ and ‘Where’s my wife?’.
    With all its separateness and control, Islamabad did not so much present an example of modernity and progress to the rest of the world as repeat the follies of the old. In all cities in the subcontinent there exists the ‘old city’, with its swirling streets and vibrant centres whose lanes are filled with lives and livelihoods exhibited to the world from small shopfronts and market stalls that—to the outsider—wind their way in a mesmerising knot of chaos and commerce. Beyond this, the colonial rulers established the cantonment or the civil lines catering to an altogether new imperial reality. Where the great Mughal mosques, palaces and centres of government were located at the heart of undivided India’s great cities, the British rule introduced a separation, especially after the mass uprising against British rule in 1857, variously known as the sepoy rebellion, the Indian Mutiny or the First War of Independence. Virtually all towns and cities in India and Pakistan thus have civil lines or a cantonment once reserved for the British army and bureaucracy but now occupied by the Pakistani middle class and retired military officers, whose rents were becoming increasingly exorbitant. During an