Deep Field by Tom Bamforth Read Free Book Online Page A

early visit to find cheap accommodation in Islamabad, accompanied by a friend’s contact in the Islamabad real estate world, I even managed to pass out at precisely the moment when yet another venal landlord started his quotes—this time for a mini oven masquerading as a room.
    Islamabad, I realised, was the cantonment to the thriving city of Rawalpindi. Built as the model city of the new state it had, in fact, replicated a much older version of imperial rule equally marked by the social and administrative separateness of the new (military) ruling elites.
    A few weeks later, and after a few more visits to Rawalpindi, I sought to impress a young Austrian diplomat with my knowledge of the swirling chaos of Rawalpindi and to entice her away from ordered and highly fortified mini-Switzerland of Islamabad’s diplomatic enclave, I suggested a date in ’pindi with exaggerated promises of adventure and the ‘real Pakistan’. Leaving behind the world of red number plates, expat-only embassy clubs, and official cars marked with ceremonial swords strapped to their bonnets, we took a local bus in forty-five degree heat into the heart of Pakistan’s other capital and immediately got lost in the maze of ancient streets and covered bazaars. I had attempted to make an effort and had recently bought some local clothes—a lightly decorated linen shalwar kameez—and hoped to blend in, or at least not to stand out too badly. The sun was intense and my misguided resistance to sunscreen and hats had led my colleagues at the office to call me gulabi sahib (pink sir) rather than gora sahib (white sir), which Europeans were usually called, on account of my regular sunburn. Trying to impress with my sense of local style and to offset the disadvantages of pale skin, I donned my new finery and set foot tentatively into the crowded bus with my date. The response was electric—our fellow passengers erupted into applause, slapped me on the back, offered congratulations and, as the bus lurched down the street an itinerant imam offered to convert me to Islam on the spot. Slowly it dawned on me that I had bought not an ordinary shalwar kameez but a marriage suit and the other passengers had come to the conclusion that we were traveling to Rawalpindi to tie the knot!
    In ’pindi itself, the response on the street was equally cheerful and my attempt to blend in suddenly became a mock-nuptial procession with cheering, well wishes, invitations to tea and the imam in tow, determined not to let pass his opportunity to save souls. This was too much for the Austrian who was immediately ill-at-ease amid the crowds, stares, ribald humour, and momentary celebrity caused by my sartorial confusion. We briefly took refuge in an abandoned Hindu temple next a street vendor selling cool, freshly crushed pomegranate juice and contemplated our next move. Knowing that the covered Rajah Bazaar was nearby where there were likely to be more women and she would feel less exposed, I suggested that we plunge into the arrhythmic mesh of side streets and make for the bazaar. It was a fatal move. If we had been lost before, within moments we had become dreadfully entangled, not in the cool of the bazaar itself looking at exotic fabrics and making memorable tourist purchases, but in the depths of the Rawalpini meat-market. It was fascinatingly awful—street after narrow street was lined with carts and hole-in-the-wall butcheries choking with diesel fumes, flies, dust and the smell of meat turning progressively more rancid in the midday sun. The dirt paths were splattered and puddled with blood and off-cuts and around us were the convulsing bodies of newly slaughtered animals. Promising that I knew the way out, I led her around a corner only to come face-to-face with a dead end and another grim series of shops whose great meat-hooks prominently displayed their treasured wares: bulls testicles swinging sickeningly in the smog-filled afternoon breeze.
    Used to the