Deep Field by Tom Bamforth Read Free Book Online Page B

hyper-cleanliness of Vienna supermarkets, my companion was deeply unimpressed and, as a vegetarian, was understandably incensed. She had by now come to the realisation that my claims to know ’pindi’s complex geography, made in the safety of the Islamabad’s diplomatic enclave, may not have been altogether accurate. To the amazement of the onlookers who had moments before been wishing us a happy wedding, an argument erupted with each of us claiming the other had been misled. And there, in my wedding attire covered in blood, sweat, flies and pollution, I realised that I had inadvertently found myself in the polar opposite of the sanitised cantonment world of Islamabad. While my date may have ended in disaster, my Pakistan journey had started exhilaratingly.

‘LET’S GO SOMEWHERE really proletarian for lunch today,’ said Imran, rubbing his hands with delight as he emerged from his office—a glorified compression chamber of ancient newspapers and harsh cigarette smoke sweetened with hashish. I smiled wanly as my early enthusiasm for these ‘proletarian lunches’ of dhal and chapattis, or sometimes just cigarettes and the occasional joint, had worn away under successive bouts of food poisoning. Grimacing and bracing myself for another nauseating round of inedible street food, I dutifully followed Imran out of the quiet and chilly comfort of the highly air-conditioned office and out onto the street. Even going out onto the street in the full heat of the summer (at least 45 degrees with high humidity) defied both the weather and the accepted conventions of the Pakistani middle class. These lunches, for all their gastrointestinal cost, had become vital in my political education in Pakistan.
    My daily work as a would-be analyst of Pakistani affairs involved reading the newspapers from cover to cover in the morning and going out to extended lunches with gossipy, well-connected friends from the office or the coterie of analysts and purveyors of political intrigue, who seemed to fill every corner of Islamabad. This was followed by more reading about Pakistan’s political complexities in the afternoon. In the evenings, over al fresco dinners at the Kabul Restaurant, we would hatch yet more exotic conspiracies before buying up pirated DVDs and heading back to the minute flat I shared with another apprentice analyst to watch, spellbound, as the great Bollywood screen sirens Aishwarya Rai and Madhuri Dixit wove their majestic way through historical melodramas set in the Muslim north of the subcontinent before Partition. It was, if nothing else, an extremely intense crash course in subcontinental politics, culture and history of the most intoxicating kind—an excitement only heightened by the fact that I was able to spend a reasonable amount of time out by myself travelling in Peshawar, Karachi and Lahore, where I had the opportunity to meet and interview many of the main protagonists from the political, military, diplomatic and NGO worlds.
    Being effectively a local institution, rather than the embodiment of a big international NGO, we had much greater freedom. There was no security and no restrictions, and I was free to do more or less as I pleased. The other huge advantage was that, in an expatriate world in which there is often a tendency towards self-aggrandisement and complaint about local people and conditions, I worked in an organisation staffed and run by some of brightest Pakistanis of their generation. These were people who had studied and taught at the world’s leading universities, each of them fluent in half a dozen European and Asian languages, and who casually reminisced about addressing congresses and parliaments and dining with presidents and foreign ministers. They did so on the basis of extensive field work in extremely demanding conditions so as to advocate the cause of peace. Theirs was a deep sophistication and when, later on, I was lucky enough to work with what I now realise was one of the finest