A memory of growing up in Pakistan -
The house was not visible from the road. It was built into the side of a hill, and a steep path through its own private woodland led to its door. There were other grand residences in Murree from the days of the Raj but none like this trophy house, which had been custom built during the sixties for the German Consulate but later sold to Brooke Bond, a tea company in Karachi where my uncle worked. It was a charming place, built in the style of a Swiss chalet with low roofs, exposed beams and oak floors. The lounge room was an enormous area with a large stone fireplace and chestnut panelling along the walls. It had a northern aspect with three large windows that looked out across the valley of Kashmir. The brown curtains on the windows blended with the dark green carpet and the mauve sofas. There were four bedrooms along the outer rim of a L-shaped corridor. The largest was ensuite and had a small balcony with flower boxes. There was a communal bathroom and toilet for the remaining three. Towards the end of the corridor, a stairwell led down into the basement, but since the entire house was built into the side of a hill, the basement was not below ground but on a lower elevation. It lay underneath the lounge room and opened out to a small meadow of wild forget-me-nots, daisies and blue gentians.
I went there in the autumn of 1976 to stay with two of my uncles and their families. I was eight years old but the memory of that time is as clear in my mind as if it was yesterday. My father drove us there on the potted, rutted, rain-washed Murree Road from Islamabad, which skirted around the dry Margalla ridge. The air changed after Chorra Pani where we stopped for Coca Cola. It became noticeably cooler and clearer as if we were entering another medium. We could see into the hills where the scattered metal roofs of houses glinted on the wooded slopes. On the right side of the road, on a green hilly slope, we saw the ruins of the Lawrence sanatorium, where the orphans of English soldiers once used to live. Nothing remained of it except three crumbling walls and the arches of a roof, which had collapsed. Next we came to the S-shaped turn in the road at Bansragali, where a road forked out from the main path towards Lawrence College, one of the four public schools that the British built in India on the model of Eton and Harrow.
It was noon when we arrived at the residence. When the car engine was turned off, we could hear the sound of wind in the trees and the faint calling of mountain crows. The gatekeeper appeared wrapped in a grey woollen shawl. He had been sitting under the shadow of a tree and had arisen like a djinn when he saw us appear. He opened the small iron gate and carried the suitcases down to the house while I ran past him.
My uncle, my aunt and my three cousins from Karachi were already there, comfortably seated in the lounge room, sprawling and reclining on the various sofas and ottomans that lay scattered around the large room. My aunt had made a survey of the cupboards in the house and she was in ecstasies over her discoveries. The English crockery was a delight but it was a Meissen tea set in glazed white with purple flowers, each piece marked on the base with two swords, that took her breath away.
Murree is in the Himalayan foothills. The town lies on a four or five mile long ridge, about seven thousand feet above sea level. In the seventies, it still retained a quaint, colonial air. The main road was called the 'Mall' and many of the other roads had also kept their old English names, just as the shops were still called emporiums. There were only two restaurants there, Sam's and Lintott's, where we would have tea and cucumber sandwiches. The waiters were old soldiers from the disbanded British Indian Army, who wore their starched white uniforms with pride. Many of the buildings, such as the Cecil Hotel, were landmarks from before the Partition and lent the place the air of a forgotten world, a sort of Avalon, separated from the seething plains.
Time passed slowly in Murree. The effect took place after a few days of hectic activity. The fear of indolence, of losing time, of not seeing the sights, propelled us into an initial burst of outings. The first few days were eaten up by these distractions. The family was marshalled into picnics, long walks and excursions. We walked to Pindi Point the first day in preparation for the longer walk to Kashmir Point the next day. After these walks, we proceeded by motor car to further destinations like Ayubia and Nathiagali. Following this flurry of activity, the remainder of the holiday had little variation in the daily routine spent walking, reading books and playing board games. The walks would commence from the Post Office and end with a stroll along the Mall, where the women would browse in the various emporiums while the men inspected the two well-stocked bookstores. Some days, we lingered at the Mall, and other days our circumnavigation of the ridges took longer, but most days were generally the same. When the rains began, the light failed and we were confined in the house for days. With nothing else left to do, there was no remorse of time lost.
We were not a religious family. No one fasted or prayed with any regularity. One of my cousins was a hippie. In his faded denim bell-bottoms and horn-rimmed glasses, he looked like John Lennon. People on the Mall would stop and stare but we children were in awe of him because he was studying at Berkeley, which we all knew was one of the finest universities in the world. Hippiedom was his prerogative. The girls wore jeans and T-shirts and none of the women covered their hair. The men were partial to Johnny Walker Black Label and the women talked to each other in English, like the aristocratic Russians in Tolstoy's novels who speak French. We wouldn't have called ourselves westernised because that implied an apeing of manners rather than a refinement of taste, but my aunts did have a fondness for Louis XV sofas and Bohemian crystal.
I had five uncles on my father's side. They were descended from Indian nobility but their fortune had declined with time and there was little left of the old splendour. Stories of old Lucknow were rarely mentioned in our family, in particular to us children lest we too fall into the mischief of decadent pastimes. Only a few years ago did I discover that my great-grandfather nearly ruined himself by refusing to accept defeat in a kite-flying match for fourteen years. This involved taking up a new kite as soon the adversary brought down the previous one, whether it was day or night, sunshine or rain. The kites were waterproofed. Servants worked in shifts round the clock and guests were continually fed and entertained by singers and dancers, all at considerable expense. The British administrator eventually intervened to save him from complete ruin. Observing how the family was squandering its wealth, my grandfather left home in 1899 and enrolled himself at the Hewitt Engineering Institute in Lucknow. Our future belonged to technology and industry. The gilded drawing rooms of my aunts were the culmination of the same positivist enlightenment that guided my grandfather and his sons, who studied in technical colleges and were shaped by a progressive belief in science.
Zia's Islamisation soured things for us. My father, a British-educated engineer, found himself at odds with the times. When the fashion changed to shalwar kameez, he continued to wear his suits – an act of subversion perhaps, in which he was abetted by his brother in Karachi. His brother would have nothing to do with the prevailing dogma either, his only concession to religion being meditation in the Zen Buddhist tradition, which was his equivalent of prayers. And long after most of his acquaintances rediscovered the mosque, my father would stay at home, barricaded behind a copy of The Economist. It pained him that Pakistan was falling behind the rest of the world. We were going backwards, he would tell us. The mullahs and the military were taking over and it was time to leave.
I never returned to Brooke Bond House. I migrated to Australia many years ago and have lived here since, happily, but there are times when something in the breeze, or the sunlight falling through the leaves, tugs and snatches at my old memories and then, by some strange process of transmutation, the years fall away and I find myself transported back to my childhood. There I am, at Brooke Bond House. I am eight years old and I am standing outside watching my beam of torchlight dissolve into the dark night. I can hear voices from inside the house. The yellow light streams through the windows. The warm fireplace beckons. The August air has a wintry chill but the night sky commands me to observe it as if it can only become aware of itself through a child's eyes. And so, spellbound I stand there, gazing up at the Milky Way that looks the like a great, silent river of light. That memory still obliterates everything before it because it showed me perfection.
