Stone walls keep the clinic pleasantly cool, but it’s impossible to keep out the roar of Peshawar’s mighty traffic. An unbroken succession of private buses, turning out of the junction with Hospital Street, hoot furiously at each other while their conductors shout for business, yelling their destinations, selling tickets on the move and, when full, slapping the sides of their vehicles with cacophonous panache.
I’ve spent a lifetime in dental treatment of one kind or another, so I’m quite interested to see how Mr Wahid works. I squeeze into his chair, taking care not to dislodge the ominously placed green plastic bucket beside it. As I settle back I find myself staring at a wall decorated with a pair of dentures and a copy of the Koran.
The side walls are hung with various examples of gnasher-related art work: a collage of glamorous lady film stars with big toothy grins, a framed set of photos of drills at work in diseased mouths (fortunately in black and white) and a faded chart depicting ‘The Four Steps Of Dental Decay’.
I avert my eyes, only to catch sight of an ancient rusty drill, standing to one side of the chair like a withered arm.
With fingers the size of small trees, Abdul Wahid stretches my mouth into a rictal grin and feels around inside, squeezing each tooth in a vice-like grip. He doesn’t seem impressed by my Disneyland of caps and bridges, and suggests I give up using toothpaste and use powder and my finger instead.
His charges are reasonable: 100-300 rupees (PS1-PS3) for an extraction, fillings from as little as 50p and a full set of acrylic dentures from PS15, though these look as though they may have been enjoyed by more than one previous owner.
If artistic self-expression has an outlet in Peshawar it seems to be in transport. Taxis, buses, auto-rickshaws and trucks are rampantly customized, bedecked with lurid colours, gleaming attachments, chrome strips, mirrors, glittering lights, prods, protuberances and general ornamentation that would have them instantly pulled over by the police in any Western city.
Zahoor takes me to a grimy yard on the outskirts of the city, where a half-dozen trucks are being beautified by teams of painters and mechanics, welders and artists, working side by side in Ruskinian harmony. They’re assisted by a number of young boys, helping out fathers, uncles and cousins, and learning how to strip down gear-boxes long before their voices break.
Decoration is ubiquitous and uninhibited. No inch of the vehicle, apart from the windscreen and the tyres, remains unadorned. Everywhere else is covered in whatever the owner and artist agree on, from abstract shapes to animals, birds, flowers, vignettes of mountain scenery, roadside views, Koranic verses, names and Roman numerals.
A fringe of painted chains hangs down from the bumpers like beads on a flapper’s dress. Multicoloured hubcaps protrude from the wheels, a combination of Damien Hirst and Boadicea.
We’re offered tea in grubby enamel cups as one of the master painters begins work on the tailgate of a truck. A green base has already been applied (green being the colour of Islam) and he is now, with extraordinary speed and confidence, sketching the outline of a partridge, a bird held in high regard by the Pathans, who believe it has many powers including the exorcism of devils.
Less than an hour later the partridge is six feet high and standing proudly on top of a pile of stones in a romantic alpine landscape of lakes, snow-capped mountains, and houses set on tree-lined river banks, above which a name has been delicately picked out in Pashto. ‘The Flower of Durband’, a reference to the owner’s home village.
The head and his team of seven take a week to decorate a truck from start to finish, for which they charge 15,000 rupees (PS150).
By the time we get back to the hotel, exhausted but exhilarated by the intensity of life here, I’m ready for a beer at the Gulbar, about the only place in Peshawar where alcohol can legally be sold, to non-Muslims only of course. But the doors are firmly closed, bound together with adhesive tape. A sticker announces that the bar has been ‘sealed off’ until further notice, by order of the local authorities.
I learn later that this has nothing to do with hygiene or any trading malpractice. It’s to do with moves by the MMA, the conservative Islamist majority in the local assembly, to introduce Sharia law on the North-West Frontier.
The Sharia law would not only ban alcohol for foreigners (hardly a nightmare) but close cinemas, ban non-religious music, forbid male doctors to examine women, forbid male tailors to make garments for women, and make failure to pray punishable by law.
Eat at the hotel’s Chinese restaurant and, with only tea to linger over, am back in my room by nine. A small sticker is attached to the desktop in my bedroom. On it is an arrow indicating the direction of Mecca, and a card, which reads ‘For Prayer Mat Dial 47’.
Day Three : South to Darra Adam Khel
Islam has been dominant in this part of the world since ad 711, when Muhammad Bin Qasim of Damascus conquered the Indus valley, which had been Buddhist for hundreds of years. Islam was once at the forefront of cultural and political progress but now, it seems, up here on the North-West Frontier, it’s being taken in the opposite direction.
Certainly the belligerence of the Iraq war and the incompetence of the peace has given the Islamists great new material as they pursue their goal of oppressive obedience.
The world is, fortunately, never clear and simple, and as we ride south to Darra Adam Khel, a town devoted almost entirely to the production of guns, I find myself confused by Zahoor’s defence of such a place. Weapons, he says, have always been important to the proud, unconquered people who live on the North-West Frontier.
‘For them,’ he explains, ‘a gun is a social necessity. Pathans carry guns the way Londoners carry umbrellas.’
What’s more, he claims that the existence of and respect for the gun has reduced crime and kept order.
‘Charlton Heston would be proud of them,’ I suggest.
Zahoor nods seriously.
‘He was in Peshawar.’
Why should I not be surprised that Charlton Heston was in Peshawar? The common ground is, of course, the West. The Wild West and the North-West Frontier have so much in common: proud, patriarchal societies with a marked dislike of outside interference, and strict moral codes of their own.
One of the twin pillars of Pathan tribal society is the concept of melmastia - hospitality. Unfortunately, the other is badal - revenge - which can be swift and violent and provoked by as little as a glance at someone else’s wife.
A few miles due south of Peshawar, we’re halted at a barrier marking the transition between what are called the Settled Areas and the Tribal Areas. Beyond this our Peshawar police escort has no jurisdiction, so they are replaced by thinner, less well-equipped Tribal police who seem delighted to see us. We pull out behind them onto a busy road full of toiling over-loaded trucks heading south in the direction of Karachi.
In the fields veiled women bend in rows, cutting sheaves of corn, and beside the road schoolboys are playing cricket in their uniform blue shalwar-kameez, the combination of long shirt over loose baggy trousers that is Pakistan’s national dress.
Darra High Street, described by Geoffrey Moorhouse as ‘the noisiest street in the world’, runs for almost a mile and is filled with the roar of horn-blaring, gear-changing trucks punctuated by the crackle of gun-fire.
You never quite know where the shots are coming from. As I cross the street a preoccupied figure in a white robe pops out of a shop behind me, raises an AK-47, blasts a few rounds into the air, shakes his head and disappears inside again to make adjustments.
Seeking relief from the din, I walk into a small arcade running at right angles off the main street. It is, to all intents and purposes, an arms mall, consisting of everything from workshops to carpeted rooms where you can select the weapon of your choice while taking tea with the management. In one establishment an earnest, bespectacled young man sits cross-legged, fashioning a trigger for a mini-Kalashnikov using pliers and a small hammer. Next door to him an older, bearded man scrutinizes a freshly made Mauser like a scholar bent over sacred texts.