Keywords

In Ancient Times

The land known as Pakistan today is traversed by the Indus River, one of the longest rivers in the world, which flows down from the foothills of the Himalayas, Karakorums, and Hindu Kush (Lodrick and Ahmad, 2021) across the Punjab plains where it is joined by the five tributaries as it moves down further south to the delta leading into the Arabian Sea. The country borders Iran and Afghanistan to the West, China in the northeast, India to the East, including the disputed northern region Kashmir, divided between India and Pakistan by the contentious Line of Control. This is crossed by the fabled Silk Road and opens out into the legendary Bolan Pass, Khyber Pass, which, together with the river Indus, has given travelers and tribes, traders and invaders, and writers and explorers access to South Asia through the centuries and led to a rich historical heritage and a cultural commingling (M. Shamsie 2017, 1–4) that emerges in the many literatures of Pakistan – including English, Urdu, Sindhi, Pashto, Punjabi, Seraiki, Balochi, and Brahvi, among others.

The earliest Neolithic site in the subcontinent is believed to be the agricultural village of Mehrgarh (7000–2600 BC) in today’s Balochistan, described as “the cradle of the Indus Valley Civilization,” which predates the ancient Indus Valley Civilization (Baloch 2019, https://thediplomat.com/2019/01/pakistans-crumbling-cultural-heritage/), which flourished along the banks of the river and beyond during the second and third millenium BCE, including the cities Mohenjo-daro and Harappa in what are today the provinces of Sindh and Punjab. Mohenjodaro, excavated by Sir John Marshall (1876–1958) in 1922 is considered the earliest planned city in the subcontinent and profoundly influenced its urban development (UNESCO https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/138/). Long before this, the Sumerians referred to a city named Meluhha as a trading partner which some have linked to an Indus Valley Civilization, possibly Mohenjodaro. The Pakistani novelist Maha Khan Phillips draws on this in her thriller The Curse of Mohenjodaro (2016), which links the ancient past and with contemporary Pakistan and the diaspora. In Khan Phillip’s novel “history, space and materiality collectively establish the malleable contours of Meluhha” (Mansoor 2018), but Khan Phillips’ imaginative portrayal of the city in the fourth millennium BCE used fiction to great advantage, suggesting how conflicts in a stratified city and society led to the city’s new name – Mohenjodaro – the Mound of the Dead.

Osama Siddique’s novel Snuffing out the Moon (2017) built up of tales set in six different civilizations, each on the verge of change, across four millennia. He begins with Mohenjodaro: “There was this city. A city of bricks. Of bricks kiln-fired and sun-baked” (1). He writes of the acropolis with “its courtyards, pools and pavilions.” His description of the metropolis below with its “long, narrow and tapering streets” and the two-storied houses “which opened into inner courtyards – airy, filled with water plants, smoking stoves, birdsong and cheerful bustle” (4) echoes traditional subcontinental cities and homes, across the centuries, still evident in the older, surviving sections of historic South Asian cities, ranging from Lahore and Peshawar to Delhi and Dhaka and similarly echoes patterns of human behavior. In his poem Taufiq Rafat (1927–1998) writes: “Thinking of Mohenjodaro/Alexandria and Rome/I note how time curves/Back upon itself/Like an acrobat” (Rafat 1985. 63).

The archaeological remains of Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro are UNESCO World Heritage sites, as are those of Taxila which is located along the Indus, further north. Taxila, near today’s Rawalpindi and Islamabad, was the meeting point of many trade routes and cultures from Neolithic times until its destruction by the Huns in the fifth century BCE. The archeological remains of the city reflect on the influences of urban development in the subcontinent of Persia, Greece, and Central Asia (UNESCO https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/139/).

Taxila is the Greek name of the city, which was originally known as Takshashila and believed to be named after its founder Taksha, son of the Hindu deity Bharata and brother of Lord Rama; it is here that the great Indian epic The Mahabharata was first recited (Puri 2020). By the time Alexander occupied the city in the fourth century BCE, it belonged to the Buddhist kingdom of Gandhara, once satrapy of the Persian (Achaemenid) empire. This city was also a center of Buddhist learning, one of the earliest universities in the world mentioned in the Buddhist Jatakas were written (Puri 2020). There also exists a tree, here, where Buddha is believed to have received enlightenment.

In the fourth century BCE, Taxila was occupied by Alexander; references to his legendary discourse with the Buddhist sage emerge in the poetry of Daud Kamal (1935–1987) and GF Riaz (1939–2020); while Shadab Zeest Hashmi’s creative memoir Comb (2020) refers to the “the two very different worlds that Alexander and Buddha represent.” (2020, 79).

Peshawar

In the Buddhist era, along the banks of the Indus upriver (which has changed course since) lay the capital of the Gandhara kingdom, known today as Peshawar and considered the oldest living city in South Asia dating back to at least 539 BCE (Associated Press of Pakistan 2010). The city stands in the verdant Vale of Peshawar which is traversed by the river Kabul. The city is linked to Kabul through the nearby Khyber Pass (“the gateway”) to the subcontinent for countless invaders; it is part of the fabled Silk Road connecting the subcontinent to China and Central Asia; it is also linked by an ancient road, best known today as The Grand Trunk Road, originally built by the Emperor Chandragupta Maurya in the fourth century BCE linking Afghanistan to Patna and later Bengal having being rebuilt and expanded by Sher Shah Suri, whose architectural innovations extend his reign.

In her 2014 novel A God in Every Stone, Kamila Shamsie says that Peshawar, the “City of Men, City of Flowers” drew “century after century– the Persians, the Greeks, the Mauryas, the Indo-Greeks, the Sassanids, the Kushhans; kings and generals and Buddhist monks and travelers” (K. Shamsie 2014 39–40) and was known by different names across the centuries: Caspatyrus. Paruparaesanna, Paropamisadae, Gandhara, Paraspur, Purhshapura, Posharpura, Po-lu-sha-pu-lo, Fo-lu-sha, Farhsabur, and Peshawar (39).

Among other Pakistani Anglophone writing, Athar Tahir’s poem “Jeipal” recreates Raja Jeipal of Lohowar (Lahore)‘s heroic stand and defeat near Peshawar by the Afghan, Mahmud Ghaznavi; Akbar Ahmed’s poems “Pukhtun Landscapes: A Mood” and “At the Khaiber Pass” recreate the historical and geographical significance of the region. More significantly, Ahmed has written extensively on this subject as well as Pashtun culture and the recent conflicts, extensively in his celebrated non-fiction (In her collection Kohl and Chalk 2013). Shadab Zeest Hashmi’ recreates the land, its heritage, and its people overtaken by America’s “the war on terror” in poems such as “Colouring the Border” and “Passing Through Peshawar” and also in her creative memoir Comb (2020) about her Peshawar childhood. The name of Peshawar means “the one that comes before, or the Frontier” (2020, 4) and is attributed to the Mughal Emperor Akbar.

His grandfather, the Emperor Babur, who conquered Peshawar two generations earlier, describes the city (and related battles) in his memoir Baburnama. The Pakistani civil servant and Anglophone poet Sahibzada Riaz Noor recreates history in his rich narrative poem Bibi Mubarika and Babur (2020), which tells of Babur’s marriage to Bibi Mubarika, the daughter of an Afghan chieftain to win over her people; it describes Babur’s march towards “the lush plains of Hashtnagar and Parashaswer” (Peshawar) (2020, 36) and of celebrations and ceremonies, following his conquest of the city, on the heights of the historic Bala Hisar citadel there. The poem leads up to Babur’s death in Agra and his son, the Emperor Humayun being driven out of India by the Afghan Sher Shah Suri who nevertheless agrees, in 1543, to extend due courtesies to Babur’s Afghan widow, Bibi Mubarika to bring Babur’s body from Agra for burial in Kabul via Peshawar and the Khyber Pass with “palanquins, bearers arranged/an elephants and camels ten” (116).

Peshawar, which was later a part of the Durrani and Sikh Empires, remains the major city in the region named the North-West Frontier by the British in 1901 – this strategic border area, which included the Khyber Pass, was part of the Sikh kingdom of the Punjab unitl the British took it over and created in 1893 the Durand Line dividing the Pashtun tribal areas between Afghanistan and British India, after the second Anglo-Afghan War (1878–80). The Frontier and its inhabitants are duly disparaged in Rudyard Kipling’s writing, including “The Ballad of East and West” (“Oh East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet”) and Kipling’s novel Kim, which revolves around “The Great Game,” the Anglo-Russian rivalry in Central Asia, Afghanistan, India, and Persia.

However, Kamila Shamsie’s novel A God in Every Stone (2014) recreates Peshawar during the British Raj from a very different perspective. The novel with its “sweep of great political events, geographical reach, stretching from 485 BCE to 1930, embracing myth, history and the Great War of 1914–1918” (Bhattacharji quoted in M. Shamsie 2017, 607) employs several narratives including those of the Peshawar-born Lance Naik Qayyum Gul, an erstwhile soldier in the British Indian army, and Vivien Rose Spencer, an Englishwoman and one of the few women archaeologists of her time. Qayyum had served in the fortieth Pathan regiment at the Battle of Ypres (1914) where he lost an eye. He returns to Peshawar in 1915. Vivien arrives on the same train. From the train window, she notices that “the railway tracks sliced Peshawar into two, separating The Walled City from the Cantonment” (74): these two distinct areas, one traditional, one British, respectively, embody the distinctions the British Raj maintained between the colonials and the colonized.

Through her characters, Shamsie contests the stereotyped British images perpetuated by Kipling among others of wild, unruly, and violent “Pathans” although these stereotypes are voiced by British officials and their wives, as a warning to Vivien, which the independent, strong-minded Vivien duly ignores.

Qayyum and his family live in the historic Walled City and regard themselves foremost as “Peshawari.” As such, their first language is Hindko, though they are also Pathans, belonging to the Yousufzai tribe and they speak Pashto, the language of the Pashtuns. Qayyum knows English too, as does Najeeb, his twelve-year-old brother: English, he is taught at school. Najeeb encounters Vivien by chance and, eager to improve his English, he becomes Vivien’s guide. Vivien moves into Dean’s Hotel at the Cantonment, which with its “wide roads, tree-lined avenues, church spires” is “almost like an English village”; but it also has number of “grand buildings” including the Museum “a red structure… with its four rooftop cupolas which simultaneously represent the India and the Crown” (75).

The Museum’s extensive collection of Gandhara statues of Buddha, which still exists today, includes those from the Great Stupa of Kanisha at Shahji-ki-dheri “the largest Buddhist stupa in the subcontinent” (Britannica, 2021) a few miles from Peshawar. Najeeb accompanies Vivien to Shahji-ki-Khetri, in a horse carriage, a Victoria from the Cantonment, through “an arched gateway of the Walled City” across a lively world of streets, peopled with shopkeepers, fruit sellers, water carriers, which includes the famous Street of the Storytellers (Qissa Khwani) where men sit on raised “open-fronted stores” and recite stories – narrative poems – to audiences gathered on “rope-beds beneath trees”; she learns, too, of The Street of Partridges, The Street of Dentists, The Street of Silver, among others and leaves the Walled City through the Kabuli Gate to enter “a rural world with cultivated fields” (81) once dominated by the Great Stupa seven hundred feet high, and now, but a mound in an abandoned excavation site.

Vivien tells Najeeb he belongs to a group described as the Pactyke, in the travel writings of Skylax of Caryanda, the Greek/Anatolian explorer. Skylax arrived through the mountains to Caspatyrus (Peshawar) and travelled down the Indus in 515 BCE; his writings influenced the famous The Histories by Herodotus c. 425 BCE. This ancient history and Vivien’s quest for the mythological circlet of Skylax is interwoven with references to different aspects of Peshawar and its history from the rock edicts of Asoka to various structures within the Walled City including the Muhabbat Khan Mosque and the Shalimar Gardens, both dating back to Mughal times, while the citadel there (now Bala Hisar) first mentioned by Chinese pilgrims in the seventh century BCE (Dani, 2007) has seen many occupants including Mughals, Afghans, and Sikhs. This collective history provides a foil to that of conflict across the ages, including World War I: ultimately Vivien leaves Peshawar unable to cope with her complicated emotions at the loss of loved ones in both Britain and Turkey – the latter, where she began her work in archaeology which led her to Skylax, is now an enemy country and German ally.

Through Qayuum’s lived experience of the Walled City, the novel recreates its timeless traditional living patterns. The mud and brick houses are several stories high but edge a street so narrow that it almost seems possible for people in windows on opposite sides to reach out to each other. In the small bedroom Qayuum and Najeeb share, they sleep on rope beds, use glass lanterns for light; a matting beyond the window forms a barrier around the roof; the roof itself is an open space to meet or chat (Shamsie, 2014, 104). Qayyum, now discharged from the army, adopts his father’s profession as a letter writer. He settles down under a canvas strung between two trees, with a small table and inkhorn and is dictated letters by customers. There he hears the cry of the muezzin from the Mohabat Khan Mosque (110). Sometimes in the afternoons, he passes the Street of the Courtesans, an alley where he hears the laughter of women; while the tales recounted in the wide thoroughfare the Street of the Story tellers – Laila Majnum, the Prince and the Fakir, Hazrat Ali – are all well known to him but now there is another, crowd-pulling narrative being recounted – that of the nineteenth-century Hadda Mullah’s fierce battles against the British during the Anglo-Afghan wars.

The novel gradually builds on the growing nationalist sentiment, but the second part of the novel focuses on the Indian demand for independence and the British Raj’s brutal response to a protest march held in Peshawar on 23 April 1930.

At this time, Najeeb, a graduate of the Islamia College, Peshawar, is an assistant at the Peshawar Museum. He had invited Vivien now at the University of London, to return to Peshawar to continue with excavations at Shahji-ki-Kehri, which she had abandoned in 1915. Meanwhile, Qayyum has become “Red Shirt,” a member of Khudai Khidmatgars, the freedom movement, led by the legendary Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan and committed to challenging British rule through non-cooperation, education, and enlightenment.

On 22/23 April 1930, in the Walled City Qayyum observes a peaceful Congress party protest march to the police station, demanding the release of fellow Party workers. Suddenly British armored cars come through the Kabuli gate (204). The situation spirals out of control as bullets fly and “The Street of the storytellers turned into a battleground” (205). More and more people arrive – supporters of the Congress, Khudai Khidmatgar and Khalifat parties, and hundreds of Peshawaris join the freedom fighters; others, both men and women, watch from balconies and rooftops or throw stones at the British. The novel also highlights the supportive role played by the women in Peshawar, whose restricted lives in purdah do not prevent them from holding nationalist opinions, or sheltering the wounded and providing food and water to the freedom fighters. “On the ground King’s forces – on foot, on horse, in armoured cars, all armed with rifles, bayonets, machine guns, occupy the space between Kabuli Gate and Dakhi Nalbandi. Beyond that, hundreds of Peshawaris planted their feet in the Street of the Storytellers and said, no, they would not retreat” (205). They are shot down in great numbers. To “hush” up this massacre, the British pack the dead bodies into lorries to be carried away to an unknown destination. In Peshawar, no one is told how and why the bodies have disappeared or what has happened to them: there are to be no funerals or funeral rites for them. Shocked, Vivien who happens to arrive in Peshawar on this very day discovers that Najeeb and Qayyum have miraculously escaped, but the inhabitants of the Cantonment have little interest (or sense of guilt) at the massacre perpetrated by British troops in the Walled City. The novel ends with a historical document, a note written by Olaf Caroe (later Sir) who gave the orders for the killing, explaining his actions and the cover up. To this day, the incident is little known. Instead, Caroe (1892–1981) is largely remembered for writings on Pashto culture and his translations of the legendary Pashtun poet Khushal Khan Khattak (1613–1694).

In 1947, Peshawar and the North-West Frontier Province (known colloquially as Sarhad and renamed Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in 2010) became a part of the newly independent Pakistan. In 1950, Peshawar University was established. The Pakistani Anglophone poet Daud Kamal (1937–1987) graduated from there and returned to teach at the English faculty for twenty-nine years. He was among the pioneers of a new contemporary Pakistani English poetry. His spare, multilayered poems draw on the experience of Peshawar to comment on history, diversity, and natural life. This includes poems such as “The Gift” revolving around Buddha’s discourse with Ananda his disciple; “An Ancient Indian Coin” referring to kings, priests, and class structures; “Reproductions” which comments on fake Mughal miniatures, Gandhara statues, and old coins. The many other poems juxtaposing past and present include “A Street Revisited” with its images of a narrow staircase, a white pigeon, a stone wall, beggars and children playing marbles, amid a flood of tourists, new cinema posters, and coca cola advertisements. The metaphorical title “In the Street of the Nightingales” has a clear echo with streets in the Walled City and draws on the symbolism of the nightingale in both Urdu and English poetry, to create the changing rhythms of a busy street at nightfall.

The Pakistani American poet, Shadab Zeest Hashmi grew up in Peshawar during the late 1970s and the 1980s. She regards the city as her hometown. Her creative memoir Comb (2020) which combines both poetry and prose and has strong links with her poetry volume Kohl and Chalk (2013), weaves in and out of time, to include glimpses of her present life in California but at the heart of it is the memory of her Peshawar childhood and the radical changes she witnessed in the city, following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979, and the religious extremism fostered by the military regime of General Zia-ul-Haq, who, in April that year had executed the former Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.

In the 1970s, prior to these events, Hashmi’s father, a businessman, and Hashmi’s mother, a television writer and producer, moved from Lahore to settle in Peshawar. The society in Peshawar was more traditional. Hashmi’s mother does not wear the chadar as is the norm for women in the city, but she learns Pashto and her many friends include Pashto women writers: she already knows English, Urdu, and Punjabi. Hashmi’s parents are also determined that she should have the same education opportunities as her brothers. All of them are sent to the only co-educational school in the city, the PAF (Pakistan Air Force) School at the Air Force base. Hashmi writes of the “beautifully kept campus …with mature vegetation and neat flowerbeds” (24). She observes “Pakistan in general and Peshawar in particular, is a laid-back society, sleepy at all times; I am fascinated by the disjunction of the Air Force culture its proper and properly robotic ways” (23). By the end of this decade, however, Zia ul Haq’s resolve to “Islamize” Pakistan by allying himself with right-wing religious extremists included the demand for “female modesty”: at the PAF school the girl’ uniform was changed from “grey skirts and white blouses with grey blazers” (23); first a shalwar was added, later the shirt was replaced by a grey kameez and dupatta. The boys’ uniform is unchanged: they continue to wear Western attire.

Meanwhile at the age of six, Hashmi becomes a child star: as the child-compere for “Geeto” a successful show for children on Pakistan Television, which is broadcast from Peshawar and runs for a year and half (15). Her two favorite places in the city are the libraries in the British Council building and in the Peshawar Club: both in the vicinity of “Peshawar’s military areas” (4). She frequently swims at the Club too and once saw a spectacular performance by Chinese acrobats there. The Peshawar Club, earlier the exclusive domain of the British, provides the location for her metaphorical poem “Gunga Din’s Revenge” which appeared in Kohl and Chalk (2013) and which tells of the ghost of Gunga Din, the water carrier (bhisti) so patronizingly created by Kipling, appearing at the Club and driving away the arrogant racist British tommies he serves, forever. Hashmi often engages with and challenges Kipling throughout her book and celebrates the cultural commingling that Peshawar embodies.

Hashmi builds in Peshawar’s flora and fauna, too, and the age-old courtesies are so intrinsic to Pashtun culture. She says: “The city smells of bus fumes and is heartbreakingly resplendent in springtime – there are richly fragrant apricots and melons. The elderly men and women are thought precious and receive a kind of reverence that sweetens the air” (6).

Hashmi often accompanied her Pashto-speaking mother to the traditional Walled City, though it is no longer walled off. She recalls the busy “Qissa Khwani Bazaar or the Market of the Storytellers which has teashops where traders, monks, poets, warriors, spies, scholars, pilgrims thieves and builders traveling along the Silk Road, have, for long, gathered to exchange stories” (3). Peshawar’s many historical sites, buildings, museums, and The Grand Trunk Road, are intrinsic to her narrative as are the Huns, Persians, Greeks, Hindus, Mughals, Afghans, Sikhs, and British. She writes “I feel certain that if I were to put my ear to the ground, I’ll hear the tread of Silk Road caravans” (49). She adds that her interest in the commingling of cultures, which would forge her work, dates back to her Peshawar childhood.

However, in the public sphere, there were other forces at play too. In 1979, Afghanistan had become the epicenter of conflict and geopolitics. She became aware “from the faces and voices of the refugees … that they belong to culture” similar to the NWFP. One of her earliest memories of witnessing “the cityscape change overnight” (45) was when she saw “Jamrud, the western end of The Grand Trunk Road” that once tranquil, oft-deserted historic highway “filled with crowds of people, mostly very tall turbaned men, but also by burka-clad women with small children” (45). Aged seven, she is horrified at the sight of children with missing limbs blown up by landmines.

Pakistan joins the US in the war against the Soviets. “Afghan families flood across the border” (46). The very refugee camp where photographer Steve McCurry took his “iconic photograph” appearing in The National Geographic as “The Afghan Girl” is only a few miles from Hashmi’s home. Hashmi only discovers this years later – the girl, Sharbat Gul, has been tracked down as an adult, and becomes famously the subject of new photographs by McCurry. Hashmi’s poem, “A Ghazal for the Girl in the Photo” which first appeared in Hashmi’s book Ghazal Cosmopolitan (2017) juxtaposes war, suffering, endurance, and defiance. In Comb, Hashmi’s narratives constantly move between past and present, to incorporate her present life in California and her memories of Peshawar, which she leaves at 16 to go on to college in Lahore and later America. She returns to the city for her marriage and then for brief trips with her American-born children. In and Chalk, she includes several poems contemplating those conflicts, while “Passing Through Peshawar” she looks at the familiar places that once knew so well, from the distance of time.

On December 16, 2014, Hashmi finds her entire sense of self and her being pulled back into Peshawar eight-thousand miles away from her home in California. There has been a massacre by Taliban militants at the Army Public School in Peshawar, “one of the world’s deadliest to date” (105) in which 149 children were killed and countless wounded. The photographs of the children, the anguished parents and teachers, the horrific descriptions of the event leave Hashmi traumatized – as indeed it did the entire nation. Hashmi finds herself in a grief-stricken daze for months. The sheer horror of it has a personal aspect too. She writes “The scenes of the new tragedy bring back the corridors of my own school, the inflections and indeed footfalls of every teacher. I remember our uniform shoes, gray school blazers.” (106).

The massacre at the Peshawar Public school is the subject of Athar Tahir’s powerful poem “Attack” which ends with the angry lines “Words cannot hold this weight but with what ease/Politicians sit and talk committees” (2015, 81) while Ejaz’s Rahim’s collection, Carnage in December (2015) takes its title from one of several poems in a sequence revolving around this tragedy and filled with grief, sorrow, and heartache. However, the violence that had taken over Pakistan also emerges in Rahim’s 2010 collection Safwat Ghayur and Other Poems, where the first section is an elegy to Safwat Ghayur, the Commandant of the Frontier Constabulary: he belonged to an eminent Peshawar family and was assassinated in the city by a suicide bomber, having conducted several operations against the Taliban. Two years earlier, in 2008, it was at the Peshawar Press Club that the future Nobel-prize winner, Malala Yousufzai, aged 11, accompanied her father, from Swat where they lived and gave her first speech “How Dare the Taliban Take Away My Right to Education?” Swat was occupied by the Taliban in 2007 until its defeat by the army in 2010.

The rise of the Taliban and its links to Pakistan and its engagement with Afghanistan has a complex history. Since colonial times, successive Afghan governments refused to accept the 1893 Durand Line and claimed the NWFP. This, together with Pakistan’s unending post-1947 hostilities with India, resulted in Pakistan cultivating “favoured factions” among the US-backed, anti-Soviet mujahidin; it also fostered the Taliban, the Afghan orphans in the refugee camps, in the belief that the Taliban “would recognize the Durand Line … [and] would curb Pashtun nationalism in the NWFP and provide an outlet for Pakistan’s Islamic radicals, thus forestalling an Islamic movement at home” (Rashid 2000 187). Instead, the Taliban followed its own agenda, supported and armed religious extremists, and created more conflict.

Nadeem Aslam’s novel, The Wasted Vigil (2008) which looks at an Afghanistan ravaged by 30 years of war, provides a biting criticism of the Soviet and American engagement as well as Pakistan’s involvement with radicalized groups. Here, the NWFP and Peshawar become a “contiguous periphery” (M. Shamsie 2009, 23) to Afghanistan and Peshawar “spills over with factions, mullahs, warlords and spies” (23). The novel is set in an Afghan villa, where people of many different nationalities converge. These visitors include Casa, an Afghan, an orphan, and a religious extremist, raised in the madrassahs of Pakistan. His familiarity with Peshawar is evident by the fact that in the Street of the Storytellers he is able to buy books which inculcate religious extremism and are banned by the government. The villa is located near the fictitious Afghan town of Usha (which means teardrop). The villas’ other visitors, and guests, include Lara a Russian woman searching for her missing military brother, Dunia, an Afghan woman teacher from Usha, David Town and James Palatine, both Americans, the former disillusioned by American policies, the latter a firm advocate.

The villa is owned by two doctors, Marcus an Englishman and Qatrina his Afghan wife. But Qatrina has been executed by the Taliban. Their daughter Zameen is dead. Marcus still hopes to find and be reunited with Zameen’s missing son, Bihzad. Through its characters, this poetic novel engages with and challenges the divisive East vs. West rhetoric of Kipling – it comments on the history of nations, the commingling of cultures across centuries and tales of war, suffering, survival, and courage. It also celebrates the enduring legacy of literature, creativity, and art. At one point, Marcus draws parallels between a painting of Virgil’s Aeniad in which Aeneas flees the “burning destruction of Troy” leaving behind “the great broken heart of the city” with the fate of Peshawar, the city where Bihzad grew up (95).

In The Wasted Vigil, the city of Peshawar is reconstructed largely through memories of David Town. There he met Zameen, He fell in love with her and came to regard the four-year-old Bihzad as his own, though at first David was not quite sure if she is spy, David had heard it said that “no other war in human history was fought with the help of so many spies” (127). Following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, spies from the world over congregated in Peshawar: the “jihad against the Soviets” was launched from there. Peshawar, once “the second home of Buddhism,” “the City of Flowers/the City of Grain” (127), turned into a city of suspicion, distrust, and frenzy, with weapons everywhere and the sound of ambulances.

David was twenty-seven at the time. He was a bitter opponent of the Communists and a trained CIA agent, disguised as a gem-trader. He first worked and lived in The Jeweler’s Bazaar, but a grizzly incident in the neighborhood, created by Fedalla, a Pakistani intelligence officer who tries to spy on him, forces David to rapidly pack up and move to the busy, noisy, Street of the Storytellers nearby. There, he finds an apartment in a three-storey building with dark wooden stairs. It is there, on the stairwell that he first encounters Zameen. She lives in a small flat right above his. Later, he strikes up a conversation with her, by the cassette vendor, in the lively street below. He learns she is a refugee. In time, he also discovers that an Aid agency has provided her with the small flat. Where every day, she supervises a group of refugee women who do embroidery there.

Zameen’s presence in Peshawar, and the fact that her parents in Afghanistan had no idea of her whereabouts after her arrest there by the Russians, unfolds gradually as does their discovery of her tragic fate and makes a telling comment on the reverberations of war and conflict beyond the battlefield. At home, near the family villa, during a secret tryst with the young man, the teenage Zameen loves, the couple witnesses a murder, The perpetrator, an influential cleric, falsely implicated them in anti-Communist activities. They are both arrested by the Soviet authorities. During her imprisonment, Zameen is raped and becomes pregnant. Her harrowing escape from prison, the birth of her child and her flight to Pakistan, takes her to a Peshawar refugee camp, only to discover the place is governed by corrupt warlords – financed by their American allies. Since Zameen does not have the money to pay the necessary bribe to obtain an identity card to ensure free health care for her frail, almost dying, new-born, she has no choice but to allow herself to be sexually exploited by “clients” for three months. She is threatened further when her old enemy the cleric and murderer, turns up at the camp, an ally of religious extremists and starts to impose harsh penalties in the name of faith and challenges the legitimacy of Bihzad – but fortuitously she discovers a job opening at the Aid agency and moves out of the camp into the Street of the Storytellers.

Through David and Zameen, the novel conjures up different aspects of the city. David’s CIA work, which includes translating dialects that take him to yet another refugee camp, later to be bombed by the Soviets. David is aware that such air attacks, violating the Pakistan airspace, are not unusual since “the refugee camps of Peshawar were the hub of the anti-Soviet guerillas, where commanders and warriors came to regroup and recuperate after fighting the Soviet army in Afghanistan” (144). Having received advance information about this particular attack and unable to stop it, David sits under a tree to chat with his friend Christopher Palatine at “a saint’s shrine, not far from the Street of the Storytellers, the holy man’s grave covered with a lively skin of tiles,” the surrounding courtyard crowded with people, mostly women. David, Zameen, and Bihzad also visit Dean’s Hotel, one day, where “the fountain played in tiers like jelly mould” but there he begins to suspect, once again, that she is a spy. He thinks, she has secretly met up with the young man she had loved in Usha and who she thought had been shot subsequently by the Soviets. David had never told her that he had encountered him earlier in the now-bombed refugee camp; the paradox is that this intelligent young man, who has escaped from the Soviets in Usha, is a Communist.

The rivalry between two ferocious CIA-backed warlords, Nabi Khan and Ghulam Rasool in Afghanistan and Pakistan over the decades and changing times, is central to the plot. Nabi Khan and Ghulam Rasool forcibly take Marcus and Qatrina, respectively, into the battle to look after the wounded, but the enmity between the two warlords is such that Marcus has no idea where Qatrina is, but his work with Nabi Khan takes him to Peshawar. There he discovers Ghulam Rasool lives in a mansion in University town, with “his family and a band of fighters” (96). Nabi Khan and several other warlords and holy warriors live nearby “in that area wreathed by magnolia trees” all of them “made rich by the hundreds of millions of dollars pouring into the jihad” (96). Nabi Khan proceeds to carry out a raid on Ghulam Rasool’s house: he carries away several women and children “to be exploited or sold” (97). In Peshawar, there are frequent pitched battles between rival warlords in the streets “car bombs and assassinations,” missiles and rocket-propelled grenades, fired into buildings and crowds. Zameen’s fate and that of her son, Bihzad, are intrinsically woven into this tale – as is David’s betrayal by his American superior, ever-eager to reward allies and punish enemies.

The novel which takes its title from a panting by the Pakistani artist Abdur Rahman Chughtai (1894–1975) says much about war, its brutalization of men and its victimization of women, but its collage of tales and its themes also play on the word “vigil” associated with honor, knighthood, and faith, and its derivative “vigilante” embodying a self-righteous lawlessness, in the name of justice. Both words are intrinsic to the long history of Peshawar.