At 72 and carrying a significant but not fatal neurological condition – Charcot Marie Tooth Disease, CMT for short – and with the jobs market populated these days by unpaid staffers and and freelancers who cling on in the hope of a paycheque arriving one day as well as a tilt even further to the right socially and politically, it is time to move on.

Moving on has always been a part of the long term plan but until recently we had never done much about it beyond discuss Portugal, Spain and Cyprus in far from specific terms but all that changed in the last week when Rose got boots on the ground in Cyprus. I know Cyprus pretty well from several visits over many years and have cycled all over it. Both my brothers served in the forces there, several tours of duty, both speak well of the place. Trawling through the various expat groups there seemed to be a consistency of message – many more positives than negatives. And then the Missus fell in instant love with the place and events have moved fast.

Frenaros is a village to the east of the island close to the UN buffer zone (can’t say this bothers me at all). It is 6.45kms from the sea to the south, 9.2kms to the east. It is one of the so-called ‘red earth’ villages, fertile and famed for its potatoes and water melons. The area is well developed, good communications and transport, all the basics. As things look today we are going for a new-build development with solar power. Not cheap but a long-term investment and a legacy item for Amber and Neha.

So how is it all going to happen? Rose returns to UK next Wednesday and will send money to the developer to kick-start the work. She then sells the larger of our two UK houses and uses the capital to pay off much of the build costs, moving the family to the smaller house. Once the Cyprus place has a habitable room or two, enough for me to live in pro-tem, Rose will come out to Pakistan and sell the Bahawalpur house. This will pay off the Cyprus balance.

I will pack up what is going from the Bpur house and ship it off, and it is not going to be a great deal. I will be disposing of most of the fiction books, plus a chunk of redundant non-fiction, and apart from my mango-wood table (much loved and future place for me to build little planes and write while looking out at a Cypriot horizon) and my rocking chair that came from Kabul – not a lot. All the computers and hifi and the TV and the CDs will be coming, but apart from that little beyond favourite paintings. I have already started to think in terms of packing up, and it is going to be a bit of a de-junk to say the least. I will also take one of the bikes, which I do not ride in Pak but feel I would be OK in Cyprus. The rest of the contents of the Bpur house will go to Rose place in the village there to await future decisions. She has decided to hang on to the village property which given the market is probably the best thing to do.

Health. Rose and I carry significant health problems, in my case limiting mobility but not so badly that I am immobile. Balance is my big problem. Rose has complex problems including diabetes and a long-term problem with pain in her left shoulder, the legacy of years-ago whiplash. She also has a recently diagnosed problem that I will not detail here but which is going to need urgent attention. None of this needs to get in the way of moving to Cyprus, and we will go ahead notwithstanding. Neha will continue her schooling in UK and come to Cyprus for the hols.

Surprise has been expressed by some at my decision to leave, having assumed that I was here for the duration. But as I said it was never part of the plan to end my/our days here. I am increasingly uneasy with the lurch to the right the country is taking/has taken. I also find the constant sense of surveillance of myself increasingly irritating. I have to report any moves I make outside of the city. Jobwise it has really gone to worms big time, and I have probably lost a lot of money – essentially five months of payment that I am not expecting to appear any time soon. Or ever. There is a crisis that is across the media, all sectors, and thousands have lost jobs, had salary reductions of up to 40% or just soldier on having not been paid in the hope that they will be one day.

I find this dreadfully dispiriting, and it saps my will to continue to fire copy off into the void. It deadens my creativity – and I have recently revived a scifi novel that was long dormant which would flower better in Cyprus than Bahawalpur. Security is much less of a worry these days, and Pakistan is waaaay safer than it was five years ago. I do not feel any sense of personal threat, nothing like that at all…but I want to be able to walk out of an evening and have a beer in a little local bar, a bottle of wine on the table when I have my dinner and never ever have to listen to the call to prayer ever again.

So Cyprus it is. I have a mental deadline of ‘being gone’ a year from now. I will of course keep you all updated as to how it goes and if any of you feel like a wander over to Cyprus…well my door is open!

They had never seen anything like it in the village before. It sat at the edge of a field close to the canal and looked old and battered. Later in the morning it was said that the first to see it was a woman teacher on her way to work in the school over the canal bridge and on the edge of the desert. But as she was only a young woman her claim to first sighting was usurped by a shepherd who was known to be a liar but he was older than the teacher and a man so he saw it first. No matter who saw it first a lot of others saw it very soon after as the village woke up and went about its business.

It looked to some to be made of metal. Others thought it was pottery, or glass. There was a hazy sheen to the pink-grey surface that had pits and holes in it. It was a cube, about nine inches to a side. The edges and corners were rounded. The shepherd who saw it first or so he said had set up camp by the thing. He felt it might be his if he stayed there long enough and perhaps it was valuable. He could sell it maybe. In the bazaar on the main road.

People wondered where it had come from. Who it had originally belonged to and what was it? A decoration piece perhaps? Something that goras might have in their homes. One woman who had worked as a maid in a gora house said she had seen something like it that was a light. Some said yes they had seen lights like that, box-shaped, in TV dramas. They shook their heads. Most went away after not very long because there were goats to gather fodder for and fields to water. A few stayed because it was a bit different and there was nothing else to do except sit and watch the horizon and talk about weddings.

The numbadar came along midmorning. He had heard about the thing in the way that numbadars always do – there had been a queue at his door since eight o’clock made up of people wanting to tell him that they had found something that it was valuable they had found it first and these other men were lying. He was no fool, the numbadar. So he went and had a look for himself and spoke to the shepherd who said he had found it first along with all the others who had found it first. The numbadar asked if there were any others who had seen it first and heard that the teacher from the desert school may have seen it first on her way to work and she was usually the first one to pass this way in the morning. He called the teacher to the spot, sending a man to get her from the school.

She came. On a bicycle. The numbadar was not at all sure that he approved of grown up women riding bicycles but she came from a respectable family and was the most highly-educated woman for miles around. She spoke English, knew how to use a computer and had one in her family house where people sometimes went to ask her to send emails for them. He knew what email was because he had been on some trainings organized by a local NGO and he thought it was a good idea but a bit complicated.  Mobile phones were another matter though, and like everybody else he had one that he was inordinately proud of because it was a camera as well but he had not worked out how to take pictures and maybe he would ask the lady teacher as she seemed to know about these things.

The teacher said that she saw the thing because it was a bit shiny in the halflight before full dawn and she saw it easily by the road. She said she had stopped and laid her bicycle down being careful not to let the books fall out of her pannier-bag. Touching it felt very cold like putting your fingers on the icebox and them sticking to it because it froze your skin and you felt it as you pulled your finger away. The numbadar asked if anybody else had touched it. Heads shook. He bent and laid his right hand flat on the upper surface and pulled it away quickly with a little ‘ouch’. Yes he said, it is like a block of ice but it is not melting.

Had anybody tried picking it up, asked the numbadar. They hadn’t. The shepherd saw what was coming next and began winding himself up in protest at the removal of the valuable thing that he had found first and the numbadar would never cut him in on any deal he might make for the thing. He took his blanket from his shoulders and threw it over the thing.

Nothing happened for a few seconds after the shepherd put his blanket over the cube and then there was a faint shimmer of light and the cube was suddenly next to the blanket not underneath it. Some people ran away saying they were going to get the mullah or the police or both. The shepherd stayed, convinced that this thing had suddenly increased in value and that he was going nowhere, especially if it could do tricks. Those fellows who went around with monkeys and made them dance for money they made a good living or so he had heard. People might pay five rupees to see a jumping thing that moved when he put his blanket over it and he would not have to move from this spot as people would come from other villages to see the trick. So the shepherd did not run away.

The teacher and the numbadar stayed as well and he asked her what she thought it was. She had no idea, but then wondered if it might be some sort of meteorite, a shooting star. They all knew about these and being in the desert where there was no light at night they saw them often and knew that sometimes these stones did land on the earth and they had both seen pictures of them. But they were not like this said the numbadar they are more kind of rough and this is smooth. The teacher agreed. Well maybe it is something to do with the army said the numbadar, some secret thing and we will be in trouble if we do not report it. The shepherd did not like the way the conversation was going. He liked it less when the numbadar said that he was going to the police post at the chowk towards the town by the little canal to make a report and that the shepherd was to wait until he came back with the police.

It was more than a mile to the police post and the numbadar would be gone an hour or more. The thing sat beside the blanket which sat beside the shepherd. Three men sat on their haunches about thirty feet away and watched.  It was nearly noon and December. Desert cold. Thin sun. There was no more excitement to be had and the trickle of foot-traffic passed not remarking the thing, its minder, or the teacher other than to make an infinitesimal inclination of the chin to acknowledge her. The teacher thought she ought to be getting back to school and went to pick up her bicycle.

She walked towards it thinking how strange this was, out here on the edge of the Cholistan desert. What would she tell the children? Should she tell the children anyway? They came from semi-nomadic families and sometimes disappeared for weeks or months on end. They would tell embroidered tales by starlight entrancing those less lucky than themselves with stories of magic boxes and gora lamps. Perhaps she would not tell them after all. They rarely came village-side, hardly ever crossed the canal bridge but went back to their reed matting houses with no electricity and mothers with arms circled by white bangles from wrist to shoulder and golden be-jeweled nose-discs that spoke of wealth but not power.

As she bent and grasped the handlebars she looked back to the shepherd. He was looking at the place where the thing had been the last time he looked. His face was rigid. This was not the plan and things just did not run away unless they are extremely magical or possessed by a djinn or possibly when he had had a few too many glasses of the sharab brewed by his feckless cousin. But it was no longer next to his blanket. The teacher saw him reach out to the spot where it had been and then pull his hand back. As he did she happened to glance down and saw the thing next to her feet.

Fear triggered her bladder and urine ran down her leg. She shook slightly all over and felt more afraid than when the buffalo had attacked her. More afraid than when the man had showed himself to her but then she had laughed and pointed and thrown a stone very hard that hit his head. More afraid than she had felt in her whole life because it was not the sight of the thing that had made her wet herself it was the voice in her head saying her name.

 Afshan.

Afshan it said and it was not the voice you get that is really your own voice in dreams. This was not a voice she had heard before it was a voice from somewhere else and it was not Pakistan. Nor was it any other place she could think of and she was quite good at geography. She knew the voice came from the thing and that it wanted to speak to her but was not sure what to say even though it was a box cleverer than all the clever boxes there were on Earth.

The shepherd was looking at her. The three men looked at her. So did a crow. She had stopped shaking but was still afraid because she knew without being told that many of the things that she had believed to be true – were not. One of those things was that the race of men was not alone. There were other things and she was looking at one of them.

The thing had changed everything for everybody and Afshan knew this without being told. She knew things that she did not know she never knew and one of them was that the thing meant no harm to her; had been travelling a long time and was one of many. Many millions, she thought, and they had all come here to Earth. She knew all this in the seconds that it took for her to glance at her feet, see the thing, her bladder let go, to look across to the shepherd and the three men and the crow. Time was not what it used to be a few seconds ago and was never going to be the same in the minutes hours days and weeks ahead. Afshan knew that. Nobody had told her, though.

There were now two times. At least two. Maybe more but two she knew of. The time that was in the dust at her feet and the eyes of the shepherd and the buttocks of the men and the beak of the crow. That was the time that was the time. The other time was like the black-brown goor before it solidified thick and hard to stir. This time was more like the mud she made with the children from which they formed figures that lay out baking in the sun. Time that was dense and heavy and which she could handle, like a screwdriver or a pencil. Or a cooking pot.

There was a long time between what she was experiencing and the time experienced by the shepherd and the crow and the men. She could live out a whole life in the blink of an eye during which time they would wither and fade and die and join the dust at her feet. She knew this but nobody had told her. It was time to talk to the thing in thing time not shepherd crow men time and it could take a very long time to say the things she knew and wanted to talk about but was not sure how to say them because she had never used the words for things she never knew before.

It spoke to her in Seraiki but she knew it could speak in any language it wanted and that it had learned her language that morning when she passed it on her bicycle in the nearly-light.

Over three days of thing time and a couple of seconds of time time Afshan picked learned a lot. More than her brain could hold she thought and she wondered why it did not have a heart attack. There was no sunrise or sunset she did not need to eat or go to the bathroom or have a wash or change her clothes or talk to her sisters. She was neither hot nor cold nor was she afraid other than when she flicked into time time and wondered how she was going to explain all this to everybody else because she would have to do that it was not something she could keep to herself. Then she was afraid but it was a different sort of fear to the fear she had when she first saw the thing by her feet.

Thing did not have a name and it was not entirely a machine and it was made of stuff other than metals but it was not organic either. It was one of billions of identical things that moved through space like a cloud. Space was very big and things were very small. So even though there were a lot of them they were quite spread out. The cloud thing was part of was about twenty lightyears across and there were other clouds. Afshan was quite pleased that she knew what a lightyear was before thing awared her. Thing was a little unsure about its origins and Afshan wondered what sort of culture never knew who or what its parents were but then things were different, weren’t they? It was made not grown like she was. It was a put-together thing like a car or refrigerator.

The cloud the thing was one of billions within had a job. It was to look for systems that hade life within them. We are scouts, said thing. We come to look and find out. But who sent you asked Afshan? Thing took a while but really not very long because its long and Afshans long were very different. Home sends us said thing. What home where asked Afshan and got no answer. Are there any others here now she asked? Yes another of me is close to here about fifty miles away. So what happens now that you have found us what will happen next and is there going to be a war like there is in films and books. Afshan thought of ‘War of the Worlds’ that she had read when she was at secondary collge. No no war said thing. Trade. We are looking for trade. Buying and selling things? Yes sort of said thing. The scouts tell the cloud of traders and then they come. They are like you? A little but bigger.

The exchange went of for hours of thing time during which the shepherd blinked once the crow was immobile and listening so hard that Afshan wondered if it was talking as she was and the three men just looked at her.

She was aware that her head was filling up with stuff. It was not uncomfortable or even frightening just…strange. She learned that there were other stars with planets around them that had life not unlike that on Earth and that where there were human-type populations there was always conflict that eventually ended in the death of the human-type races. Earth was apparently close to the end of its life which was why the cloud of things had made a decision to move quickly and see if there was profit to be made. Afshan understood that. It made sense. If you were a trader-spacefarer culture it made sense. Thing showed her films in her head of other places. Some looked rather nice, others not. She wondered if she might go to some of the nicer ones. No said thing.

She was suddenly tired and wanted to rest. Thing agreed and she went into shimmer for a while but she did not know how long and when she came out of shimmer the crow was gone but the shepherd was still there and pointing at her and the three men were standing up.

I vaguely remember a 1974 TV series called ‘The Family’ which was probably the first iteration of reality TV in the UK. There was then a long break until the end of the century and the early outings of what seemed not much more than a bit of innocent-ish fun – Big Brother was interesting for the first couple of seasons – then I dropped out. At least of reality TV viewing, and have seen nothing of the ilk since 2003. I have never watched the Jeremy Kyle Show or Love Island, both of which are the subject of interest and debate in the UK today. Anybody that follows the Brit media could not have avoided the Kyle brouhaha over the last 10 days. So I got my Googling fingers working. Oh dear.

My televisual experience in Pakistan is limited. Mainly news channels and a bit of infotainment from time to time. Most TV I watch is downloaded films or TV serials (currently bingeing on cops) so mainstream TV as entertainment pretty much passes me by. I am not missing much by the looks of it. Saw a few Kyle clips and they were for the most part nauseating. People in obvious emotional and psychiatric difficulty paraded (all willingly I believe) for an audience that brayed at their pain and discomfort, egged on by all sides to greater excesses.

This is the most popular TV show that ITV broadcast and around a million watch it every week day. It has now been pulled and cancelled, and at least some of the back edition clips I saw have disappeared but not all. There is to be a formal enquiry led by the chair of the digital, media culture and sport committee Damian Collins. ITV executives will be called to parliament to account for themselves at public hearings. They are going to be asked about aftercare and mental health support given to those that participate, and will consider a tightening of the regulations governing how contestants are treated on air and whether these programmes place ‘unfair psychological pressure on participants and encourage more extreme behaviour.’

Digging around in the undergrowth was interesting. The bookers for the Kyle show were asking what types of medication the prospective participants were taking and then making selections based on the likely level of their vulnerability. If that is not unfair psychological pressure I don’t know what is, and it calls into question the moral boundaries, if any that are supposed to exist. In all of us. Did the bookers never consider that this might not be a good move for the dreadfully vulnerable, often visibly damaged, people they were hooking in front of the camera? They were not singletons; there were whole teams of these people who appear to have been a collective ethical desert.

There have been other deaths that are alleged to have links to people appearing on reality shows, not many but enough to raise concerns about just where does duty of care begin and end for the TV companies that make a lot of money from them. There is a sub-strate of people, far more numerous, who have experienced suicidal thoughts after their reality exposure. Some have gone on to attempt suicide, a few more than once. Some of this group have self-harmed which is relatively unusual in adults over 30. The numbers, subjective as they are at this point, suggest all is not well somewhere.

Grim as it was watching what was going on in front of the cameras more chilling by far were the frequent shots of audience reactions. I presume that there is a ‘pool’ of people who make up audiences for TV shows (somebody correct me if I am wrong on this) and a quick search also shows that the BBC has an online application for audience membership. The Kyle shows are recorded in Salford, these days a major hub for TV production companies. Densely populated as Salford is they are likely to get a reasonably representative cross-section of the public to clap and cheer at the appropriate moments. (On my single attendance at a TV recording with an audience placards were held up with instructions on them telling us what to do. We did.) I guess that something similar will be used today but it looked like the audiences needed little by way of reminding or encouragement and were more than happy to bay at the first whiff of emotional blood. They were having a whale of a time. They liked what they saw.

Reading reports of the reactions of some audience members of the Kyle show that has brought things to a shuddering halt, it is clear that not all of them were comfortable with what was playing out in front of them but they were a minority.

Public blood sports have been popular down the ages, this is nothing new. The Colosseum in Rome is reported to have been packed when it was time for the lions-and-Christians show though historical records suggest that the majority of early Christian martyrs died at the Circus Maximus rather than the Colosseum but no matter – as many as 65,000 Romans of all ranks and types could be accommodated.  Interestingly the shows put on at the Colosseum were staged by private individuals and never by the state. It was a commercial concern for much of its life.

The public sacrifice of humans faded down the years though in the UK burnings of witches and others, especially women, were popular spectator events. Between 1450 and 1750 in Europe there were between 35,000 to 100,000 executions, mostly of women, with the last being in the 18^th century. All were public.

Insulated as I am in Pakistan I have no feel for this at a grassroots level in the UK or anywhere else for that matter. The days of Big Brother viewed in hindsight seem almost innocent compared to the eviscerations of Kyle and his ilk. There is some faux-outrage by the likes of the Daily Mail but what is as clear as day is that there is an appetite for if not public murder then torture – so long as there is no actual blood spilled. And whatever happens when they get home well that is their business and none of my concern.

All of which suggests to me that there has been little change in the human condition for the last couple of millennia. Oh well…tootle-pip!

As the news broke on Wednesday 8^th May I was sceptical. There had been announcements that Aasia Bibi had left the country before, some of them from her lawyer who one might have thought had his finger on the pulse. But it was not so, and she and her husband were confined at an unknown location for months while the state worked out what it was going to do with a woman who had become an embarrassment, an inconvenience, and who just might spill any number of beans as to her treatment since she was fitted-up on a baseless blasphemy charge.

The street protests at her acquittal had abated and faded into the background, but she remained a potential locus for trouble, a lightning rod. Simply killing her was probably considered as an option at some point. There would be a bit of a fuss internationally but dead is dead and there would be no outpouring of public grief or anger outside of the Twitterverse. It might even get as far as questions in the UN but when has Pakistan ever worried about that? But instead there was a cunning plan hatched, and thus far on the midday of 9^th May, it was working.

‘I know’ said somebody we will never ever know ‘Lets bury her alive.’ ‘Lets not kill her, let’s instead have our cake and eat it. Get the army to play nice and shut up for the time being, then cobble something together with one of the friendlies – the Brits, the Canadians – and once the deal is done ship her out and job done.’

And thus it was. The Washington Post reported that she was put on a flight wearing a burqa, her otherwise unreliable lawyer said that she was safely in Canada, Theresa May the Brit PM seemed to confirm it as did the US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo…all within the space of a few hours. As for the Canadian PM he was tight-lipped about it all citing security and privacy but not denying it either and by the end of the day it did indeed look like Aasia Bibi was in Canada, there to make a new life.

By any standard this was a major news story, and it was duly picked up by the global media. The Pak media reported the bare bones of her release but there was almost no comment or analysis in the English language press, and the TV channels gave  it prominence for not much more than a couple of hours, again only repeating the basic facts. No questions were asked, no answers sought. There was no debate about why an innocent woman had spent 8 years on death row, much of it in solitary confinement and whose health was by the time the decision was made to let her go reportedly failing. The story was fading by Wednesday evening.

Come Thursday morning and Plan A was there for all to see. Not. None of the leading EL papers carried an editorial on what had happened and the Urdu papers simply ignored it completely. Overnight the Aasia Bibi story had become a non-event and I strongly suspect it will remain so as far as Pakistan is concerned into the far future.

And what for Aasia herserlf? Well she aint out of the woods that is for sure. There are no recent pictures of her in the public domain so she at least has the gift of anonymity. All pictures are of a much younger woman who had yet to endure a decade of privation and torture. She is unlikely to look just as she did before the state mangled her.

The Canadians, who have now assumed duty of care, have a difficult and expensive problem on their hands. Her children are already there as are some members of her extended family, but she is not going to be giving interviews to the breakfast TV shows any time soon…because the killers will be watching, looking for any clue as to where she might be in order that they can do the job that was denied to the hangman. And let there be no misunderstanding about this…there is no shortage of Muslims who would happily kill or connive at the killing of Aasia Bibi. Certainly not in Pakistan where groups are already on record as to their determination to find and murder her. There will be Muslims in Canada ready, willing and able to do the deed. The Canadian security services will doubtless have their eyes wide open because the last thing they are going to want is a body on their hands.

So everybody concerned is going to be keeping very very quiet about Aasia Bibi. She will probably get a new identity and plugged into an already existing support network in the Canadian Catholic church who have experience of caring for victims such as she, tho never of such a high profile. Some churches may be wary of giving open support for fear of a Muslim backlash if they do, and the Canadian government will be actively colluding at Plan A, the burial alive of Aasia Bibi.

I have not the slightest doubt that the government of Pakistan will be rubbing its hands together today at a job well done. Even if there is a ghosted tell-all book somewhere down the line it is a storm that will be weathered, and who will remember the woman anyway outside the fragmented bunch of bleeding-heart secular liberals? Nobody. Case closed. Move along please nothing to see here…

There was a time and I remember it well when terrorism and extremism in my neck of the woods was linked to poverty. As I recall this was as much assumptive as it was objectively determined. ‘The poor’ are driven to desperate acts as a protest, a push-back, at the forces that keep them that way – the Establishment, politicians of every hue, feudalism and patriarchy, pick any one or combination – and ‘the poor’ find themselves prey to those with evil intent who would manipulate and influence them for dark reasons, often religio-sectarian or based on interfaith intolerance and animosity.  ‘The poor’ were the eternal fall-guys, the ones that carried the can or the bombs or wore the exploding vests and were the reliable and determined delivery systems for those that sought to destabilise states.

Except that was not so, and poverty on close inspection has little connection to violent extremism, more it has connections to wealth, privilege, higher education and the comforts of life at the middle and upper-middle class end of the scale. The Sri Lanka bombings are an exemplar of this – as well as a pointer for where groups such as Islamic State are going next. And anybody that believed recent assertions that IS was ‘defeated’ or ‘finished’ with the demise of its short-lived ‘caliphate’ needs a paradigm reboot.

The Sri Lankan police, intelligence services and politicians have a lot to answer for in the appalling mess of mis and failed communication that preceded the attacks, but the police at least were on the ball in the immediate aftermath. A little over an hour after the first explosions they were in the wealthy Colombo suburb of Dematagoda and outside the 3-story house of Inshaf Ibrahim who owned a copper factory and his brother Ilham. Their father is one of the wealthiest in the Muslim community and made his fortune in the spice business. The two brothers were members of the attack team. As the police approached there was an explosion and the older brother’s wife and three children were shredded, the top floor being wired with explosives presumably to pre-empt any attempt to gain entry. The younger brother has been caught.

Global media sniffer dogs were quickly on the case. One of the bombers attended Kingston University in London studying aeronautical engineering, later studying in Australia. Most of his fellow bombers were educated to degree level tho not all completed their courses.

Bright bombers are nothing new and the current leader of al-Qaeda Ayman al-Zawahiri is a qualified pediatrician – a children’s doctor – and a plot unearthed in the UK in 2007 was almost exclusively run by qualified medical personnel. There are numerous examples of well educated Islamist extremists in the killing business and none of the men who flew into the WTC’s on 9/11 came from a poor or in any way deprived background. The 2016 bakery bombing in Bangladesh was carried out by terrorists with a similar profile to that of the Sri Lanka attackers.

After a pause in which everybody and their partner speculated on how it was that a tiny and hitherto unregarded Muslim extremist group could mount a multi-target operation, albeit one that Indian intelligence was acutely aware of almost a month in advance – Islamic state put its hand up as being behind the operation. No details of course, but the information came via IS sources known for their reliability and having tried and failed in the caliphate business IS has upped the ante and served notice that it can run repeat performances of Sri Lanka any time, any place any where. It had moved on and we should all be afraid, very afraid.

It is five years since IS came into the world and it has never been a populist mass movement, more a carriage for an ideology of Sunni Islam that finds no shortage of fellow travelers but needs little in the way of formal infrastructure to sustain itself. Most of the leaders – alive and dead, there have been some determined culls – are religious clerics. Its volunteers that carry out the operations come from Syria which is nowadays a manufactory of well-trained extremists looking for somewhere to practice their arts – as well as the UK, Iraq and Egypt or Tunisia. Insofar as I can tell reading the background for this piece none of them is from peasant stock. The failure of the caliphate has left some of these characters in search of an author, and in one high-profile case a British woman sought to return to her homeland, a move that triggered the UK government revoking her citizenship. She is not alone and there are hundreds of others, many of whom would be delighted to plaster themselves and you across the landscape given half a chance.

Not all are graduates or aspiring undergrads, and in Europe at least recent attacks have been the work of men with a small-time criminal record, but they have all felt themselves drawn inexorably in the direction of militant or extreme ideologies, Cannon fodder for the digital age.

To quote from a recent ‘Guardian’ piece – ‘Taken together, this teaches us that neither education nor economics can help explain any one individual’s violent activism. The literature on radicalisation that has been produced since 2001 has yet to pinpoint a cause, and few experts think there might be one.’

How does it all happen then? How do these people arrive at this point? The first, and perhaps most difficult idea to get our heads around is that terrorism is a social activity. The Sri Lanka attacks are an example, this was family and friends, peers that knew one another socially and were easy in each other’s company and able to keep a secret. Ideas quickly spread in a small group, there is a sense of exclusivity and probably a rolling paranoia linked to supremacist ideas of the need to impose faith. Married couples have friends and family also, then there are the mates from schooldays that have come into adulthood all together. This is a broth that takes little stirring, and a charismatic preacher/mullah who is handy with his Googling finger can catalyse with the results seen on Easter Sunday. The availaibility of a competent facilitator such as IS makes it all so easy. The SL group had no need of foreign funding, no transfers of funds that might alert the security agencies, they were rich enough to fund this themselves and IS was more than happy to assist with logistics and planning and reconnaissance advice, all of which could be delivered at arms length, no need to make very visible journeys just access to the internet, a layer of VPN’s and encryption and BANG!

Well where does this leave IS? Felling pretty good, most likely. This is a proof-of-concept operation that went flawlessly. With local variations this can be replicated assuming the right host group can be identified with the independent resources to make the hit. The hit team hides in plain view, anonymised by their ordinariness, their places in society, and it can be any society at least theoretically but preferably one with weak or corrupt security systems and a busted political cohort that have no investment beyond self interest.

Right…where are they then? Sitting right next to you. Or at the workplace. Perhaps working in the playgroup where the kids are dropped off. Putting a needle in your arm as they take blood for testing. Comforting, huh?

Mind how you go.

Just occasionally I get irritated. At 72 my irritation levels are trended downwards, mostly because of the futility of it. And with life shortening by the day there are better things to do with my underworked brain. But there are some things that are persistent, and they tick along with the status of ‘a bit of a niggle’ without ever actually turning the corner into full-blown irritation. One of them is the use of the word ‘martyr’ in the Pakistan media and right now it is irritating the pants off me, mostly because of its abundant use in the context of recent terrorist acts in Quetta and on the Makran highway. Right, time for a little context, a few definitions and some history.

My thanks to Wikipedia for this concise but serviceable definition.

‘A martyr (Greek: μάρτυς, mártys, “witness”; stem μάρτυρ-, mártyr-) is someone who suffers persecution and death for advocating, renouncing, refusing to renounce, or refusing to advocate a belief or cause as demanded by an external party. This refusal to comply with the presented demands results in the punishment or execution of the martyr by the oppressor. Originally applied only to those who suffered for their religious beliefs, the term has come to be used in connection with people killed for a political cause.

Most martyrs are considered holy or are respected by their followers, becoming symbols of exceptional leadership and heroism in the face of difficult circumstances. Martyrs play significant roles in religions. Similarly, martyrs have had notable effects in secular life, including such figures as Socrates, among other political and cultural examples.’

Well that seems pretty clear, so how about some standard dictionaries…Merriam Webster first…

martyr

1: a person who voluntarily suffers death as the penalty of witnessing to and refusing to renounce a religion

2: a person who sacrifices something of great value and especially life itself for the sake of principle a martyr to the cause of freedom

3: VICTIM especially : a great or constant sufferer a martyr to asthma all his life— A. J. Cronin

And now Oxford Living Dictionary…

A person who is killed because of their religious or other beliefs.

‘the first Christian martyr’

1. 1.1 A person who displays or exaggerates their discomfort or distress in order to obtain sympathy.

‘she wanted to play the martyr’

• 1.2 martyr to A constant sufferer from (an ailment)

‘I’m a martyr to migraine!’

And lastly the Cambridge Dictionary…

a person who suffers very much or is killed because of their religious or political beliefs, and is often admired because of it:

a Christian/Islamic/religious martyr

She fought against racism all her life and died a martyr to the cause.

​

disapproving someone who tries to get sympathy from others when he or she has aproblem or too much work, usually when that person caused the problem or chose to do the work himself or herself:

She offers to do extra work, then plays the martyr!

Well that all seems pretty consistent does it not? A rootle in the etymology suggests…

martyr n. Old English martyr (before 899); borrowed from Late Latin martyr, from Greek màrtyr, late form of mártys (genitive mártyros) martyr, witness, probably related to mémēra care, trouble, mermaírein be anxious or thoughtful. In Middle English the term was reinforced by borrowing (probably before 1200) from Old French matir, rom Late Latin martyr. 
v. Probably before 1200 martern; later martiren (about 1200); developed from Old English gemartyrian (before 899); from martyr, n. In Middle English , the verb was also reinforced by borrowing from Old French martirier, martirer, and Medieval Latin martyriare. — martyrdom n. About 1175, martirdom, developed from Old English martyrdōm (before 899); formed form Old English martyr, n. + -dōm -dom.

Which also seems to hang together pretty well.

Christianity has been big on martyrs pretty much from the outset, reams have been written on the lives of martyrs, and I recall the fascinated horror I felt leafing through a copy of ‘Foxe’s Martyrs’ that was lavishly illustrated with detailed pictures of the demise of hundreds of the aforesaid martyrs. It dates from 1563, is written by John Day and focuses on the persecution of Protestants in England and Scotland. It remains a key text for many academic theologians.

Then there is art. Art loves a martyrdom. A quick Google reveals tens of thousands of depictions of martyrdom from paintings to sculptures in stone and wood and you will find at least one image or representation of martyrdom in virtually every Christian church aside from the crucifixion that is. There are however ‘undecorated’ Christian sects that have no adornments in their places of worship. Do your own research on this one.

It should by now be clear where I am going with this. The 14 butchered by the side of the road after being taken from a bus were not martyrs. They were victims of terrorism. So were those that died in Quetta. None of them came anywhere close to the definition of ‘martyr’ but the term has been appropriated in a fallacious elevation to a realm of faith that somehow makes their deaths different. Not run of the mill murders which are what they are. Workaday killings for terrorist groups for whom this is all part of the day job. Victims are not selected for their piety or the sacrifices they have made in life, but for their ease of access, vulnerability and generally an inability to mount resistance to their coming fate. And their value as levers of fear and terror.

One of Pakistan’s frequently cited martyrs of recent years is Benazir Bhutto, murdered in the line of duty. Whatever else she was it was not a martyr. She was a damn fool. She was travelling in a vehicle that had an armoured capsule in which she sat. The ‘sunroof’ that she opened to stand and present a target to her killer was in fact an armoured hatch. Had she kept her head down she may well be alive today – and would have survived any bomb blast short of a direct hit by an armour-piercing round. But no. The Bhutto death-wish was strong in her, and it is no stretch of the imagination that ‘martyrdom’ was a part of her personal playbook. Kismet. It is written. Now that is not martyrdom, but that iconic label was quickly attached and is now a permanent feature of the Bhutto legacy.

And today we find the pages of the print media and their online iterations liberally scattered with martyrs. Virtually anybody that dies at the hands of a terrorist achieves instant martyr-hood. Elevated from the mundane to the quasi mystical, and challenging that can be a risky business. I have been warned off discussing it in the past as there are those that might see my argument against this phony martyr-hood as in some sense blasphemous, and we are all aware of the risks attached to a trip down that road.

So what do you think?

Another piece from what now seems like a far past. I think the desrt melas have faded away in recent years as the desert people became more settled, built permanent structures close to water sources, got their kids into schools and whose flocks diminished as the area they lived in became more saline. My village family always had a close relationship with the desert people unlike many who saw them as pests, a nuisance, when they came looking for help, usually medical.

If I went to everything I was invited to, I’d never get to bed. Hospitality is a way of life, not something you offer just occasionally here in Pakistan, and people are both puzzled and offended if it is refused for whatever reason. With my western mindset of priorities and things to do and times they have to be done by, my internal clock runs quite a bit faster than that of the average rural Pakistani. I also make the frequent mistake of believing what people tell me. So a few days back, just after I got to the village, the Chairman of my Board of Management said that I had been invited to a mela, or cultural gathering, at the shrine of the Pir most holy to the desert people. This shrine is right out in the sand desert, maybe 20 miles from a road, and by no means easy to get to. But an invite is an invite, no matter how difficult to access.

The desert hereabouts comes in several flavours and strengths.

Desert-lite, vanilla plain flavour, is the area to the immediate east of the irrigation canal that itself is east of the village. It is a mix of scrub and salt flats, with regular stands of trees and some fairly recent fixed habitation where the desert people have begun to settle down. They have pirated water from a subsidiary canal and set up some fields, growing the Punjabi staples of wheat and sweetcorn. They came to the farmers in Chak 74 for advice on how to do this new-fangled farming stuff, as prior to four or five years ago they had been nomadic herders with vast flocks of lop-eared goats and fat-tail sheep wandering the landscape. The desert people and the people in Chak 74 have always ‘got on’ – and I also have a good relationship with them. A few DP girls are now attending the English Medium school in Fatimapur, the first girls of their community ever to learn to read and write. Their desert is easy to move around in, there are tracks across the salt, and the occasional landmark, and I move around in it alone with ease, but always carrying a compass and doing a back-bearing occasionally.

Desert-Industrial Strength, double mint with choc bar and coloured sprinkly bits is at the other end of the spectrum. This starts to the southeast of Chak 74 and goes for hundreds of miles, far into India where it becomes the Rajasthan desert. This is the desert of sand and emptiness, of barchan dunes and the occasional clump of low bushes. This is at the serious end of desert, and has to be treated with respect. There are no wandering herdsmen to get water or directions from if you are lost (and it is very easy to get lost) and precious few landmarks of any sort. The going underfoot is mostly soft golden sand over a gravelly under-layer. It is tiring to walk on and difficult to drive through. There are areas of high dune, rolling and with an austere beauty that I love to come here for, and sit on the top of a crescent of hard rippled sand, with tiny rivers of displaced stones rolling with a ssheeeesh down the lee of the dune-face. You can feel a very long way from anywhere in a place like that. It was in this area that the Mela was to be held. Getting there was fun.

Having received the invitation, a day later I was told by another Board member that no, we were not going as there was no suitable transport available; so come Saturday morning I was busy with writing and researching articles, trying to get my email away and generally deep in admin. I had made the mistake of believing exactly what I was told. So up rolls my Chairman at 11.30 and says ‘You ready? We go mela.’ It was steaming hot and I was not best pleased either at the interruption or the prospect of a midday trip into the most inhospitable place around. I asked about the lack of transport, the reason for cancellation in the first place. ‘No problem’ he says. ‘I hire motorbike. We all go on that’.

All?

Yup, all. Well, three of us, anyway.

The Chairman is 6’2″, I am 5’9″ and Stephen the President of USWS is a mere 5’4″. Collectively we must have weighed in excess of 560lbs. The motorbike in question was a 70cc Honda. It was about to perform heroically. But only after running out of petrol before we even got as far as the junction outside Firoza town. Chairman and I stood whistling by the road as Stephen was dispatched to get some fuel. Sun blazed down. Eggs fry on tarmac etc. I casually asked if Chairman knew the way. ‘No’, says he. ‘Somewhere in desert. But we bring water for you’. He holds up a grubby bottle containing what appears to be a very large urine sample and assures me it is finest possible pani and I was to drink if I was thirsty. I’d rather hammer red-hot nails through my dick than have drunk whatever was in the bottle, and held my tongue. ‘Other people will go. We follow them’ says he. Perfectly reasonable.

Once you get a few Klicks beyond the city boundary it all gets a bit open. The Serious Desert sits either side of the road saying nothing and keeping itself to itself. Traffic peters out after we passed thro a tiny village and we motored on, the three of us astride the tiny motorbike, into an eyeball frazzling heat haze. Suddenly, O Lord, a sign was given. Easily missed, virtually buried in fact, but a sign nonetheless. A sign in white Squiggle on a blue background that might have said ‘This way to the Get-your-throat-cut Abattoir and Ice cream Parlour’ for all I knew. Chairman turns bike to left and we go Desert.

We were still Desert twenty minutes later when the bike falls sideways, briefly trapping us all on the ground before we squirmed ourselves out. The sand was just too deep for the bike with three up and bald tyres, so Chairman and I decided to walk for a while, and Stephen gentled it through the slippery sand. We had seen, and roughly followed some 4WD tracks that we assumed might be going in the right direction. But not seen or heard any actual vehicles. After a bit of a walk, the sand got firmer again, and we re-mounted and ploughed on. It was fairly flat, and the horizon was about two miles away. On we plodded for another couple of miles, getting off for the soft bits.

Then Chairman points and says ‘There mela’. And it was. In the far distance I could just spot the tiny white triangle of the top of a tent. Saved. We were saved. Or at least I was saved, mainly by not drinking from the Deadly Bottle. Then there was a vehicle to one side of us, rolling down what looked suspiciously like a reasonable track. And then another, then several, all travelling on a marked route through the sand. It had run to our right about half a mile from us, complete with little flags as waymarkers, but it was set down between dunes and we could neither see not hear the traffic on it. I gave my Chairman a very hard look indeed and he went to study the flora for a few minutes. When he came back I asked him what it said on the sign we had seen. It appears that it said ‘Road to mela in half-mile turn left’ and he had taken the ‘turn left’ part of that message a little before he should, assuring me later he thought he knew a short cut. There was a certain chill twixt self and Chairman for a while.

Mela is a word you quite often hear used in UK nowadays, and it usually refers to an Asian open-air event with dancing and stalls of traditional work and music, and stands representing assorted charities and local bodies working for or with the ethnic minority communities. The mela in the desert was all of that and so much more.

As we rode our little Honda into the area where the mela was taking place I began to appreciate both the scale of it and the importance. This was no cosy get together in a local park. This was three days of intense and quite tightly choreographed activity, taking in social and cultural activities, political and tribal matters, health and education and a very large portion of food. And transvestites, of which more later. It was also the venue for the largest free health camp I have ever seen in Pakistan, and probably the best organised as well. There were doctors for every specialism, including women doctors, and the patients stretched in queues for hundreds of metres outside the tents where the doctors worked. Patients stood in the hot sun, in orderly lines and waited their turn, very unlike normal queuing behaviour in Pakistan. I was taken in to one of the dispensaries, and introduced to the doctor running it. I looked over the medicines, all branded products and all in-date. No cloned or obviously counterfeit drugs, just lots of quality medication being prescribed by people who knew what they were doing. I toured the tented diagnostic centres, where modern equipment was run from portable generators, and watched ECGs and BPs, chatted to the Doctors and got the background to all this activity.

All of the doctors were giving their services free, and some of them had come from as far afield as Karachi. They were the men and women who had given the medicines, hired the generators and paid for the tents, as well as donated the vast amounts of food that fed the throng. They were all Sufis, adherents to the mystical arm of Islam that has been influential in this part of Punjab for centuries, and see this philanthropy as a religious duty to their fellow men and women. This is the third year that the mela has been held, and it looks like being an enduring event.

It is centred on the shrine of a revered Pir, Hajr Farid, (Pirs are almost saintly in their status) who as a Sufi mystic spent 19 years in meditation at this spot about 800 years ago. The shrine itself is a modest affair surrounded by a low wall, into which I was invited out of courtesy, and it was much appreciated when I declined but took my hat and shoes off and stood at the entrance for a minute to indicate respect. Little sensitivities like that go a long way in places like this. Hatted and shod again, it was off to see the camel dancing (which is actually camels fighting) and browse the knick-knack and gewgaw stalls. As I wandered with Chairman in tow I was confronted by a man who stood directly in front of me and without ceremony or warning stuck a mike in my face and asked me to do a vox pop to camera; beaming cameraman standing behind him.

He was from PTV news, making a documentary about the mela and the desert people, their lives and culture. I was not really dressed for televisual stardom, wearing a filthy cricket hat, a t-shirt that had seen better days but a very long time ago, a pair of dusty GAP cargo pants ripped at the knee from our little tumble with the bike, and a pair of classic suede desert boots (that really are very comfortable in the desert). Despite the lack of elegance the producer assured me I was just what he was looking for, so we ran thro a few things I could say on national television that were unlikely to get me shot and I did my interview. Years back, when working in local government, I did a media handling course as I was often called on to do radio and a few TV pieces, so I knew more or less what I was doing. I managed to get a plug in for USWS, complimented the organisers of the mela for their humanitarian activities and dashed off some mildly erudite stuff about the Sufi tradition and its peaceful and philanthropic ethos. Big smiles all round.

I was then led in the direction of an extremely smart 4WD, by people speaking Seraiki, the desert language, of which I speak not a word, and swiftly found myself transported to the august presence of the surviving descendant of the Mystic Pir, who was holding court in a large marquee separate from the main action. Shoes off, hat off, I was invited to sit at his shoulder, slightly behind and to his left. He was sitting cross-legged on the floor, wearing a simple white shalwar and a red Sindhi cap. He listened earnestly to what the people who came to make representation to him had to say, as not only was he a descendant of the Pir, he was a member of the Princely family that had ruled the Bahawalpur area before the creation of Pakistan. In addition, he was closely connected to a political party of note and power locally, and a good man to make a plea to if you wanted to get something done.

I watched the process closely. Plea-makers sat in front of him, and quietly and with a minimum of fuss, presented their cases. He had a variety of advisers to right and left whom he consulted occasionally and I got a sense of what it must have been like a century ago, when his family were the absolute rulers of this region, and for the desert people he was here talking to, he still was the absolute ruler. It was one of those rare moments when it was possible to feel history around you, to have a sense of connection running back eight centuries in an unbroken stream from this portly man who rides a Pajero to the simple white shrine that was behind some dunes half a mile away. It was also one of those moments when I felt a great sense of personal privilege. The invitation to me had come from one of the desert chiefs who I knew, and it was a considerable honour for a non-Muslim and the very first westerner to be present at this gathering of the clans. I sat for almost an hour, until the soiree ended. We all stood as the plea-makers went away, and I had my hand shaken most warmly by a man whose name, to my shame, I did not write down. I carry notebooks with me all the time here, writing down snatches of conversation or significant events as contemporaneously as possible, and on this occasion left my little black moleskin notebook and the black and gold fountain pen with the old-fashioned sepia brown ink, in my day-pac outside. Well, you can’t remember everything, I guess.

Back at the main event it was time for a last amble up the main street of this temporary village in the desert to the edifice at the end, a round wooden tower held up by the ubiquitous rickety bamboo poles that act as scaffolding here. It had a familiar look about it, and it was the conical cover of this structure that we had spotted and disclosing the location of the mela to us. There were many young men standing around with a sense of expectancy, and there was the kind of buzz in the air that you get when there is something faintly naughty about to happen. And suddenly I clicked – the wooden tower was a Wall of Death. I had first seen a Wall of Death as a small child living in London, and every year in a park close to the house where I was born there did Selfridges, the famous London store, sponsor a Grand Fair. The fair had whirligigs and whizzers and bumper cars and a ghost train that scared the living daylights out of me, but the highlight was the Wall of Death, and I stood at the top, seemingly impossibly high off the ground, with my Father and watched as the daredevil riders whirled around the inside, glued to the perpendicular walls by centrifugal force, with glamorous ladies on the pillion. It wasn’t quite like that out in the desert a few days back.

For one thing, the glamorous ladies disporting themselves in front of the WoD as a come-on for the main event weren’t ladies at all, but kussurra.

Kussurra are an odd phenomenon, to say the very least, and a few words about them are in order. I saw my first kussurra in Rawalpindi 10 years or more ago, and have seen them all over Pakistan and in parts of Afghanistan ever since. At their simplest, they are transvestite gay men who earn a living dancing at weddings and funerals. At their most complex, they are born hermaphrodite, with elements of the genitals of both male and female, often fully functional, but they are always sterile whichever is the dominant gender element. This genetic aberration is especially common in southern Punjab and northern Sindh. A further wrinkle of the kussurra spectrum are those who are born male, but either through choice or force, being abducted by kussurra gangs as small children, they are eunuchs – castrated early in life and occasionally with a ‘vagina’ created from scar tissue. They tend to live communally and some operate as criminal gangs. They are often found living deep in the ‘hira-mundi’ or red light area that you find in most major towns and a few of the smaller ones as well. Despite the strictures of Islam, prostitution in all its forms thrives in Pakistan, and in at least one city, Lahore, has become an internationally known tourist attraction.

There are several kussurra living close to the centre of Firoza, and I often see them in the bazaar buying their fruit and veg and camping it up outrageously. They are always extravagantly made up, and sashay around like the old queens they so often are. A few of them adopt women’s voices, but most don’t bother, and on first acquaintance it can be a little disconcerting to be addressed in a rich basso-profundo by a woman with tits that look like a dead-heat in a Zeppelin race. One of the local ‘girls’, Ronno, danced for Rose and I at our wedding celebration in the village here. She was the first of her type I had talked to, and a sad creature she was. She was a gay man, but could not ‘come out’ as she would in the west, and opted for castration and life as a kussurra. Her breasts were what they call ‘water balls’ and look and feel very convincing. (Yes, I gave them a squeeze.) Subsequently, I looked into the kussurra phenomenon in some detail, and talked to doctors and local health workers. Many of the newborns that are quickly identified as neither one nor the other are handed over to one of the kussurra gangs within hours of birth and never know their natural parents. The hermaphrodites tend to live as ‘family’ groups, whereas the eunuchs and transvestites have a more fluid social structure. The eunuchs in particular can be extremely violent and threatening, and will intimidate people into giving them money by the simple expedient of turning up at a wedding or funeral and then threatening to take their clothes off unless folding greenery is in their hands directly. The last thing you want either on the happiest or saddest day of your life is a bunch of fat abusive eunuchs pissing in the rice pot – which they do.

Seen it.

One of the local kussurra I had seen at a food stall earlier, and she gaily waved to me and blew a kiss. Her compatriots were giving it their best in front of the WoD marquee to a crowd of adoring men. One of them looked across and saw me, and her face was an absolute treat as she realised she was looking at a Gora in a place where there had never been a Gora before. Recovering quickly, she dropped into ‘business mode’ and gave her tits a wiggle in my direction and had a rummage in her crotch to make sure I got the point. These girls work as prostitutes, and would have been doing a roaring trade at the mela. I made a polite excuse and went on my way. The very last thing I need is for stories to begin circulating that I got it together with a kussurra!!

I did not stop for the Wall of Death performance, having seen and heard quite enough for one day, and determined that whatever else I was going home on the marked track rather than the Chairman’s idea of a short cut. And that I was going home in daylight. I had been invited to the evening festivities, when the medical and social services all shut down and the desert people had the mother and father of all hooleys, singing and dancing in their thousands far into the night. Another year, maybe. So we got on the bike, got on the track, waved goodbye to hundreds of people and were back on the two-lane blacktop in 45 minutes, in the village about an hour later.

Truly memorable days are few and far between, but that one was. My scribblings here do it little justice, and cannot possibly capture the sense of peaceful purpose and one-ness of community that was there on that day. It was only hours afterwards that I realised another thing – I had not seen a single gun. Nor heard a single shot. Aerial firing and the inevitable casualties on the ground would have punctuated any other event of similar size or import. Writing it up now it is still vivid in my mind and will remain so for a long time to come, I suspect.

Chris Cork, 9th March 2004

After a month – March – which was taken up with a mixture of being on strike and ‘paused’ at the suggestion of my editor the news finally came thro – your dues have been deposited. Long experience of working in Pakistan meant that I was not jumping for joy. Cheques can bounce – and do. And I had no pay slip either so I did not know how much had been deposited, so I waited a couple of days to give any cheque a chance to clear then went in this morning to see the state of play.

Oh dear. Currently I am owed three months arrears totaling about 320,000 rupees (1,748 GBP). I claim via an invoice submitted monthly. December, January and February are now in arrears.

Bad as my situation is it is not as bad as many, probably hundreds, of my fellow contributors to assorted newspapers and magazines in Pakistan. Some senior staffers at The News have not been paid since last summer. I believe nobody at ‘The Nation’ has been paid for months. There have been widespread job losses across the print media in the last year and salaries have been cut, in some instances by 40%. Things have got worse under the PTI government as it is not spending as much on advertising as its predecessors and the media houses had long stayed fat on government spending, their business models heavily dependent on it.

Many that I know of continue to work despite not being paid, the logic being that a job is a job and they have a contract saying so, even if it is unpaid. They cling on in the hope of payment. Freelancers are hung out to dry. They have no contract, nothing is ever in writing, there is no effective unionisation and the media houses are more than happy for this state of affairs to continue, preferably indefinitely. The very last thing they want is to be held accountable. There are few – Dawn being an exception – that would be willing to come clean with their employees or contributors. Silence is their first and last port of call. Say nothing, admit nothing. Never apologise. Don’t give interviews.

Thus the media houses – none of them exactly impoverished – continue their exploitative ways secure in the knowledge that that have a captive herd of sheep as contributors. Copy continues to flow in and get published. The circle is unbroken.

I got a third of my dues and now have to battle yet again for the rest of my earnings. In idle moments I have mused about going to law, sueing the buggers, but unless there is a sharp lawyer who will to work for expenses only that road is closed. I resume work on Monday, 1^st April, coincidentally All Fools Day. Watch this space.

This is an extract from a much longer piece that dealt with all sorts of family-and-friends stuff, and is a boil-down of an account of a train trip. PakRail is something of a jewel in the transport crown these days. There are privatised business-class trains, joint-venture trains and the Green Line Express between Karachi and Pindi. The trains themselves have been spruced up but the infrastructure is crumbling. Under-invested and much of it dating from the Raj it collapses sometimes, derailing the shiny racks of coaches and killing and injuring a steady number every year. But is perceptibly improving and I will be using it for my upcoming trip to Islamabad. Watch this space.

I have lost count of the times I have stopped at or staged through Karachi airport, and must have walked past the Pak-rail shop a hundred times, and for some reason never bought a ticket there. It is an unassuming little operation next to the Moneychanger and the PCO. Previously, I had always bought my rail tickets from the seething screaming madness of the office at City Station, where you fought to the death for the privilege of getting a double-booked hard-class seat to somewhere you did not really want to go before you changed trains to get to the place you really wanted to be. But here was a place where, apparently, I could buy a railway ticket without queuing, having a stand-up row with the man who validates the ticket when you have bought it, or feeling robbed and abused at the end of the process. I wanted to go to Bahawalpur on Monday 1^st March, the very day when the Moharram mourning was at its height and the whole country sitting on the edge of its seat waiting to see if the blood that ran from the backs of the flailing mourners would leak into the wider populace, and the always-present propensity for sectarian disorder shake the country once again. Not the best day to travel, perhaps. But I had appointments, things to do and people to see, so I boldly stepped up to the window and was faintly surprised to be immediately attended by a man who asked me, very politely, if he could help me. This must be a recent introduction to the repertoire of customer care options available to Pak-rail staff, who normally rely on in-your-face abuse as their favoured method of communication, to which I normally respond with a selection of gutter Punjabi along the lines of ‘If you could possibly drag yourself away from the obvious pleasures of fucking your sister and your fathers donkey I would like a ticket to X, Y or Z.’ But this Tickus-wallah was clearly of the New Breed, a Musharraf Man to the tip of his poised ballpoint pen, and eager to please if at all possible. Restraining my normal invective I smiled back and said in my very politest and most formal Urdu that I would like a ticket to Bahawalpur, on Monday, and could I possibly have a Parlour Class seat? ‘Certainly Sir…would you like to travel on the Shalimar Express or would you like to take a night sleeper? Just let me check seat availability…hmmmm…yes there is a seat in Parlour Class…tap-tap-tap at the keyboard…would you like me to book it for you?’ Retrieving my jaw from the floor, to which it had unceremoniously dropped I did a few goldfish impressions before bowing slightly in the direction of the Tickus-paragon and handed over 980rps, or slightly under £10.00 for a 850kms journey. He handed me back a little yellow rectangular ticket and a computer printout that validated my seat and even gave his name in case of any complaint or error. It had taken about two minutes from start to finish. Then he completely blew it by waving through the glass at me and saying ‘Have a nice day’ as I wheeled my trolley in the direction of the cab rank. Sorted.

Comes the morning of 1^st March, 5a.m., and a wake up call from reception at the hospital where I stay. I had gone to bed late having watched the Moharram processions go past the hospital. They passed mostly in silence and darkness. The police had turned off the street lighting, and there was very little shouting or chanting. They carried placards of prominent Sheikhs (Shi’as have Sheikhs, not Mullahs, as their clerics) and were unaware of the lone Gora watching them from the sidelines. Nobody got out of line and procession followed procession, winding off into the night.  The streets themselves were uncharacteristically clean, having been given the once-over by the city council, and white powder had been sprinkled along all the gutters where the processions were to take place as an indication of their purity, and to remind the populace not to throw rubbish or litter. There had even been a road-kill clear up, and I had seen a wagon on Thursday afternoon coming along to scrape away the carpet of dead dogs and cats that builds up over time. But the streets were empty as I went in the pre-dawn darkness to Cantt Station, there to board the Shalimar Express, and go north to Bahawalpur.

Most passenger trains have names in Pakistan, and there is a certain affection for them. People refer to the Shalimar, or the Rohi, or the Chennab as if they were talking about friends. The train timetables rarely change, and train travellers usually know the timings of their chosen conveyance. There was some alarm on the part of my driver when I told him my train was at seven o’clock that morning. He frowned, and said ‘Shalimar? No…Shalimar go at six-thirty…maybe you miss it if we are not hurry’ and he raced thro the empty streets, getting to the station a few minutes before six-thirty. I had shown him my ticket and booking slip, both clearly stating that the Shalimar went at seven, but he was not convinced. He hurtled into the car park in front of the main entrance and jumped out carrying one of my bags on his head, shouting ‘Shalimar…Shalimar’ at the tickus-wallah on the gate. Tickus-wallah looks bemused. ‘Shalimar here…this platform…seven o’clock’ he says. ‘NO no no’ says the driver, ‘Six-thirty…Shalimar six-thirty’. Tickus-wallah moves to Height Of Full Importance Complete With Clipboard With Train Timings and thunders ‘SHALIMAR SEVEN BLOODY CLOCKS’ and places clipboard in front of driver. Errr…the illiterate driver. A small and appreciative crowd had assembled for this charade, and they took up the cry ‘SHALIMAR SEVEN BLOODY CLOCKS’ pointing at the train not ten feet away across the platform that clearly said ‘Shalimar’ in English and Urdu on the side and looked in no hurry to go anywhere for a while. Driver deflates, shakes head in bewilderment, puts my bag on the ground and carries on muttering, sotto-voce, ‘Shalimar six-thirty…Shalimar six-thirty…’completely flummoxed by this change in the order of things. The platform was covered in rubble, and passengers stumbled through the smashed and awkward masonry to get on the train. The rubble is apparently a part of an upgrade of stations across the country, as I saw similar at all major stations northwards through the day. I was to be enthroned in seat 29, bogie number 4, the only Parlour Class carriage on the whole rack of coaches.

Parlour Class is the very epitome of rail luxury in this country, and is regarded as only slightly below an airline seat in terms of comfort and convenience. I had first ridden Parlour about 8 years ago, and was immediately besotted. It is expensive, by Pak standards, at almost twice the price of a First Class ticket, but worth every rupee. You literally enter another world when you go thro the Parlour Portal. It is a standard Pak-rail carriage but fitted out to quite astonishingly high standards of comfort. The seats are wide and deep, covered in deep green velvet, with soft arms and the sort of ‘enveloping’ feel that goes with a good armchair. There are only 36 seats per carriage, compared to the 50 or 55 in standard class. The seats are in pairs and mounted on a swivel, being turned to face the direction of travel as appropriate. There is an overhead TV a-la airliner, and sockets for personal stereos and music channels (all off for Moharram). The air-conditioning keeps the temperature at a pleasant 70°f; and the windows have roller blinds to keep out the sun. The windows themselves are double glazed and dust-proof. Each Parlour carriage has its own kitchen and group of staff, whose job it is to care for you every mile of the way. They have a kitchen that produces breakfast, elevenses, lunch, tiffin and dinner, with a ‘naptime’ bijou meal-ette if the service runs into the night.  There are also Snack-wallahs who get on at every stop with crisps and sweeties and Nimco, and regular visits by the newspaper sellers who even go as far as having the Financial and New York Times (yesterdays, but hey…) and there is a Parlour Ticket Inspector of impeccable style, carefully barbered and with a neat pencil moustache, a state-of-the-art clipboard and an oily civility that is just this side of being unpleasant. But only just.

Then there are the passengers. Lets be frank about this one…they are not your average peasant moving 13 children, two wives, the laundry, a goat and Auntie Perveens headstone a few miles up the line. This is your actual upper echelon of Pakistan society, many of them disdainful of air travel as being for the hoi-polloi, and they expect to be Looked After in the finest Colonial manner. Air travel is for people who have to rush about. Parlour Class is for people of note and standing who have the time to appreciate the finer things of life. Like me. But seriously…they are a reasonably civilised bunch, and those that speak English and are over 50 sound like BBC newsreaders circa 1930. Nobody spits on the floor in Parlour Class, nor discards peanut shells, or allows their child to shit under the seat. Oh no. They sit in mostly dignified silence between bouts of Olympic-standard gustation served up by the staff, which seem able to deliver minor culinary miracles, along with day-long trays of tea without sugar at the drop of a chapatti. The Sahibs tend to be a little overweight, the Memsahibs vastly overweight. Any children appear languid and pre-occupied, probably thinking of the next Durbar and whether young Chitti Amarjeet will be wearing those pearls she trots out now and then. The younger parlour Class traveller is all laptops ‘n mobiles, and spends time studying spreadsheets and corporate reports. Conversation is international, and this will be one of the very rare occasions you hear Pakistanis speaking foreign languages other than English. A huge section of the population, even many who are illiterate, speak reasonable English, as well as one or more of the languages of Pakistan in addition to their ‘home language’. But Parlour-Classers may have French and German, or Spanish, Greek even I have heard on one occasion.

Settled in, bags carefully stowed overhead in capacious racks, it was time for the papers, and a cup of tea and an omelette. The train moved off on the dot of seven as my breakfast tray and napkin and toast and jam arrived in front of me. At times like that, Pakistan can be the most wonderful place on earth. Tea poured and toast buttered, omelette savoured with black pepper and spicy ketchup, and shoes off with feet on the little plush-upholstered footstool in front of my seat it was time to take in the landscape.

Sindh does ‘flat’ like Edison does light bulbs. There is every kind of flat you could possibly imagine in Sindh. Flat with and without camels people or trees. Flat with buildings. Flat with ruined buildings. Flat sand. Flat sand with grass. Flat with one person standing in the middle of horizon-to-horizon flat with one person…yup, flat. Railways like flat, and there was plenty for the Shalimar Express to roll over. It went on like this for hours. Then we got to the flat but suddenly interesting Rohri, a town in upper Sindh noted mostly the Akbari Masjid mosque, built by the Mogul emperor Akbar in 1583, and having exquisite porcelain tiled walls. It also has the Shrine of Mau Mubarak just to the south, built in 1545 and housing (allegedly) a hair from the head of the Prophet Mohammed, which is probably what caused disturbance and disruption to the Shalimar Express on the 1^st March 2004. Because on the 2^nd March the Prophets hair is displayed to the devout (they must have bloody good eyesight is all I can say) and there is much hollerin’ and shoutin’ of a devout nature. Preparations for the Display of the Hair were well advanced, and the faithful were a-froth at the prospect.

I had been having a post-lunch doze and was rudely wakened by a man hammering on the window next to my resting head and screaming at me. He did not appear to be selling ice cream or Coca-cola, and there were several hundred others doing likewise. Probably inviting us to a pre-event snacks ‘n drinks do, complete with a private up-close viewing of The Hair. Suddenly – it seemed sudden, but it may have taken a couple of minutes – the carriage was full of men in black shalwars, barefoot and dusty, doing their screaming on the inside rather than on the outside. This is not in the Parlour Class script, and a dim view of this unseemly behaviour was taken by my fellow passengers, who hid behind their newspapers, hurriedly packed up their expensive laptops and generally tried their best not to panic, me included. The Moharram mourners had for whatever reason decided to invade the train and share their fervour with us, to the annoyance of the police and army, who were on the train in strength to deter just this eventuality; and who had apparently been caught flat-footed by the invasion. They had the delicate job of removing the invaders without doing damage to the important passengers they knew to be in Parlour Class, which did not stop them from cracking heads with truncheons and leading invaders out of the carriage by their scrotums. Religious fanatics with their bollocks in a vice-like grip tend to become docile and compliant. They were all cleared from PC in a few minutes, but it took a lot longer to clear them from the rest of the train, where their sympathisers and supporters did nothing to help the police and army in finding and ejecting them. So we sat there in harrumphing silence while sounds of ‘ouch’ ‘ooooooh’ ‘aaaaargh’ and ‘squelch’ came from around us. We eventually moved off, and all had a cup of tea to calm ourselves, sharing names and addresses and tit-bits of family information, and wondered what the world was coming to…I mean…those naughty boys…coming in here! I’d have ‘em flogged to within an inch of their lives. Buggers’d probably love it. Harrumph.

A few invaders showed up from their hiding places for the next hour, to be chased down by the forces of Law and Order and hurled from the train, which was not always stopped when they became airborne. And then nothing at all happened for hours and it stayed flat. Tiffin came and went, I chatted with a Doctor from Rahimyarkhan who had heard of me and a retired shopkeeper from Birmingham who hadn’t. We crawled along rather than raced for the last couple of hundred kilometres, and inched thro my ‘home’ station of Firoze, and it was dark when we arrived at Bahawalpur. Parlour Class…warmly recommended.

I have travelled Parlour many times since this was written 2004 and it has changed very little. Many of the same staff are still there, aging as I age, and I have a favourite seat and the same waiter who has looked after me for donkeys years still does and enquires after my family and I his. Bahawalpur is in the process of getting a splendid new railway station, said to be the second-largest in south Asia, and I will have to treat myself to a rail trip when it is finished just to savour the delights. A bookshop is promised. A ‘French style’ cafe’. I can’t wait.

The appalling events in Christchurch, New Zealand where 50 people were murdered and 50+ were injured by a white supremacist Islamaphobe are an indelible memory. Nobody alive and able to see mass-media outlets will have been able to miss the event and many, possibly most, will carry it in their long term memories all their lives. Almost nobody is going to remember the name of the killer, but most will probably recall the name of the NZ Prime Minister – Jacinda Ardern. Many, but fewer, will remember the responses and reaction of the Muslim world to the grace, dignity, sagacity and decisiveness with which Jacinda Ardern responded to the atrocity.

The way she wore, as did many other NZ-ers, a headscarf as a mark of respect, her use of an Islamic greeting, her attendance at the memorial event a week after the carnage. The images were viral and global, and Muslim people around the world expressed nothing but their admiration and respect for a woman most of them had never heard of before. However and it must be said, had they heard of her she was probably not the sort of person most Muslims would be wanting to invite round for tea and biccies.

And why might that be Dear Reader? Well because she is the very antithesis, indeed the epitome of antithesis of all that many (not all) Muslims hold to be near and dear, the values at the core of their existence. First up – she’s a woman. In much (not all) of the Muslim world women are little more than chattels, their lives secluded and sequestered, their evidence in any criminal proceeding weighs less than that of a man, they are not welcome in mosques and compared to the non-Muslim world even more under-represented in the workplace.

But but but…Benazir Bhutto. Well so what? She was a dynast from a patrician family, a political aberration and most certainly not a feminist. She is projected as something of an iconoclast, but nowt could be further from the truth. In terms of the role and place of women in society she changed little or nothing. A female footnote and not a lightning rod.

But back to Ms Ardern. She has a nine-month-old child and to the best of my knowledge is not is any traditional sense married to the child’s father, with whom she lives. There is no indication that either of them intend to change that state of affairs. Christians of my acquaintance call that ‘living in sin’ and most Muslims would not approve either, no matter the veneer of faux tolerance assumed by many – and I know several personally. In the eyes of many theists whatever the flavour, Jacinda Ardern has committed a moral crime, and there are faiths that would condemn her to death for this. Including Islam, where some interpret it as a form of adultery and it is not that uncommon for women to be stoned to death for this crime.

Then there is there is the Lesbian-Gay-Bisexual-Queer-Trans angle. For many years and long pre-dating her premiership Ms Ardern has been a champion of the rights of those belonging to the LGBQT communities. She has marched in their support including during her time as PM. The Abrahamic faiths are pretty clear on the LGBQT stuff. Don’t. And if you do we reserve the right to kill you. In May 2000 I saw just that in H e r a t when two gay men were tied up, placed on the ground, and an earth-mover used to collapse a large thick wall on top of them. They died, of course. Two women were tied to a bijli pole outside my Kabul office in 1999 and flogged bloody with electricity cables. Lesbians.

Notwithstanding prohibition the tradition of ‘keeps’ persists in the prevailing culture of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa. Keeps Mr Chris, and what are they? They Dear Reader are the pretty boys kept for the purposes of buggery, to be fucked at the pleasure of their keeper and discarded when they are too old or lose their looks. There are reams of Pashto poetry extolling the beauty of peachy boy-bums. Why, I even know couples who would not allow their daughter to be married UNLESS there was a keep in the house and they did not want their daughters fucked up the arse. You would not get them standing up and saying as much in a public place – or even many private ones, but it’s there deep beneath.

Plus she’s a bloody liberal. All over the map on the liberal stuff not just the LGBQT and, dammit…a socialist. A Commie by any other name. And apparently not shy about flaunting it either. Abortion as well. Pretty much a full house there.

But here’s the clincher – Jacinder Ardern is not just secular whatever that means in these days of semantic gymnastics, but a professed agnostic. I looked it up for this piece and here is the Merriam-Webster word on the matter…’: a person who holds the view that any ultimate reality (such as God) is unknown and probably unknowable broadly : one who is not committed to believing in either the existence or the nonexistence of God or a god.’ There is a difference that need not trouble us between atheist (I am) and agnostic which need not detain us here, but it is a position that is not something that most Muslims can accommodate, a cognitive dissonance too far if you will.

I ‘came out’ as an atheist around 12 or 13 and it was considered radical back then, growing less so over the decades, but professing atheism or agnosticism can be tantamount to a suicide note in some cultures, Pakistan included, where such positions attract the attention of the blasphemy laws.

I read today that the mosques where he butchery took place will be operational again in the next couple of days, and can do nothing but admire the fortitude of the Muslim community, that have acted I have to say in the very best traditions of their faith. New Zealand, as remarked by the Imam that led the memorial last Friday has not been broken, and all the evidence before us is that it is emerging stronger. For the rest of the Muslim world there is much to ponder in the aftermath as laid out above. At the moment nobody is breaking ranks at least publicly, irked that a Kafir is getting a well-deserved polishing despite being absent many of the virtues and beliefs that define goodness and greatness or salvation in the (non-existent) afterlife. That may not stand the test of time.

‘A paradox, a paradox, a most ingenious paradox’ they sing in ‘The Pirates of Penzance’ and indeed it is. And delighted to see an honest-to-goodness kafir setting the very best of examples to a world cursed by the collective madness of religion.