Kashif Noon
Writing in metaphors is safe. This is the story of two travelers’ misadventure. The last tehsil of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province bordering Baluchistan is Draband. I am certain that most of my fellow Pakistanis must have not heard of this place. It is indeed in the middle of nowhere. Let us call it
Macondo. The travelers reached Macondo at around 11 am on a sultry late morning on their way onwards. For those who have travelled through our Macondo, would know that there is a bottleneck 90 degrees turning, smack in the center of the town. If that turning is blocked the traffic from both sides gets blocked, and so it happened on that late morning, when the two travelers arrived at Macondo.
There was a crowd of young and old men who were blocking that turning. Their demand was the release of bodies of 6 slain young men. The conversation buzzing in the crowd of travelers informed the crowd about this occurrence. The two intrepid travelers as part of the buzzing crowd, now understood the reason of the blockade. The crowd came to know that the law enforcement people had killed six local boys and were withholding the bodies. I have no near or even distant claim about knowing the facts, therefore I am just telling what the buzz was telling. The use of word ‘buzz’ is deliberate because it was an actual composite sound, as other travelers from both sides were trying to understand the problem and talking. The town of Macondo was abuzz.
The driver who frequented this route told us that we could sit at a roadside hotel near a petrol station on the Baluchistan side. We headed his sound advice and sat down in the hall of the hotel. We ordered food from the limited choices that we were presented with. The hotel had fans and the day was hot and humid. The food came we ate, waiting. Waiting is a tiresome business, so we started to stroll. We noticed that the traffic from both sides was now piling up. Other cars had also started to come to the only eatery in Macondo. It was clear that the little place did not have enough provisions to cater for the spike in demand. The supply side economics were collapsing. Prices were rising steeply. A water bottle’s price was increasing at the rate of 100% per hour. The economics of the protest was quickly unravelling.
People were making insane profits at a micro scale, but they were.
Meanwhile, at that same micro scale, entrepreneurship was also springing. The only useable bathrooms were near the mosque of the petrol station. The prayer leader had placed a chair near the entrance of the toilet and was charging PKR 30 per person per visit. There is no harm in adding to the charity income of the mosque. There was also that little girl, hardly ten years old, who had started selling tea from a thermos. Me and my fellow traveler were sitting on the only two available chairs. She tried to sell us the tea but the cups were too unclean so we let it pass. I gave her some money without buying her ware.
She was innocent enough as not to insist and accepted the money and went looking for other customers. The only eatery of Macondo had finished its reserve of tea. Her little business was flourishing. Later when I went to the only shop of Macondo, which was selling water bottles, I a saw her sitting on a bench eating candies. She gave me a very beautiful smile. The smile of a child for whom candies were probably a dream and my extra money had made it possible for her achieve her dream. I am sure her mother or father would do the accounting after she would close shop. My meager amount was her bonus. I was happy in that dreadful gloom of an endless wait.
First the shop ran out of water, then all the soda bottles and eatables. The supply side had crashed. The protesters were sitting there relentlessly. Families coming from Quetta side were in a state of despair as there was only one female toilet. The children sitting in sparse tree shades were crying. It was misery all around. At nightfall me and my fellow traveler decided that we should return back to Dera Ismael Khan, the city we had left in the morning. We turned the car after great difficulty. I also noticed the discipline of the truckers. They were the only ones keeping the queue. All other vehicles had occupied the wrong side of the road. After prolonged haggling we managed to turn the car and slowly started to head back. The luck was not with the intrepid travelers and residents of Macondo realized that the traffic turning back would mean the pressure would loosen on the authorities, who were acting authoritatively by deciding not to negotiate. Therefore, the younger population of Macondo closed the return roads also, preventing anyone from turning back. So here we were stuck in Macondo on a very hot and humid night.
Me and my fellow traveler had by now exhausted our conversations and were hopelessly sitting in the car. A young man approached me and said that he and his partner had arranged a pass with local boys through the narrow streets of the town. He needed to go because their diesel was leaking. I thought that their fuel tank must have sprung a leak. It was a risk but it was worth taking considering our current circumstances. We asked the driver to follow the boy’s car. I told him that their diesel was leaking. The driver to my surprise, informed me that it was not the car’s diesel that the boy was talking about. The car itself was filled up with diesel in specially designed cavities and they were smugglers. Suddenly, it dawned on me that we were following a possible or probable moving bomb.
As we turned through narrow streets the car full of fuel in front of us was stopped by a stick wielding group of boys. They demanded money from the diesel boys. I think they gave them some money and they let them pass. Our turn was next, they came to us. We denied carrying any contraband, they checked and were satisfied. Their head came to my window and demanded a payment even if we were not carrying any contraband, ostensibly “for their trouble”. We paid them a thousand and emerging from the maize of narrow streets we found ourselves on the same road. The informal economy of extortion was also flourishing in Macondo.
Having given up on existence of decency, we got out of the car and strolled aimlessly. A shop was open, actually all shops in the town of Macondo were open, they were not selling anything but open they were. There were a few Charpoys in front of one of the open shops. Travelers like us were perched on them. We also found a place to squeeze in. They were locals and were talking insistently about what was going on. It was oddly a celebratory atmosphere and ironically it was connected to the despair of now hundreds of travelers. An old man who was sitting near us started talking. On knowing that we had come from Islamabad and we were neither traders nor people who were regulars, he softened up. He went inside a nearby house and brough out two charpoys with pillows. He considered us Bonafide travelers and the religion and tradition both command that travelers are to be cared after. He did what he believed in; a good and kind deed. He offered us his support and we gratefully accepted it. A glimmer of decency in that circus of racketeering was refreshing.
The situation was getting tense. Groups of travelers were gathering, the voices started to rise and a powder keg in Macondo was ready to explode. We were also getting uneasy, very uneasy. Suddenly, the lady luck smiled and there was a cacophony of voices asking people to give way for a patient in critical condition. Quickly we decided to follow the car which was taking the patient. We were lucky to find a place behind that car. I also observed that despite very close spaces, vehicles, trucks, buses, people in the cars, did make way for the patient. Another glimmer of decency. Eventually we were able to clear the pile up of traffic stuck at Macondo and safely made it back to the town. The line of vehicles on this side was more than 10 km long. Women and children who were travelling in night buses were stranded in hostile and inhospitable conditions. There was no sign of the government.
P.S. The metaphor of Macondo is borrowed from Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude, because in Macondo the dominant theme is inescapable and inevitable repetition of history.
The writer freelances as a consultant and works on public policy issues. He tweets @kashifnoon
