Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
most of the crumbling old structures still in use on its summit date
from when the Sikhs ruled the city.
The British took the first census of Peshawar in 1868, and the
numbers boggle the imagination: thirty-one separate castes, tribes,
and races were counted, including seventeen 'Americans'. One
wonders what 'Americans' were doing so far from home just two years
after the American Civil War. Were they Confederates fleeing the
dark days of the Reconstruction? Were they perhaps Irish rebels
evading Victorian justice by claiming another nationality?
Professions practised at the time were similarly exotic and
revealing: '1,425 police, 2,151 priests, 4 printers, 1 jeweller, 5
chemists, 2,411 blacksmiths, 1,701 goldsmiths, 4,806 beggars, 1,201
female musicians, 147 dancing girls and 307 prostitutes.' Ray would
have been well provided for even a century before we arrived.
I noted the many tea shops as we drove through the hectic streets
of the old 'native quarter.' They employed vast and ancient Russian
copper samovars, around which clients congregated. We on the
other hand, were heading into the Peshawar cantonment, opposite
the Kisakhani Bazaar. The permanent military station spread beyond
what was then the Pakistani Frontier Corps' headquarters in the
huge round Sikh fort. Built in a style that could be termed 'Victorian
Pathan,' the cantonment lined two sides of a broad, tree-lined
boulevard, its massive bungalows set far back from the street, their
walls a yard thick, with small, deep-set windows positioned just
below the high ceilings of their rooms - a precaution against snipers.
Dean's Hotel turned out to be our destination, a sprawling
collection of single-storey structures laid out across gardens ablaze
with flowers over three or four acres. Ray instructed me to write a
phoney name and destination in the guest register.
'The fucking thing is copied out ten times a day by a dozen
different intelligence agencies,' he claimed.
Any foreigner in Peshawar is even more suspect than any
foreigner merely in Pakistan: no one ever came to Peshawar for
anything so innocent as tourism. Ray warned me to avoid even the
most innocuous conversation with strangers, and to act doggedly
like a tourist.
We dined that night in the hotel's sepulchral restaurant beneath
