Like a Charm

By Hephzibah Anderson, "The river of faded dreams - The National - Abu Dhabi, UAE Friday, February 13, 2009

This is the story of a river – a river that flows across 2,000 miles and more than 5,000 years.

It’s also the story of Sanskrit priests, Greek soldiers and Sufi saints.

In her award-winning first book, Alice Albinia follows the Indus River upstream and back through time. Her journey from sea to source is also a voyage from the violent birth of Pakistan as experienced by the people of Karachi (close to where the Indus enters the Arabian Sea) to the birth of the river itself, high in the snow-capped mystic mountains of Tibet.

During a history as long and meandering as its own waters, the Indus has been many things to many people.

Before Partition enforced its own divisive boundaries, the river acted as a natural border, separating Baluchistan from Sindh and the North West Frontier Province from the Punjab. It curbed the ambitions of invading forces from the West. And its eddies are of spiritual significance to Muslims, Sikhs and Buddhists.

The river, Albinia writes, “runs through the lives of its people like a charm”, and it is her encounters with these people – some living, some dead legends – that make her odyssey so compelling.

We meet “river saints” like the Shah Abdul Latif, a Sufi poet and chronicler of its lively legends, whose tomb in Bhitshah, Pakistan, attracts Hindu as well as Sunni and Shia pilgrims.

A less orthodox figure of unity is Sarmad, a 17th-century Persian-Jewish trader and poet, who converted to Islam, fell in love with a teenage Hindu boy, and roamed India naked as a sadhu.

Then there are the Sheedi, curly-haired, dark-skinned Muslims who claim descent from Bilal ibn Ribah, the Ethiopian slave who was the Prophet Muhammad’s first muezzin.

Albinia roams around each of her stories, gathering such a wealth of material that she often merely glances on details intriguing enough to sustain pages. In Karachi, for instance, a few sentences sum up several months of adventures that include attending weddings, eating halwa and haleem cooked by refugees who arrived in 1947, and dressing up as a man to infiltrate a gay party at an elite, army-run housing scheme. And then she’s off again.

There is danger, too, some of it the result of Albinia’s own foolhardiness. She crosses the Pakistan-Afghan border illegally, almost forgets to don her borrowed burqa, and hires a Tibetan town drunk as a guide. She even drinks watered-down sewage, though perhaps that’s preferable to some of the food she samples – the opium-infused warthog testicles, for instance. When a Kafkaesque combination of Indian and Chinese bureaucracy threatens to curtail her odyssey, she takes a looping detour to the nearest legal crossing point in Tibet – 4,000 kilometres away.

Throughout, there are ominous notes. For example, the birth village of Guru Nanak, Sikhism’s founder, was once surrounded by forests filled with lions, leopards and tigers. Today, colonial irrigation projects, hunt-obsessed officials and pesticides have left it a dusty plain.

The book’s end takes on the timbre of an elegy. At Ali, in Tibet, Albinia finds the riverbed dry, littered with an old blue boot and a bicycle tyre. “Chinese instant-noodle packets are scattered about like flowers”. Thanks largely to dams, the Indus, for so long a vibrant thread of optimism – an emblem of unity in a region too full of strife – is dwindling.

“One day,” Albinia warns at the close of this accomplished and spirited account, “when there is nothing but dry riverbeds and dust, when this ancient name has been rendered obsolete, then the songs humans sing will be dirges of bitterness and regret.”

Picture: Mohanis fishermen sneak up on unsuspecting birds of the Indus by wearing headgear made from dead herons. Randy Olson / Getty Images

[The book's cover is from http://tinyurl.com/czk6tn].