Declan Walsh

Who is without sin in the city of my beloved
– Go Forth in the Streets Today in Your Fetters
by Faiz Ahmed Faiz

On my last night in Pakistan, the angels come to spirit me away.
It is a balmy summer evening in Lahore, the ancient city of Mughal splendour, down by the border with India. Lying on my bed in the Avari, Lahore’s grandest hotel, I stare at the ceiling and listen. Sounds of jubilation drift in: honks, hoots and cries; the urgent stampede of hundreds of feet. An historic election is under way, the kind that promises to reshape the destiny of a nation, and this is the street music of democracy, Pakistani style. Tens of millions of people have voted, forming impatient lines or elbowing their way into polling stations across this vast country, from the twinkling, snow-dusted Himalayas to muggy villages on the Arabian Sea. Here in Lahore, as the sun dips low, the most fervent citizens are parading down the Mall, the city’s elegant tree-lined boulevard. They pass under my window – men tottering on cheap motorbikes, three to a seat, or scampering past on foot, waving placards emblazoned with images of cricket bats, tigers and arrows – symbols that help illiterate voters identify their chosen party.

But the triumph of the day transcends any one party. For the first time in Pakistan’s history, an elected, civilian-led government has completed its term of office, and is about to hand power to another one. It might seem a small achievement, but in Pakistan it is stupendously good news. For sixty years, Pakistani leaders have departed power in handcuffs or coffins, expelled by military coups, rigged votes or lurid assassinations. A relatively clean vote: this is novel. Across town at the home of a well-known lawyer, my Pakistani friends are glued to the TV, exhilarated witnesses of history in motion, trading gossip and sipping bootleg Scotch. I wish I could join them. But I can’t.

He campaigned in the company of a caged tiger, his party’s mascot, an unfortunate animal that was paraded across the country. Opponents made fun of Sharif’s prodigious appetite, but the middle classes of Punjab loved him as one of their own, and at boisterous rallies, exultant supporters hailed him as the ‘Teflon Tiger’. The actual tiger was less fortunate: it died of heat exhaustion before the campaign was over

rented a house on the Islamabad chessboard, a four-bedroom villa with a capacious garden, bought a 1967 Volkswagen Beetle (of a marque known to Pakistanis as a ‘Foxy’) for scooting around the city, and acquired three dogs, all strays.

In Pakistan, it seemed, prose could be as rich as poetry. Novelists such as Mohammed Hanif, Mohsin Hamid and Kamila Shamsie were gaining global acclaim for their artful depictions of the country. But daily life offered the best material. ‘We have no need for magic realism,’ a lawyer friend told me. ‘We just have realism

In a country of contradictions, it made sense to visit the opposition. I flew to Dubai, where I found Benazir Bhutto at her suburban villa. She sat in a gilded armchair, tapping on her BlackBerry and picking from a box of chocolates. A Mercedes was parked outside. ‘Do help yourself, Mr Walsh,’ she purred, at once imperious and intimate.

Her two terms of office, from 1988 to 1990 and 1993 to 1996, were marred by disappointments. She sparred endlessly with the army, failed to reform Pakistan’s misogynistic laws, and, along with her husband, developed a reputation for mouth-watering corruption. Benazir denied the accusations, but after she fled into exile, in 1997, lurid details spilled out: Swiss bank accounts, a lavish English country estate and jewellery splurges at the Bulgari and Cartier showrooms in Beverly Hills. She claimed it was inherited wealth. ‘I mean, what is poor and what is rich?’ she said to a New York Times journalist

Depending on who you asked, Islam or the army were supposed to be the glue holding the place together. Yet both, in their own way, seemed to be tearing it apart.

‘The whole trajectory of this place is wrong,’ wrote Cyril Almeida in Dawn, the newspaper established by Jinnah.