The Saints

Is there anybody out there?















Cycling with escorts. As I wrote before there are many benefits, but the constant humming of an engine does get on my nerves. So for the first time I listened to music whilst cycling. Normally I don't do this, as I need all my senses to orientate on the traffic, but now that I have 5 metres of steel bumper behind me, I feel safe enough to build a sound wall of waves.
I must say, you start to feel like a rider in the Tour the France, with a car following you, and a microphone in your ear. When the going is smooth, I picture myself as the breakaway, sprinting ahead of the peloton. There he goes, bête de vélocipède, tete de la course, no one can catch up with him. When I am out of breath, slaving against the wind, trying not to think of the heat, I feel like the stay behind; the officer on duty in the car behind me as the directeur sportif, who has a headache caused by my poor performance.


(Picture: the provincial border: Welcome to the Land of Saints: 'The Sindh'.)

The ride that I described in the previous entry is really interesting as it takes you into a totally new surrounding, culturally as well as geographically. It's the area that functioned as a buffer when an insular subcontinent collided with Asia. Of course this was a very slow process, but the traces are everywhere to be seen. When you have passed the crumple zone - the mountains - you ride onto the plain. You feel that you have left the borderland between Central Asia and the Middle East. A vast plain with mighty rivers stretches as far as Burma. Temperature goes up, humidity too. Tractors drive around with megaphones blasting songs in Urdu and Sindhi, horns sound everywhere. Top heavy trucks barely make 35 km/h, donkeys make a supernatural effort to transport all that didn't make it onto the truck.
The economy's largely dependent on agriculture. Most of the work on the fields is still done manually. Like Brabant - my home province - in the Middle Ages. But tropical. I really like this place, it feels like coming home.


(Picture: boys in the streets of Sultankot, refreshing themselves with bottles of water.)


(Picture: cycle otter 15 kilometre out of Jacobabad, refreshing himself with a river.)


(Picture: neighbouring kid in Sultankot and gambling at the site of the bull cart race.)

In Sultankot I was invited to stay with Mr. Agha Sonny Khan, who I had met before in the hotel in Quetta. Experienced and fortunate, once a minister at provincial level, nowadays a patriarch to the village. Mr. Sonny is a show master, or at least, he uses that word a lot. Show. When he asked me after my story, and I told him about my trip by bicycle, his reaction was 'good show'. When he took me around his village, 'cause that's what Sultankot more or less is, he introduced people by telling me which part of his show they're running. As a politician he knows, it's all show. Like his disgust for Americans ("they are cursed people"). When his son comes to the village in summer to run the show, he flies off to the States to live there with his children.



On one of the evening Mr. Sonny took me out into the fields where a bull cart race was organised. Hundreds of people had gathered to see the race that didn't take longer than half a minute. But it was definitely a spectacular race, with gun shots in the air that introduced a shock wave of cheers for the winner. The guy to the right proved to be the fastest. Mr. Sonny won 600 rupees as he had it right. My grandmother would have sighed and said: "The devil always craps on the same pile."



I mentioned the Middle Ages before, in drawing the parallel to my own province, but there's more to this comparison. Sindh's very much still a feudal society, where land is owned by families that get richer and richer, and where labourers have enough food to eat, but not to grow. They remain dependent on the proprietor, while in practice it's the other way around. Without the many hands that sew, nurture and harvest the crops, this land would be a mishmash of marshes and wastelands.
When I asked my host for the apportionment of the harvest he told me blankly: "We share. They get half, and I get half." The costs for fertilizers and seeds are shared. The taxes are paid by him. That's the cut down. Fair and square the landowners will tell you. The workers don't know better. In total there are about 300 families working on his land, so you can imagine what an incredible amount of wealth is amassed in one family, and how little is scattered among the rest.



And yet, the people treat the landowners with the same respect as they have for saints. When we pass by in the car, they hold their hands as if praying (like Christians do) and smile and say words of praise. In the morning time they come to the bungalow to complain, seek advise, ask for money and whatnot, as most people know from The Godfather.


(Pictures: workers on the lands of the Khan family. Beautiful people.)

There's another interesting historical feature to Sultankot, which means literally the wall around Sultan (Sultan being an ancestor of Mr. Sonny, who's fifth generation if I remember correctly). This Mr. Sultan Khan came down from the hills in Southeast-Afghanistan to help the British form a buffer zone between them and the Afghani's that had just kicked their arses. What would you give me in return if we keep the Pathaans at bay (he himself being one, and an honorary code prescribes that Pathaans don't fight among themselves, although Sultan Khan left his homeland after a dispute), he asked the Raj. "You can live in these lands" was the answer. That's settled then, and he started buying land. Around his residence he built a wall, which would later suffer from the growing pains of the village. When the British left, his offspring stayed.
Over the last 150 years not much has changed, apart from the irrigation system, that has turned these lands into a breadbasket.


(Picture: Rajo with his rooster.)

For five days I stayed with the people of Sultankot. How a small place can grow big on you. Warm welcomes, the guys at the corner store always waiting with tea, kites in the air and water fights in the streets. Afterwards I continued my ride south by taking the Indus Highway. A nice road that takes you through what 5000 years ago was one of the most advanced civilizations. Can't help thinking of what the Dutch would call 'the law of the restraining head start'. Perhaps not fair if you take into account how often this area had to deal with invading armies, but a progressive mind sees room for improvement.


(Picture: boy along the way from Moenjadaro to Dadu. If you look carefully you can see that the river flows through his eyes.)