Among the Believers by V.S. Naipaul

Author:V.S. Naipaul [Naipaul, V. S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-78930-3
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-03-22T16:00:00+00:00

10

The Salt Hills of a Dream

The evenings were getting cooler in Rawalpindi; the summer was nearly over. But to take the short bus ride down from the Himalayan foothills to Lahore in the plains of the Punjab was to go down to where it was still very hot. It was also to go down from where farming depended on rainfall to where it depended on irrigation, fed by the rivers of the Punjab.

The irrigated plains of the Pakistan Punjab had been the granary of this part of the subcontinent. But the irrigation that blessed some fields cursed others. With no natural drainage in the Punjab soil, the water table had risen to within ten feet of the surface. Forty percent of the irrigated land was now waterlogged; a quarter of the land was spoilt by salt, white on the soil surface, black and more damaging below. The killer marched underground; but it was possible to see the next line of grown trees whose roots were to rot, the next area of fields where soon nothing would grow.

The village of Raiwind stood in the middle of an area of new desert. To drive out to it from Lahore was to see (because of the flatness of the land) hundreds of blighted square miles (with, here and there, rich green patches still). There was a big gathering at Raiwind. From far away it was like a fair: people going on foot along flat, straight paths to a great tent city, trucks and buses and horse carriages, like miniatures in the distance, kicking up dust (but the ditches were full of water).

It was a religious occasion: in Pakistan the religious excitement never abated. There had been Ramadan and the festival at the end of Ramadan; there had been the excitements of the pilgrimage to Mecca; the Festival of the Sacrifice was soon to come. In the interval there was this: the assembly of a Muslim brotherhood dedicated to the idea that every Muslim was also a missionary for Islam.

They had come, at heaven knows what expense, from all parts of Pakistan and from many other countries as well. They were not among the poor, the people of this brotherhood; many of them were traders. For three or four days they would listen to speeches and live and pray together. Raiwind, where no crops grew, provided a perfect open space. The land was so waterlogged, the water was so near the surface, that to walk in certain places was like walking on a spring mattress.

There were many refreshment tents with striped canvas walls. The main tented area was vast, with innumerable bamboo poles sticking out at varying angles from the hummocked white cover: lengths of white cotton hung on ropes tied to the bamboo poles, the cotton dipping and rising, loosely tacked together, so that in the immense covered area, where it was hard to see to the end, the white covering looked gashed and ripped, revealing bits of pale-blue sky and bits of the dazzling white of the top of the cotton, where the sun struck.

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