Pakistan, 1999

Laughter in the Dark

by Beth Cataldo

"We're going to a market where we can see guns that the locals manufacture," our Pakistani guide Shafiq announced as if it were another Buddhist Stupa or mountain peak. Our tour group had no idea that we were being corralled into a gun mall with loaded weapons in the middle of a lawless land. We got our cameras, and were ready to gawk at the wares.

I kicked up a pile of dust as I moved into the stall, which was a little cubbyhole six feet long and wide. A good-looking James Bond wanna-be with a thick dark mustache and sparkling brown eyes was placing a bullet in the chamber of what looked like a little silver pen. Then he aimed it at the wall and pretended to shoot by pushing the top of the device. Another swarthy man showed me how to load and unload bullets from a .22, displaying its ease of use. Guns, ammo belts and rifles hung on the wall. The guns looked like Russian Kalishnikovs but were actually knock-offs made in northern Pakistan.

I turned to check out the next stall, and bumped into a man with a long hennaed beard and sharp brown eyes. He looked wise - and unfriendly. He was with a man whose grimace seemed carved from stone. They both surveyed me quickly.

The bearded man spit on the ground first. "ALHAMDU LIL-LAHI," he murmured. I knew he was saying, "Praised be to God" because I had studied Arabic a few years earlier. His buddy reiterated his thoughts "ALHAMDU LIL-LAHI," adding a bit more spit to the ground. I'd read that Muslims spit to get the bad taste out of their mouths after seeing certain western ways. I think my body and my blonde hair had offended them.

I was in Sakhakot, in the Northwest Frontier Province of Pakistan. It was noon in the dusty old tribal town. A street lined with small, concrete stalls served as a perfect backdrop. If you didn't need guns, you could load up on a skinned sheep, fresh-baked bread, a woolen shawl, tobacco, gold, dresses, bananas or grapes. I was not in the mood to shop, though, as the hard stares from the passing truckloads overflowing with people had worn me down.

See, in this part of Pakistan you don't see many women on the streets. If you do, they're covered. Perhaps they're covered from head to foot in a burqa, a body veil that looks like a ghost costume with a small window of fabric cut out of the front (so women can see where they are going). Some Muslims aren't that conservative and hide their features with a scarf, which covers all of their head except for their eyes. But in this part of Pakistan almost all of the women were hidden. I had worn my loosest hiking pants and a long-sleeved shirt that made me look rugged, certainly not sexy. Didn't matter, though: Nothing was covering up my long blonde hair or hiding the contours of my body.

"Ok folks follow me in here - there's a few more spots to look at," our American guide, Dolores, was oblivious to what had just happened to me. As the rest of the group followed her under the hand-written Arabic sign, my muscles tightened. The two men remained there, watching the parade of 12 Americans head into the brick building. I heard Judy, the other single woman in the group, flirting with some good-looking arms dealers, taking their photos with her digital camera and showing it to them. I could hear their laughing down the hall. I was stuck in front of the door. Suddenly I felt naked, a show-off, doing an old style burlesque in a crowd full of teetotalers and devout Christians. Years of catechism and confession certainly helped prepare me for this hall of shame. And Christian shame probably wasn't that different from Muslim shame.

"Ok folks, 10 minutes then we're back on the bus," Dolores repeated.

"The bus," I said out loud, eyeing the little 20-seater van that was parked across the street. I didn't need to look at any more guns, I reckoned. I had walked onto the wrong stage at the carnival and it was time to get off. I could watch the action in the mini-mall of arms and ammo shops from across the street in the air-conditioning. I'd find refuge on the bus.

Me, Omar (the bus driver), and a couple who said they didn't think the ammo-mall was a good idea either, waited for the others to return. "Your safety is my first concern," Shafiq, a polite and solid man with a small bulging belly, had told us many times as we careened along washed out tracks and headed through dark towns late at night. After all his assurances, his sudden announcement of our arrival in this non-descript town in the middle of nowhere was perplexing. I wondered why our master of understatement hadn't forewarned us.

I guessed that perhaps he wanted to keep our whereabouts hidden from any potential kidnappers, and that if we had known before hand, we could have slipped and told the odd shop owner or candy seller who could have passed it along to a rogue. He wanted us to travel incognito, mock bandits skulking through dangerous places.

I was having a hard time gauging my surroundings. When we had first arrived in Pakistan from China a few days earlier, Shafiq nonchalantly told us, "From now on, if anyone asks you where you're from, tell them that you work for the UN in Islamabad. You are teaching English. And we need to stay together as a group for the rest of the trip." Judy, the only other single woman on the trip, was sure it was all-okay.

"Why's that?" Judy had asked, defiant and proud about being an American.

"The people in this area live under tribal laws," he explained "The Pakistani government doesn't have any judicial power here." I'd heard kidnappings were popular among these tribes.

"In the hotel, I spoke to a woman from the refugee-aid group," Judy told him, "and she had gone for a jog with some people this morning. She said that there's no danger here."

We were relying on figuring out the truth from Shafiq, who wasn't a member of any of these local tribes and lived in Lahore, an industrial city about 200 miles away. Like a museum docent, he delivered information about the area in an aloof manner, telling us that the inhabitants are mostly Pathans, a fiercely independent tribal society of around 16 million people divided into various clans.

One of the codes they follow is a strict Islamic law governing women, the Purdah, which forces all post-pubescent women to be isolated from any man who isn't a part of her family. In fact, even in their veiled wrappers, women still turned their faces away from our van. They say it's about protecting their honor.

The time passed sluggishly, and I watched a pyramid of people form on the steps outside the bus. There were a lot of local police in dark green uniforms with automatic weapons. The rest of the curious onlookers were most likely vendors from the roadside stalls who'd ceased mid-day sales to watch the scene. I thought I saw young lads in the distance picking up rocks. I yearned to look closer to find out for sure, but the last thing I wanted to do was have eye contact with anyone.

How would the switch get flipped? Would one of the young boys knock on the window and then drag me off, loudly commenting on my inappropriate attire? Or would a tour member on our bus try to photograph the scene and push them all over the edge? We were a distraction at best, a disturbance at worst.

"Ok, we're back," the giddy guide, Dolores, broke the silence as she herded everyone back onto the bus. "Everyone all set?"

Judy got in behind me - she was a Californian, too, from Santa Cruz. I had first spotted her before we even started the trip. A typhoon had detained our plane in Tokyo, Japan, and I was trying to find a place to sleep for the night and a ticket for another flight. As I talked to the agent, I heard a loud noise. "Are you on the trip to Pakistan?" she'd said bellowing across the room. She had on ripped, stained jeans as if she had been gardening for hours or had shot and cleaned an elk before hopping on the plane.

"Yes, I am," I said.

"I'm your roommate, Judy." She smiled and her sloppy smear of lipstick cracked and showed her crooked teeth. When she wasn't smiling, her mouth turned down in a permanent frown - a scowl that embodied her need to always get her own way. Her mascara was rolled on too thick and gave her a cow-like look. She told me she was a strict vegan as she blinked 50 times a minute. I wondered if she were on an illegal substance.

Judy got on the bus and began to giddily show off her digital photos of the gun sellers with their Kalishnikovs. She pulled out a business card from Iqbal and Brothers Arms and Ammo Dealers. The fellows working that booth, it seemed, were the friendliest of the bunch.

But I was distracted by a conversation going on between Shafiq and Dolores. The news then broke, "Ok everyone, we're almost on our way. Unfortunately, we have a flat tire, which Omar is going to fix. After that, we'll be off."

Dolores sat down in the back of the bus, pretending that the flat tire meant nothing. But I had an eye on our guide, Shafiq, whose forehead had broken out in waves of sweat. The sweat from his armpits and belly had soaked through his light cotton top.

When he went outside to watch our driver change the tire, I concentrated on his contorting face muscles. He was gritting his teeth as he observed Omar. I thought it was odd that they left the bus running - must be for a quick getaway.

In the meantime, Judy refused to see the danger looming outside, "These people are completely friendly. We're more apt to get killed in Oakland than here." She waved to the crowd of about 40 Pakistani men that was gathering around our conspicuous vehicle. She thought she was still in Santa Cruz and the world was her 20-foot wave.

"We're animals in this cage," I responded. She continued to smile at the growing swarm. "Don't wave," I demanded, "I think we should just ignore them." I refused to look out the window, and sat with my back to the crowd.

She then took out her digital camera and waved it in front of them all. "Hel-lo," she sang, trying to get their attention.

Dolores suddenly appeared in front of Judy. "Please, no photographs. Put the camera down," she ordered.

The usually chatty group went silent.

I was writing the script for the next disruption, Omar finished propping the tire and got into the front of the bus. Shafiq quietly followed. As we all drove off, I saw them both crack for a moment and reveal their nervousness as they wiped the sweat off their faces. We all applauded. They shook their heads, and never spoke another word about the event. I turned to face the front window as we headed off toward Peshawar, the capital of the Northwest Frontier Province.

Up into the hills we went in our van as Shafiq explained to us that the Pathans' self-reliant survival is based on a harsh climate and guns, not particularly in that order of importance. Although they live off the land, they also make money manufacturing rifles, including those knock-off Colts and Kalishnikovs we saw, and growing hash and opium for export. Their passion for honor, freedom and independence (as well as money, women and land) made us all think of the Wild, Wild, West, Pakistani style. The southerners in our group compared it to Appalachia, which, of course, conjured up scenes from the movie Deliverance.

Night was falling as we passed through one-horse town. In the quiet bus, I was dredging up the strange crimes, odd forms of justice and deterioration of law and order that I'd read about each day in the local English-language paper. Muslims were killing each other in the rising sectarian violence. Wives, sisters and cousins were being beaten and immolated. Cows were stolen at gunpoint. In one case, a man came home from a trip to discover that his cousin had flirted with his wife and he ended up killing them both. Another day, a woman named Shabnam was shot dead by her husband allegedly because of her bad character. Bad character, indeed.

Then came the idea: I would buy a burqa when we got to the bazaar in Peshawar. Not only would I have something to hide under, but it would give me a mission in this land.

When we arrived at the bazaar in Peshawar, Shafiq made it clear that we all had to stay together. "Gordon, you must hold up the rear of the group. No one is to leave my side. You must let me know if anything odd is starting to happen," he told us as we stood at the edge of the sprawling market.

I was entertained by our guide's earnestness, knowing that the request turned this group of hearty adults into powerless disciples. Gordon, slim and shy, was an engineer who was more apt to be pushing around instructions in his head than herding people. But, like the good Girl Scout I never was, I proceeded with Shafiq at the front of the group wanting to catch any nuance of danger he might hide from those who followed farther back.

After five minutes of traipsing through the bazaar, a short man approached and chatted with Shafiq. They moved away from me and spoke in low tones. He was a thin-faced man with a dark mustache and light blue outfit. He had on glasses with opaque yellow lenses, which he probably picked up in the early seventies.

"Is that an old friend?" I asked after the peculiar man walked away.

"No," Shafiq smiled, "He is from Intelligence."

Intelligence? Pakistani Intelligence walking through the bazaar? It was like finding someone from the CIA hanging out in Safeway.

"That makes me happy," Shafiq added with an unusual smirk, "because that means everything is under control."

The sooner I got that burqa the better.

I tested Shafiq, "I need to buy one of these outfits so that I can cover up. Make an honest woman out of myself." He displayed that inscrutable grin as he led me to a shop where reams of colorful patterned material decorated the stall. All sorts of fashion options hung on the walls. I realized that the women wear beautiful clothing underneath their dark cover-ups, but that those garments are reserved for the eyes of friends and family. Strangers aren't as privileged, and must interpret through the tiny perforations in front of the woman's eyes.

"What color do you want?" the burqa dealer asked, unimpressed by the crowd of foreigners filling up his tiny shop. "What have you got?" I inquired, looking around to see if they had many different designs. The rest of the group watched as he pulled out the simple synthetic black, blue and yellow outfits. I was hesitant to touch the cloth as I decided to buy two -- black and blue. I was glad that the seller stuffed them into the bag rather than waiting for me to try it on: one size fits all.

As we headed back through the bazaar, the surroundings began closing in. Lilting "hellos" and piercing eyes made me feel farther and farther away. I felt nauseous and hot, and for moments it was unclear whether a poisonous lunch had kicked in or my body was in revolt. I realized that I could have easily slipped the burqa over my head, and hidden my sickness along with my distracting hair and body. If I honestly wanted to respect their culture, I chided myself, I'd do that. Faceless, I could have walked through the market like the few other female ghouls.

The food poisoning gained a stronghold on my body, and I began to sweat as the crowd floated around me. Piles of colored spices fought for attention - the bright yellow, orange and browns added a dollop of cheerfulness to the dark market. The squawking money dealers and gold merchants popped off the grid, like outlined cartoon characters whose repeating backgrounds betray their simplicity. I leaned against a wall with my bagful of burqas while the others shopped.

As the rest of the group seemed to disappear into boutiques selling Afghani jewelry, I was suddenly faced with a lone woman covered from head to toe in her dark blue body veil. Trying to find her eyes behind that window cut out of the cloth, I stared back at her. We both shamelessly looked at each for an uncomfortable period of time as the rest of the group looked at leather sandals and lapis lazuli. I didn't move, hoping that, as while we silently exchanged glances, some revelation would appear.

Then she started laughing uncontrollably. Her eyes had a jovial gleam. I joined in. I believe it was nervous laughter. She was blatantly showing her curiosity about such a foreign dress code. Was she envious about my freedom? Laughing at my shameful exposure? She probably was thinking about slipping something over my head. I hadn't seen a Pakistani woman for days - at least not a self-contained woman walking around without concerns of what others thought of her. What is it that makes the forbidden cry out to be touched? Something inside of me wanted to strip her naked. All the world's possibilities swirled around us as we laughed and laughed in the middle of the market until my concerned companions came and escorted me away.