35053668-Empire-of-the-Soul-Paul-William-Roberts

‘I LIKE TOO MUCH THE PHFIT-PHFIT’
‘Khudai de mal sha,’ he called out. May God be with you.
Compared to Urdu or Hindi, Pushtu was an alien, unfamiliar
tongue, a tongue with something grand and ancient about it.
Soon we removed the sheets.
‘He think you my khaza,’ Hadji explained. Khaza was woman or
wife. ‘I tell him Hadji have too much khaza for one car.’ He laughed
himself into a hideous fit of coughing, the anguished barking of
lungs weighed down with kilos of cannabis resin.
Now the icy waters of the Swat River were tumbling along
furiously below the roads, and the pine-covered slopes on either
side became steeper.
My carnal heart is an Afridi, who cares nothing for religion.
Its good thoughts are few, and it is very much given to
wickedness . . .
The call of the muezzin is not to be heard anywhere in the
Afridi land,
Unless you listen to the crowing of the cock at the dawn of day.
– Khushal Khan Khattak, seventeenth century
Hadji eventually revealed, with some pride, that he was an Afridi, a
member of one of the fiercest of the Pathan tribes. Much later I
remembered the story he told while reading Khushal Khan’s poetry.
Many years ago, he announced, a pir, a Muslim holy man, had
come from India to visit his people. He told the Afridis what dreadful
sins they had committed, pointing out that in all of the Afridi lands
there was not one single tomb of a saint where they could worship.
‘My people they were too much impressed by this old pir’s words,’
said Hadji, growing implausibly grave. ‘So they are killing him, and
now this holy-man tomb is too much popular place of worshipping.’
He burst into another lung-ripping bark of laughter.
I came across the same story in 1992, in an account written by
some British traveller in the 1850s.
‘The Church Hill,’ Hadji suddenly announced, pointing vaguely
to his left.
There were hills everywhere – none, however, with churches, or
indeed any kind of buildings, on them. I did not pursue the
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