How do I describe Islamabad?  I can’t.  Pakistan’s capital city is an experience that doesn’t translate to our local hockey town vernacular. I have twice been told that Islamabad is five miles from Pakistan; a phrase, which refers to how different it is from the rest of the country.  It was purpose built as the capital after partition with India.  The city is based on a grid design, and I am told that if you construct Islamabad on the game SimCity, it doesn’t survive long.  It may be the only capital city in the world without a tram line, a movie theater or a train station.   If I can’t adequately describe the city, I can describe the people.   

Khadijah is a friend and colleague from my five years teaching in Portugal.  She mistakenly opened up and invitation in our third year there to anyone who wanted to see Pakistan over the Christmas holidays.  I jumped at the chance.  The invitation was extended again when a group of us left last June.  Once again I took the bait.

Freeloading of friends is a fine art that I have been perfecting for some time now and this has been my best stop so far. Upon entering the house I take over the biggest room in the place.  My bedroom includes a private bathroom and office desk on the main floor.  My every whim seems to be catered to and the entire family becomes my personal travel consultants, drivers, and translators.  It helps that Khadijah’s family is well off by Pakistani standards.  Both her parents are bilingual and professionally educated and employed.  They employ a maid, a gardener and a handyman from their ancestral village.  They don’t need to, but the jobs help support three families.  I may be the first whitey that the maid has seen in her lifetime.  The difference between the rich and the poor here is appalling, and they fall in the fortunate category.     

Khadijah’s father, Raj Haland, is a curmudgeonly thoughtful man that often tails off his stories in as much Urdu as English.  He asked me my opinion on Chinese manufacturing and exporting within the first hour of my arrival.  In my last visit, we started off a three hour car ride with him questioning my views on the afterlife.  Currently he is harassing all his (frequent) house guests for prayer rugs on my behalf.  It is a joy to sit and hear him tell stories to me, or converse with his friends.  It doesn’t matter that I don’t understand the language; it is the atmosphere of the conversation that he enjoys.  After I spent three hours selecting carpets one day, I returned the next to spend three more hours after he called the shop keeper to discuss my pricing.  Everyone seems to be an old acquaintance.  When my flight to Gilgit was cancelled, he personally, felt it his responsibility to satisfy the wishes of his ‘honoured’ guest.

His wife, on the other hand, actually was the one who helped me arrange my transportation to Gilgit.  We jokingly said that if Haland was in charge, we would still be drinking tea, smoking cigarettes, and talking on three phones to arrange our first active steps.  Selana is a model of dignified elegance, a professor of literature at Islamabad University.  In sharp contrast to buying carpets, which eventually took four trips and seven hours, my car ride to Gilgit was singed sealed and delivered in half an hour.  She outlined to the gentleman behind the counter four specific questions, and with that solved we were quickly on our way.

However, quickly on the way is not typical for Islamabad, or Pakistan in general.  But the hospitality is!  Even as I was drafting the first copy of this I was interrupted by a family friend that made the effort to take me hiking in the mountains start north of the city.  All people that I have met have been very welcoming.  This includes family friends that I have met, as well as the smiling and waving security guards with semiautomatic weapons that I have been saying hello to on my morning walks.  Maybe it is because I am friendly and nice, or maybe it is because I am white.

The other person I have yet to describe here is me, the foreign white guy.  There is not a lot of people like me around here, and we do get treated different; treated better.  I will get served ahead of other people waiting at some shops.  Security guards wave me through beeping metal detectors.  I was a bigger hit than the exhibits at the museum of heritage and culture, which included two people stopping to take a picture with me.  Whiteys do well here, and part of that frustrates me when I see how the regular Pakistani is treated unfairly.  I have no illusions about a superior race or reverse discrimination, they see me and they see money.  What we may drop on bootleg booze tonight could be a month’s salary.  What I dropped on carpets could support a family for more than a year.  I (personally) despise an elitist society, yet I (whitey) an am elite.

People may be the same the world over, but most of the people here are dirt poor.  I don’t think we, in Canada, really understand what dirt poor is.  One attempt at explaining it is to explain the recycling program in Pakistan.  There isn’t one.  Yet everyday hoards of people are sifting through garbage for bottles and paper and scraps of anything to collect and use or sell.  The unofficial recycling system is one of the world’s best, provided the rest of us litter.  It is a hard concept to wrap your head around.

A city is nothing without the people and Islamabad never stops humming with excitement (except during the daily power outages). If the people make the city, then Islamabad is a wonderful, diverse place.  Just don’t expect anything to happen quickly or efficiently.   All I can do is smile and enjoy the ride.

PS Dad what’s new in the NHL? Are the Leafs out?  Are your Habs first?  Where are my Bruins?