Yesterday, the driver arrived at around 10. We’d planned to go to Taxila, see some sights, return, but one of our hosts proposed a different plan which I immediately leapt at. This was to go to Mardan, about 2 hours from Islamabad, there to visit the remains of a Gandharan Buddhist monastery at Takht-e-Bahi, and to have the world’s finest chapli kebabs. So, well, yes. The GF, not being a meat eater, was probably less enthused, but my enthusiasm was sufficient to overrule his reservations, so off we went. First on the motorway, where we passed about a dozen wedding cars, decked in flowers, and some stopped at the side of the road with people dancing around them. We crossed the Indus, here very wide, braided and low on water, but still with a couple of bright-coloured boats moored on what water there was.
Takht-e-Bahi, the town, is small and poor, with a single elevated road soaring over the one-street bazaar to enable those in a hurry to bypass the chicken sellers, etc. It was clear we were no longer in Punjab: the people were immediately different. The men harder in appearance and more dignified, with fewer of the soft edges you see in Punjab. The women was veiled, of course, far more of them in brown shuttlecocks than you see in Punjab, but there were certainly a lot of women around, perhaps more than in many small central Punjab towns.
The chapli kababs were remarkable. By far the best I’ve had in my life. They were tender, speckled with its of fat, perfectly spiced. Unbelievably good, a worthy replacement for the disappointment of missing Baking Virsa.
We ate them in the family room, which was divided into small curtained cubicles, served by a deaf man and an elderly waiter, both of whom were very solicitous indeed to a woman and a gora. Of course I covered my hair, but it’s fair to say it was obvious I was not from these parts.
After that delightful lunch we went up to the monastery. It’s a World Heritage site, located on a hill top in a nature reserve, so the setting was beautiful. The car park is at the foot of the hill and then you climb up but the broad, well kept park is along the hillside and protected from the sun, with plentry of greenery around. We were stopped by a small security detachment who took the GF’s passport and my ID card, but seemed concerned mainly with whether we had cigarettes. There had been two accidental forest fires recently, one of them told me, and pointed to a bare hilltop which had once been very green.
The site itself was in impressive shape with stupas and halls and monastic quarters. All the statues were gone, sadly, in museums elsewhere in the country and many of the finest pieces in the British Museum or in Germany. A shame, though I daresay they’d have been destroyed quickly enough had they stayed here. But still, it was sad to see the empty niches and bare walls.
We found an employee of the archaeology department who showed us around, including some of the locked up bits, of which the most spectacular were undoubtedly the meditation cells, small black rooms with high arched ceilings encrusted with dozing bats.
Strange that this quiet countryside was once the throbbing heart of Buddhism. But strangely easy to imagine the monastery, with its tall white buildings all over the hilltops, and people in Hellenic robes bustling around.
We returned to Islamabad and took our host off for a cup of coffee and to do some quick shopping. We bought a couple of things for the house – notably a tea mug for me and a truck art box for hte GF, and then I bought a bag for myself from Jafferjee’s, the old, highly established and luxurious leather bag shop from Karachi. Of course I didn’t get one of their more respectible bags, choosing instead a cross-body bag and not even the most grownup of those. I rather regretted this, as I’ve long felt rather immature in my bag choices, but at least it was a step up from my usual canvas, and is extremely practical for travelling etc.
We picked up some fish and tofu, then returned home to cook dinner.