Waiting for the Boom
By Mohsin Hamid
There is no electricity in my house as I pack my bags. A sudden windstorm has damaged a power transformer on my street in Lahore, so I am forced to hunt through my sock drawer in flickering candlelight. But I am excited, because I am embarking on a search for paradise, in a place called Gwadar.
Pakistan today is a country of enormous potential and enormous uncertainty. There is much to be hopeful about. Peace with India is being discussed. Property prices and the stock market are booming. On the television are a dozen recently launched local channels, ranging from news to music to fashion. But at the same time, Pakistan remains desperately poor. School enrollment is among the lowest in Asia. Militant religious groups remain a grave threat. And the fate of the country is tied closely to that of one man, President Pervez Musharraf, a regular target for assassins.
Like many Pakistanis caught between optimism and nervousness, I am constantly seeking sources of encouragement, signs that life here will continue to change for the better. Symbols are important to me, and my mood tends to brighten after each victory of the national cricket team, each announcement of improving economic data.
So I am thrilled to be going to Gwadar, a small fishing village on the Arabian Sea in Pakistan's largest but most sparsely populated province, Baluchistan. Gwadar is said to be Pakistan's great boomtown, a place of incredible beauty and unparalleled opportunity. Chinese engineers are building a $250 million deepwater port there with the potential to link all of Afghanistan and Central Asia to the sea. Newspapers are filled with articles predicting that Gwadar will become the "Dubai of Pakistan" and with advertisements trumpeting pictures of under-construction luxury hotels and residential communities.
As I leave my house, I step into a cool breeze, the pleasant aftermath of the day's storm. My flight to Karachi, where I will spend the night before connecting to Gwadar, is smooth and uneventful. But a friend who has come to pick me up from the airport tells me that Karachi is tense. A few hours earlier, terrorists attacked a Shia mosque in the city, killing 15 worshippers.
It is not an auspicious beginning to my search for paradise.
* * *
A large group of foreign-looking people traveling in Pakistan is an uncommon sight, so I am not surprised that many of my fellow countrymen are staring at the Chinese engineers sitting beside me the following morning in the departure lounge of Karachi airport. But the smiles that the Chinese are receiving, the handshakes and words of support from complete strangers, do surprise me.
As I listen to the brief conversations taking place in broken English between Pakistanis and Chinese, I begin to understand. A car bomb has killed three Chinese engineers in Gwadar. The Pakistanis in the lounge are expressing their gratitude for the work the Chinese are doing and for their decision to persevere despite the attack. "Pakistan, China, good friends," a middle-aged Chinese man says to an elderly Pakistani, who looks pleased to hear it. I am pleased, too. Pakistan's friends are few and far between these days. Much of the world seems to look on our country with a mixture of suspicion and fear. But these Chinese engineers appear calm, professional and not in the least resentful or hostile.
Gwadar's runway is too short to accommodate a modern Boeing or Airbus, so we board an ancient, propeller-powered Fokker. We take off with a roar. In just a few minutes, the urban sprawl of Karachi has given way to the arid and rugged Baluchistan coast, a muscular, bony land edged by the cool blue of the sea. I find myself trying to visualize Gwadar, playing with images of other seaside paradises I have visited. Bali comes to mind, and Portofino, but I dismiss the first as too green and the second as too wealthy. Perhaps Gwadar will be like Mykonos, with its whitewashed buildings and dry coastline.
"Are you going to buy property?" asks the man in the seat beside me as he opens a metal briefcase and takes out brochures covered with hand-written notes.
"No, I'm looking for paradise," I say, adding, "for an article I'm writing. Is Gwadar as lovely as people say?"
"The port is almost done. And soon they will complete the coastal highway to Karachi. Now is the time to buy."
"Yes, but what does it look like?"
He is distracted by a flight attendant, who has brought us sandwiches. Then he begins entering figures into a calculator. I decide not to ask him again.
* * *
There are small airports around the world that have the immediate effect of making the tourist relax, secure in the knowledge that he or she has indeed arrived in paradise. Gwadar's airport is not one of them. Men in uniform with automatic weapons guard the perimeter and far outnumber those civilians who have come to receive passengers. Also, there are no taxis. Instead, there are for-hire Toyota 4x4 pickup trucks that look like the vehicles Taliban fighters drove in TV footage of the 2001 Afghanistan campaign.
I nod to the driver of one of these, negotiate a rate and hop in. I ask him to show me sights he thinks are particularly beautiful.
"Do you want to buy land?" he asks me.
"No. I'm a writer. I want to see places you think are unusual. I want to know their stories, the stories of your area."
"I will take you to where land is a million rupees an acre."
"I'm not here to buy land."
My driver, Faisal, insists again, and eventually I give in. We race out into the desert on a remarkably smooth road. Suddenly, he stops. "Here," he says.
I look around. Empty desert stretches out in every direction. In the distance, sharp hills mark the horizon. "What is this?" I ask, puzzled.
"Good land."
I see sand, stones and some scraggly bushes.
Faisal tells me that there will soon be houses, and he points to a network of pylons and wires snaking off to our left to show me that there is already electricity. When I ask if he really thinks the city will reach this far inland, he says Gwadar will be huge one day and that this will be near the center.
Faisal takes me to Golden Palms, a luxury development I have seen gleaming from numerous advertisements in Lahore. When we arrive, I see a sign with the words "Golden Palms—Bringing Dreams to Life," a single-room shack announcing itself as the site office and what appears to be empty desert except for rows of white stakes in the ground.
For the first time, I begin to wonder if Gwadar could be just a mirage, a speculative boom built on flimsy fundamentals. But I don't want to believe that. I've come here looking for hope. So I tell myself that I'm no urban planner or civil engineer. All this really could be a paradise waiting to be born.
Much to my relief, the town of Gwadar is indeed spectacular in its setting. Its low, rough buildings fill a slender isthmus stretching out into the sea and culminating in a massive, cliff-ringed hammerhead of rock. The port nestles beside these cliffs, wonderfully protected from the open water, and on either side, gentle bays curve away in long stretches of beach that lead eventually to steep, sharp-edged mountains.
But physical beauty aside, Gwadar is essentially a poor fishing village, a rough-and-ready little settlement with a very visible paramilitary presence. Women are kept well covered and do not often stray into public areas frequented by men. There is little evidence that much work on the luxury hotels I've read about has even begun.
As I walk along the beach one afternoon, watching the day's catch being off-loaded from small wooden boats onto carts pulled by donkeys knee-deep in the surf, a local boy named Abdul strikes up a conversation with me, asking if I have come to buy land. I shake my head and ask him what he thinks of the new hotels that will be built here.
"We are excited," he says. "We want people to come. I am a good swimmer. I can teach them to swim. I will tell them not to be scared of the sea snakes."
"Are they poisonous?"
"One bite and a grown man is dead."
There is excitement in Abdul's eyes as he talks about the future. But try as I might, I just don't see it. I cannot imagine a tourist paradise developing here, in a place where women are not allowed to do their shopping outside of the women's section of the market, let alone put on swimming suits and venture out into the sea, and where lethal sea snakes lurk beneath the waves.
Yet, there is undeniable beauty here. Offshore, protected from the open sea by the cliff-lined bay, Gwadar's fishing fleet bobs on the sparkling water. Beyond the horizon, not far away, are Oman, Iran and the oil wealth of the Persian Gulf. Perhaps I am missing something. Perhaps there really is reason to be hopeful. After all, even in the Garden of Eden, paradise was home to a serpent.
I escape the afternoon heat by taking a nap in my modest but clean motel, apparently the nicest place to stay in the bazaar. When I wake, I go for an evening stroll. Despite my earlier disappointment with the lack of visible activity at the large new property developments, Gwadar is certainly changing. Small signs of growth abound, with many houses and shops in the process of adding second and even third floors.
On closer inspection, Gwadar has much one would not expect to find in a poor fishing village. There is a place called the Global Internet Cafe, for example, and a video-game arcade packed with young kids in colorful T shirts. There are restaurants with televisions connected to satellite dishes, numerous public call offices offering international dialing and fax services, and even more numerous establishments advertising themselves as property dealers. There is also an amazing absence of seafood.
In the main square, I take a seat on a wooden bench under the night sky near a sign offering dishes of chicken and lamb. The owner of the restaurant comes to me, and after inquiring politely if I want to buy land, asks me for my order.
"Why don't any of the restaurants here serve seafood?" I ask him.
He laughs. "We can if you wish. But it is best to tell us the night before, so we can buy it fresh when it comes in. You see, we used to eat mostly fish. But now our fish commands such a high price that it is auctioned at the harbor and sent off for export. With the price we get, we can buy enough chicken for two men with a fish that would feed only one."
He seems pleased by this. My fellow diners are devouring chicken with such enthusiasm that I suspect they do not mind the change in their diet. Trade has brought them increased prosperity and access to goods they could not previously afford. That may not be the paradise I had in mind, the sanitized and glamorous paradise of a world-class tourist resort. But it is certainly a kind of paradise nonetheless, something for which most of Asia's billions pray every day.
On the morning of my flight back to Karachi, I am informed by Pakistan International Airlines that although my ticket says I have a confirmed seat, I do not in fact have one. I go to a public call office and phone Lahore and Karachi, trying to find someone who can sort out this problem. But it is a weekend, and I have limited success until a local man sipping a cup of tea beside me intervenes on my behalf. His name is Babu, and in addition to being a property dealer, he is also a telephone repairman. "Everyone knows me," he says. "And they all owe me a favor."
He takes my ticket and drives off on his motorcycle. Fifteen minutes later he is back, and my problem has been solved. I thank him, and we get to talking. I ask him what he thinks of the plans for Gwadar's future. "We are very happy," he tells me. "Here there has been no development for so long. We don't even have a hospital. Pakistan had forgotten about us. But now things are changing."
I remember walking along the beach a few days earlier and seeing the shattered glass that marked the site of the recent car bombing. I ask Babu why, if the people of Gwadar are so happy about the project, someone targeted the Chinese. "It was not one of us," he says. "But outsiders sometimes come. Strange people from Afghanistan and Peshawar and Islamabad. They do not come for business. We do not know why they are here. But I know that we did not do this thing to the Chinese."
He invites me to his home for lunch, and I eat with the men of his family. I ask them about reports I have read that tribal leaders in Baluchistan are opposed to the development of Gwadar, because they fear it will only benefit non-Baluch outsiders. They admit that this is true for some of the inland Baluch tribes, but not for the people of Gwadar itself. That said, they also tell me that they are disappointed that locals have so far been given few jobs. "We want other Pakistanis to come here and invest," Babu says. "But we should not be excluded. It will not be fair to us if outsiders buy all our land and leave us without work."
I think about this on the flight back to Karachi as my Fokker bucks and rears through a turbulent sky. I hope that there is indeed a plan to make sure the locals continue to benefit and that Gwadar does not become just a speculative game for the rest of Pakistan. Because although I did not on this trip find the paradise I was looking for, I did find what could be a source of hope for thousands of poor people in Baluchistan if Gwadar is managed correctly.
My search for paradise in Gwadar only reinforced my feeling that Pakistan is a land of both potential and uncertainty. This is not surprising, I tell myself as my Fokker banks sharply and comes in to land. After all, in the Sufi tradition, a successful quest for paradise always takes the searcher back to himself.
(From: TIME Asia Magazine) |