Coda:
The Pure Land

On the morning of my departure, I packed my bag in the hotel room in Islamabad as the call to Fajr prayer moved across the city in the pre-dawn dark, each muezzin's voice finding the others at slightly different intervals, so that the azaan arrived in waves, overlapping, recursive, filling the air with a sound that is, when you have been listening to it for two weeks in a dozen cities, something very close to the voice of a country talking to itself.

Pakistan has six UNESCO World Heritage Sites, all of which we visited. It has twenty-six more on the tentative list, many of which we also visited. It has mountains that are among the highest on earth, rivers that are among the oldest in human memory, a cuisine that is the most underrated in South Asia, and a people who, in sixteen days, refused to let me pay for a single camel ride.

It has a nuclear weapon, two hostile neighbours, a military that has governed it for half its existence as an independent nation, an economy that has been to the IMF more times than most countries have been to the dentist, and a political culture of such spectacular dysfunction that it has managed, in the seventy-six years since independence, to have three heads of government assassinated or executed and several more imprisoned or exiled.

It has the Dancing Girl of Mohenjo-daro: four thousand five hundred years old, her hip cocked with an attitude that says she knows exactly who she is and is not particularly interested in your opinion. She is in New Delhi now, technically. But she belongs, in every sense that matters, to the soil of this particular plain, this particular river, this particular chapter in the long improbable story of human civilisation.