Travels in a Dervish Cloak
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Average rating5
15
Ratings1
Average rating5
"Since 9/11 the reader has been inundated with academic volumes about radical Islam, the geo-political alliances of Pakistan and the identity of the Taliban. What has been lacking is Travels in a Dervish Cloak, an affectionate, hashish-scented travel book, full of humour and delight, written by a young Irish foreign correspondent living on his wits, on the contacts from his grandmother s address book and with a kidney given to him by his brother. Others might have conserved this gift of a life-saving kidney by living a sober and quiet life, but it had the opposite affect on Isambard Wilkinson, who took to the adventurous life of a Daily Telegraph foreign correspondent like a cat assured of nine lives. His rich and wonderfully intimate picture of Pakistan describes the country in all its exuberant, colourful, contemporary glory. It s a place where past empires, be they Mughal or Raj, continue to shine like old gold beneath the chaotic jigsaw of Baluch, Punjabi, Sindi and Pashtun peoples, not to mention warlords, hereditary saints, bandit landlords, smugglers and party-mad socialites. The only way to understand the contradictions is to plunge into the riot of differences, and to come out grinning."--Publisher's description.
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Isambard Wilkinson is an Irish/British journalist - one with Indian roots (grandmother) and ties to Pakistan. He also suffered from kidney failure and received a donor kidney, and his doctor advised against a trip to Pakistan: “Patients like you who take imuno-suppressive medication are more vulnerable to disease... and have died in such places.”
So despite this, he took the position of the foreign correspondent in Pakistan for The Daily Telegraph, and set himself up in Islamabad for the period of 2006 to 2009. This book was written some time later, published in 2017. From his base in Islamabad he reported on events in Pakistan and Afghanistan. This was a period when Osama bin Laden was in hiding, and thought to be sheltered in Pakistan or Afghanistan, or both.
The books title was inspired by a line in a tract on Sufism written by the 11th century mystic Data sahib, Lahore's patron saint, which said that all the mysteries of the universe could be found in a patched dervish cloak, “...containing as it does the earth, the sun and moon and all the stages of the path to truth”. Wilkinson is quoted in an interview as saying “Pakistan itself seemed to me like a patchwork of peoples living along the threads of rivers and in the folds of mountains, imagining the universe in myriad ways. I saw myself crossing the cloak, grappling with it, trying to understand it, sometimes getting lost in it.”
With his trusty retainers (or often not that trusty), and often joined by his brother as a travelling companion, he moves about Pakistan and Afghanistan chasing stories or travelling for his own enjoyment, meeting people, making connections and experiencing the culture.
Form me the mix in this book is about right - travel, history, contemporary views and thoughts of the Pakistani people he is in contact with. This was a really enjoyable book with poignant moments, funny moments and the reader is exposed to a view of (reasonably) modern Pakistan.
For me 4.5 stars, rounded up.
There were a few quotes I hoped to add, but my memory didn't help retain the page numbers, so I could located on this one on P122, where Wilkinson is talking with his driver.
‘I once took my wife to a spring there,' he said... ‘We saw a woman swimming in the pond. She was...' he cocked an eyebrow and turned two fingers one way, then the other, ‘half woman, and half fish.'‘Ah,' I said, mistrusting my grasp of Urdu. ‘You say,' I twisted two fingers one way, then the other, ‘half woman, and half fish?'‘Yes sir.'‘She had a tail?'‘Yes sir.'‘And you say she had the head of a woman?'‘Yes sir.'‘What did she do?'‘She swam about.'‘What did you do?'‘We kept very quiet.'‘And then?'‘She disappeared.'‘Are you sure you saw this?'‘Absolutely Sir'He looked sidelong at me with reproach at my incapacity for insight into local affairs. I marvelled that one who had seen a mermaid so far inland was permitted to be in charge of a mechanised vehicle.
