Breakfast at Kan Mehtarzai

Awhile ago, I wrote about Kan Mehtarzai railway station, which is the highest railway station in Pakistan. Located at a height of 2,224 metres (7,295 feet). The railway station was part of the the Zhob Valley Railway (ZVR). This once the longest narrow gauge railway system of the Indian Subcontinent, served the British and the Balochistan Chrome Ore Company.

Today I share a post 'Breakfast at Kan Mehtarzai' written by the famous traveler and writer Salman Rashid. My friend Shirazi often publishes travelogues of Salman in his blog and today this post caught my attention. Since I had already written about this remotely located railway station, I thought of adding Salman Rashid's account too to make the journey to Kan Mehtarzai complete and wholesome.

Read on the beautifully worded account of history of Kan Mehtarzai right from the breakfast table.

Balochistan was the greatest railway adventure there was in Pakistan. It drubbed the much-flaunted Khyber Pass train by miles. I wish I could talk of it in the present tense, but sadly that is not the case. It was once a great railway adventure.

There was, for example, the magnificent line that ran north of Sibi through Harnai, into the Chappar Rift and on to Quetta. The marvel of engineering on this line was the Louise Margaret Bridge that stitched the gaping crack of the Rift. The line died back in July 1942 after it was washed out by a massive torrent during a rainstorm. This wasn’t the first time such a thing had happened. The Chappar Rift was famous for recurrent maintenance problems and the question of dismantling it had been considered before. The war was on, steel was needed for munitions and in any case the Bolan route was in service. And so the line in the Rift was uprooted. Today all that remains of this glorious piece of railway engineering are bridge piers, line bed and abandoned railway stations.

The other great one was the Zhob Valley Railway (ZVR), so named for following the course of the Zhob River. While the Chappar Rift line was broad gauge (5’-6”), this one was the tiny Narrow Gauge (2’-6”). It ran northeast from Bostan on the Quetta-Chaman route to Zhob – or Fort Sandeman as it had been renamed by the British. Its length of three hundred kilometres made it the longest Narrow Gauge line in the subcontinent. I had once thought that at 2224 metres above the sea, Kan Mehtarzai station was the highest Narrow Gauge railway station in the world. But I now know that it is Ghum on the line to Darjeeling in India. The latter being thirty-five metres higher than our Kan Mehtarzai.

The ZVR was laid during the First World War. But then it ran up only as far as the chrome mines of Hindubagh (renamed Muslim Bagh in the 1960s) that was used in the manufacture of munitions. In the 1920s the line was extended to Zhob with dreams of it going across to connect with Bannu in the North West Frontier Province. But that dream became a victim of the uncertainty of the 1930s and the Second World War. What Pakistan inherited at independence, it was the sacred duty of her sons to undo. And so barely forty years down the line we had successfully closed the ZVR.

Snow clad landscape of Kan Mehtarzai - a desolate and abandoned place now

The first time I traveled the length of the line in 1992, it was not by train but by car: the line had been dead for some six years or so. Whereas India draws train buffs from all over the world to its various railway lines, we have been great ones for shutting down our best showpieces. And so this line became a victim of part apathy and mostly inefficiency and corruption. Half-hearted attempts to revamp the line were made and the locomotives that rest and rust in the sheds at Bostan were overhauled some years ago. But no work was done on the civil works of the disintegrating line. For some time the refurbished locomotives were periodically fired to keep them work. Bye and bye all was forgotten and the last time I saw them in 1999, they were beginning to lose their shine once again.

As I stood on the platform at Kan Mehtarzai on that blustery November morning in 1992, I imagined myself in the First Class Sleeper on the NG-10 pulling in en route from Zhob to Bostan. And I had imagined myself making ready for the bearer to pop into the carriage with his stack of breakfast trays. The idea of toast and eggs at the highest Narrow Gauge station in the country (the world, as I then believed) had tickled me. I found myself wondering if, when the line worked, travellers had paused to consider the uniqueness of their situation.

In Bostan in 1992, Mirza Tahir the Station Master remembered the glory days of the ZVR. Winters were pretty hard on the tiny Narrow Gauge locomotives, he had told me, and it was not uncommon for trains to be caught in snowdrifts. Tahir remembered the great snowstorms of the winter of 1970. So deep was the snow that the snow-plough in front of the locomotive just could not make way. The train foundered. The fireman built up steam while the driver tried again and again to nose through. But the snow was too deep – nearly two metres – it was said, and they had to give up. They dropped fire and waited.

While the passengers walked to the highroad that runs parallel to the line and got away as best as they could, the telegraph wires buzzed. Bostan was informed of the snow-bound train and requested for a rescue locomotive. Out came one steaming and puffing through the wintry landscape only to be caught in the snow a few hundred metres short of the stranded train. Bostan sent out yet another one and even that could not make it. Tahir said it took them a few days to clear the line and get it going again.

Since that journey along the ZVR thirteen years ago, I have passed through Kan Mehtarzai half a dozen times. Once or twice I detoured to the station just to check things out. But none of my trips had been in midwinter after a good fall of snow. Kan Mehtarzai station, as I knew it, was always dusty and wind-blown sitting in a treeless openness with a touch of a spaghetti western. I knew I was lucky when I got a chance recently to be there with the area in the grip of what many people would call bad weather: for several days there had been incessant rains and snow on higher altitudes. After years of drought, this was the best thing to happen to the Balochistan plateau and local farmers were joyous at the prospect of the harvest that the summer would eventually bring.

For me this was the chance to get to Kan Mehtarzai and imagine what it must have been like during the blizzards of 1970. The distant peaks and the rolling hills around the village were all nicely couched in deep snow and looked a darn sight better than their normal summer khaki. Snowmen being a Western partiality, there were none to be seen. Strange that when it snows, building a snowman does not come spontaneously to these people. Perhaps unprompted artistic expression is not part of our make-up. Or perhaps it is because we have not yet invented waterproof mittens that will keep the fingers from freezing while we attempt to flaunt our creativity. In town, business was shut and the few open doors showed shawl-wrapped men huddled around fires. Kan Mehtarzai seemed a bit of a ghost town.

Bordered by orchards where the apricot and almond trees were all undressed for the winter, the unpaved lane taking off to the south from the main highway was still unmistakable seven years after my last visit. The only difference was that it was under snow that a tractor gone before us had churned up into slush. We left the jeep short of the station and with snow crunching underfoot walked around a fencing, under the tall water tank and on to the platform.

I did not remember the set of three freight wagons, in their prescription reddish-brown, from my last visit. Surely they must have been abandoned there when the line worked. Only I had failed to register them. They were as bound in the snow as the trains in the winter of ’70. This time round, however, the snow was about a metre deep. On the ZVR, the cutest things on the entire pre-partition North Western Railway are the darling station buildings. I have not seen them duplicated anywhere else in Pakistan. They are, with only a couple of exceptions, all mud-plastered; they come with a pitched roof and, to one side, a neat octagonal tower-like structure with a conical roof. This was the ticket window. But only for those who cared to pay fare, for most travelers on this line considered it their birthright to go free. Indeed, that was one of the reasons for the line’s untimely demise.

Icicles were draped along eaves that were shaded from the sun for most part of the day. Glass-less lamps that once lit up the platform at night emphasized the dereliction of the station. The mud plaster on the facade was beginning to crack and peel and the roof on the north side of the building had caved in. This portion, if I remember correctly, bore a sign in 1992 marking it as the Station Master’s office. The rest of the station had been taken over by a family for we could hear women and children behind the matting that shielded them from prying eyes. A young lad from this family came around to check out my friend Naeem and me. I wondered if others came around to photograph Kan Mehtarzai railway station or he thought we were a pair of loonies with nothing better to do than to have our ears fall off with cold.

Snow completely covered all signs of the platforms and the track. Years ago this is how it must have appeared to travelers on this line. And when in the winter of 1970 the train failed to show up, the Station Master must have sent out a patrol to see what had become of it. Now nothing happens at Kan Mehtarzai. They don’t even build snowmen on the platform. Only the squatters bicker behind the matting.

I lament again the waste of a perfect showpiece of a railway line that could have helped Pakistan earn a few good tourist dollars. But that would have happened if the writ of the State held and if there were dedicated men in the railways. All those I had spoken to concerning the reopening of the ZVR as a tourist line had said it could not be done. There were too many problems and not enough finances. That I know to be untrue: we first permitted a working line to go to seed and now we complain of not enough funds to revitalize it.

India did much better with her Narrow Gauge show pieces in Simla and Darjeeling. But how can we, god-fearing Muslims, be expected to emulate those godless enemies of our beloved country.

Salman Rashid is author of eight travel books including helium: City of the Vitasta and The Apricot Road to Yarkand 

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Salman Rashid on The Apricot Road to Yarkand

Is there anything more beguiling than a true tale of high adventure well told? Stories about places like Pakistan and China sides of Muztagh Pass, braving difficult odds under overwhelming conditions in far flung locales, relating to people of Pakistan and Chinese Turkistan who had been in the area centuries ago, can keep anyone glued to The Apricot Road to Yarkand by Salman Rashid.

The Apricot Road to Yarkand is a spellbinding tale of journey from Shigar Valley to Yarkand in the North, over the glaciated Mustagh Pass by Salman Rashid. The author is master of conveying what seems to be going on in his heads in gripping prose that is never clichéd.

First, a word about the author. Salman Salman is Pakistan's foremost travel writer. His passion for writing is matched by his passion for photography. His research, range of visual subjects and narratives make a remarkable combination. In addition to eight travel books, his work appears in leading English language journals. In The Apricot Road to Yarkand, Salman Rashid has also told how he switched his career in the army to become a full time researcher and a writer. (I keep thinking how Salman Rashid would have been in appreciating tactical situation on battle grounds if he was still in army?)

Salman Rashid is a historian in the truest sense. He writes from a knowledge standpoint as opposed to a position biased toward the dominant paradigm and its conquests. A moving writer, Salman reminds the heart of its search for power in a world which has forgotten its purpose for existence. As usual, Salman Rashid, 54 when he undertook the journey, delivers a ton of current information all based on historical research. No one else seems to have half the energy of this man. What is more, Salman Rashid is currently translating the book into Urdu language.

In The Apricot Road to Yarkand, Salman Rashid recounts his journey from Shigar Valley to Yarkand and he does so in frank and honest terms. Result of sixteen years of dreaming about everything that sits on the historic route from Baltistan to Yarkand, The Apricot Road to Yarkand is an epic to the essence of exploring mountains, but it is also about of the cultural, geological, and biological make up of mountains, people of that area, human behavior in difficult situations, and history and about joy of about watching purple-gray clouds spreading out like an atmospheric ocean in all directions as far as the eye can see.

Alan Hovaness once wrote, "Mountains are symbols of mankind's search for God," and Allen Ginsberg told us, "Things are symbols for themselves." In The Apricot Road to Yarkand, Salman Rashid allows the mountains to be symbols of the seeking soul and at the same time symbols of themselves - they are encountered as we internalize them in our quest, and they are encountered as they really are: cold, hard, lonely, mighty and sometime hazardous.

The Apricot Road to Yarkand inspires its readers to explore the less explored areas and experience for themselves what only a few had the fortune to discover. Well-written and wonderfully presented, the book is a must read for anyone remotely interested in mountains, adventures or for those who want to find out why a chunk of land was handed over to our best friends. I highly recommend it.

Fellow of Royal Geographical Society, Salman Rashid is author of eight books including jhelum: City of the Vitasta

Also at Doodh Patti,  Logic is Variable and  Light Within

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By Trolley through the Bolan Pass

Salman Rashid

The early years of the 19th century saw the beginning of one of the greatest struggles of modern times: the tussle between the two imperial powers of Russia and England for ascendency in Central Asia. This epic struggle led many a good man either to death or to glory, and one such was the young Scotsman Arthur Conolly who was beheaded in the central square of Bokhara by Amir Nasrullah in 1842. It was this high spirited young man who gave the euphemism of "The Great Game" to this conflict.

When railways came of age around the middle of the century both nations saw in it the means to easily and quickly cross the great desert expanses of Asia. And so it was that while the Russians struggled to span the blistering Kyzylkum Desert, east of the Caspian, England was inching its way forward across the desert and mountains lying between Sibi and the garrison town of Quetta. Fear of the Cossacks riding in through the vast openness of Balochistan, the sub continent's back door, rode high and the "Kandhar State Railway", as it was called, was top priority.

First proposed in 1857, this railway hoped to reach Kandhar in Afghanistan and make its way across the southern part of that country to Herat and then to Merv in Central Asia. It was eventually to reach Bokhara which was to be swamped with English and Indian goods to counter the influence of Russian traders. Needless to say that the railway was also to help the army of British India maintain some sort of presence in Central Asia.

Work on the Kandhar State Railway, however was deferred for one reason or the other until the Second Afghan War broke out in 1878. Even then it took the government another two years to get their act together and when work actually began the following year it was in a state of frenzied desperation with a force of three thousand five hundred men. On the sixth day of October 1879, the first rails were laid in a northwesterly direction at the station of Ruk on the Larkana-Sukker section of "The Indus Valley State Railway "; and on January 14, 1880 a jubilant crowd celebrated the completion of the line to Sibi. In an extraordinary effort of engineering, two hundred and seventeen kilometres of line had been laid in a mere one hundred and one days!

But if the Kandhar State Railway had hoped to play its part in the Second Afghan War, it had come a little too late. One thing was clear: that long before the army in Afghanistan could benefit from the line the war would be over. And so the state of hysteria gave way to deliberate inactivity: it was time to take stock and wait out the long, harsh summer of the Sibi plains that was already beginning to make itself felt in the month of February.

Within a few months an event took place in Afghanistan that was to suspend the effort of reaching across the Afghan frontier by railway: in June 1880 on the dusty plain outside the village of Maiwand, west of Kandhar, a British garrison was to suffer one of the most humiliating defeats ever to be their lot in Asia. That and a pacifist government in London seemed to be the undoing of the ambitious plan conceived far away in Delhi in 1857.

Not long afterwards, in 1883, came the news that the Russian had taken Merv. Jogged out of their somnolence the British frantically set to work on the old plan again. But the railway which was to reach Quetta via Harnai, Khost and Bostan was to be a highly secret affair under the improbable title of "The Harnai Road Improvement Scheme". And when in March 1887 the first train ran this route to Quetta it was only for, according to my father, a railway man who served in this part of the country, the most heroic feat in the history of railway engineering: the line that stitched the great crack tearing the crust of the earth in the Chapper Rift. Simultaneously another line was traversing the length of the Bolan Pass and the two were to meet at Bostan, a few miles north of Quetta.

But the heroic endeavour in the Rift is another story. In the event, because of its endless mud slides, it was the Rift itself that defeated this section of the Harnai Road Improvement Scheme. Within a few years of recurrent washouts in the Rift, railway engineers were reconsidering upgrading the much steeper route through the Bolan Pass. And steep this route was: in the twenty six kilometres from Mach, at the eastern end of the pass, to Kolpur in its heart the line climbs a stupendous 801 metres or 2627 ft!

To get around the problems of expensive tunnel building the original track which was opened in August 1886 ran from Sibi to Hirok via Rindli along the bottom of the parallel and less steep Kundlani gorge to the south. And since the first two years after it was laid were virtually dry no damage was suffered. Eventually the rains came causing massive washouts and the new railway had to be designed a safe height above the torrents that swept through the canyon. Thus the present line was laid which we inherited at independence and today as your train, hauled by modern diesels, thunders through the Bolan gorge on its way to or from Quetta you are negotiating what they called the Mushkaf Bolan Route.

Kolpur is magic. The winding highway bisects the town and is overlooked by two and three storeyed houses with stores and tea shops at ground level. All around are stark, brown hills and to the south is the railway station. It is magic because it has the aura of places like Yarkand, Tashkurghan and Merv. Rehmatullah Brohi, the tea shop owner, was a very funny man and big time People's Party whose claim to leadership, he said, was his bald pate. Discovering my own affiliation he refused to accept payment for my cup of tea. He didn't care a fig about me being a travel writer; so far as he was concerned I was a numainda and a numainda at hand had to be favoured with an interview. The honour was therefore, duly bestowed upon me and I was instructed to see to it that it was perused by the Prime Minister.

My arrival at Kolpur was the fulfillment of a family pietas. In 1945 my father, as Assistant Engineer at Mach, had, to use railways jargon, "done" trolley in the Bolan Pass. Now, forty eight years later, I was following him. As their predecessors too must have done, Nazir and his assistant, the trolley men from Mach, had brought up the dinky looking cart in a Quetta bound train. It was simply a wooden platform on four wheels with a brake lever and a rickety bench, so beat up and ancient I half believed it to be the very same trolley that my father would have used almost five decades ago. The axles were oiled, the bench was placed in the housing and the lot was heaved onto the tracks; we were ready to follow in my father's footsteps.

"Sit tight," said Nazir as he gave the trolly a gentle push and jumped on. Soon the bare walls of the gorge were rushing past at more than forty kilometres an hour as we hurtled along the sharp descent. Unaccustomed to be sitting without the protection of a windshield I felt vaguely unsafe but Nazir assured me that the brakes were fine. I pointed out that there was no lining and it was metallic shoes against iron wheels which didn't seem to be such a good idea. "Don't worry," said the man, "If the brakes fail the catch siding doesn't." Ignorance certainly is bliss, for it was after the adventure that friend Sarwat Ali, who had something to do with this journey, told me that accidents with the trolley are known to have happened.

We swept into the cavernous womb of Mary Jane, the tunnel. The thoughts of Irishman F. L. O'Callaghan, who first pushed the railway through the Bolan, must not have been far from home and family for him to have immortalised his wife in the name of a tunnel. Windy Corner and Cascade were indications more of the nostalgia felt by the pioneers for their native Scottish highlands or the Lake District. And local colour was taken care of by the tunnels Pir Panjeh, from a nearby shrine, and Sir-i-Bolan. The only colour in the brown landscape were the trucks and busses labouring along the road never far from us and the several encampments of Brohi nomads where the children jumped up and down and screamed as we sped past.

From a couple of hundred metres away I could see the junction as the track veered to the right and a white painted line shot up the slope on the left to disappear behind the knoll. The brakes squealed, a shower of sparks flew as we slowed to a crawl and Nazir's assistant jumped off to act as pointsman. This was the catch siding where runaway trains shot up the sharp incline and burnt out their kinetic energy before any serious accident could take place. The standard operating procedure was for the point to remain switched to the catch siding and was changed by the pointsman only when the train had slowed to a virtual crawl and he had ascertained that nothing was amiss.

I asked if the catch siding had ever come in useful. "It happened the day Benazir was installed Prime Minister for the first time," said Nazir. But he only grinned when I asked if the driver had been drunk with happiness or so dejected as to have some sort of a death wish on the installation of a woman Prime Minister.

Past the tiny station of Dozan where a solitary man sat waving languidly at us, we sped through the gorge to Hirok, a small brick building as bleak as the barren, stoney gorge it was stuck in. Long before the standard broad gauge line was laid the original section between Hirok and Kolpur was metre gauge. That was perhaps the only moment in the sun for unexciting Hirok as travellers switched from the larger trains to the smaller and as we swept through the station I could not but wonder if modern travellers would take such an irritating routine with the same equanimity as their earlier counterparts. The station of Sir-i-Bolan was aggressively abandoned with gaping holes for doors and windows and several pairs of rock pigeons strutting about the parapet. Nazir said he was not even sure why, in the first place, this station was ever built and did not remember how long ago it had been abandoned.

The bustle of Mach was a sharp contrast from the bleak desolation of Dozan and Hirok. The babble of languages on the platform, in the bazaar and from the mosques (for it was Friday) comprised of Pushto, Brohi, Balochi, Persian and Punjabi. Mach was cosmopolitan.

Nazir walked me out of the station and up a narrow path to the Assistant Engineer's office. It was too new to be the place where my father would have worked in 1945, but past the stone wall was the house that looked old enough. The chowkidar let us in but the sahib was away at Dalbandin and I had to satisfy myself peering through the windows into the interior that had once been my parents' home. Unlike Mohammed Sharif at Dalbandin, there was, unhappily, no one in Mach who remembered my father. They said locals did not join the railways in those days and the staff was nearly always Punjabi and Sindhi who had since retirement left the place.

Within the year my father was transferred yet again; this time to Dharampur on the Kalka-Simla section (India) where he had the distinction of being the first Muslim AEN. Of all the narrow gauge railways in the sub continent the Kalka-Simla section is one of the few that still survives. In Pakistan the last of these toy trains ran some five years ago before they finally got the axe, victims either of improved road transportation or official inefficiency. If there is another pilgrimage to be made it will be to Dharampur. For the time being Mohammed Sharif had made the journey worthwhile. The pilgrimage, for the time being at least, was done. I was ready to go home.

Salman Rashid is author of eight travel books including The Apricot Road to Yarkand

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