Add just one more vehicle to the narrow streets of Lahore and this whole insane throng of a city would be in danger of seizing up forever, Douglas Whitehead of the Telegraph reports. Dad, mum and their four little girls whizzed past, all perched precariously together on the family scooter. Taxis wove in and out with the skills of a Schumacher. Millimetres to spare. A cacophony of car horns. Motorised rickshaws careered down the wrong side of the street.
A day here would give most Western drivers a stress-induced coronary; riding a bicycle left this Westerner quickly seeking a safe haven.
Despite its misleading name, the Regal Internet Cafe is a tourist hostel. At Rs 150 a night to sleep in a dorm room, it’s among the cheapest and best places to stay in Lahore. And a bonus: the hostel’s owner, the inimitable Mr Malik, is a fluent teller of a thousand and one funny tales, several of them almost believable.
On arrival he read my palm and pronounced that I would father two children – a girl called Baby Rosemary and a boy named James Bond. It was a happier welcome than that given to a French backpacker, who was apparently turned away because his hands revealed him to be a murderer.
A huge fan of Sufi devotional music, Mr Malik never misses a Thursday night/Friday morning at the tomb of Baba Shah Jamal, a 16th-century Sufi saint said to have used music and dancing to spread the word of the Koran.
Topping the bill that evening was Gonga Sain, who, despite going deaf in childhood, is famous throughout Pakistan due to his astonishing mastery of the dhol, a large double-sided drum, which is played while standing up.
The service did not begin until well after midnight. This being the marriage season, the musicians and dancers first had to perform at several weddings around Lahore.
As we sat outdoors on rugs and waited in the warm night air, a stir intermittently spread through the congregation. Youths rushed in and out through the main gates to the low-walled compound. The police were attempting to arrest worshippers for smoking cannabis and fights were breaking out.
At long last, a loud drum roll. “God is great”, chanted the singer in Urdu. “God is great”, shouted the faithful in reply with all the fervour of a football crowd.
The dancers started to shake their heads. Slowly at first, but then faster with the music, then faster and faster still, until they were “head banging” manically, their long hair whipping from side to side.
Now they began to whirl around on the spot. Not with the easy grace of the Sufi dancers I’d seen in Istanbul, but with arms taut and fists clenched. They would have broken each other’s noses if they had collided, but somehow, just like Lahore’s traffic, they never did. A claque of teenagers started up a chant of their own in counterpoint to the main crowd. Each youth stretched one hand imploringly to the heavens. With the other they clasped a mobile phone to their ears. They were calling God directly.
This was not strait-laced Islam. On the way home afterwards, a friendly but obviously stoned youngster came up to me. “You Japanese?” he asked.
“No, British.”
“Sufi music good?”
“Very good.” No need for diplomacy, it really is very good.
“British music good?” my new friend asked.
“Yes.”
A silence while his befuddled brain struggled to shape another question.
I decided to help out: “Yes, British music is also good. Do you like The Beatles and The Rolling Stones?”
“Who?” he said.
At the hostel, a new guest had arrived. Lex was American – the only one I met during my time in Pakistan. He worked as a teacher in Beijing, spoke fluent Chinese and was bright and convivial. At the moment he was also a bit confused.
A small but strongly-built stranger had just accosted him on the street. This stranger spoke no English but gave Lex a business card that identified him as a Kung Fu instructor. The man then grabbed firm hold of Lex’s hands, uttered something unintelligible, and refused to let go until he managed to repeat the phrase correctly.
“Was this Kung Fu guy menacing?”
“No, just kind of intense.”
“What was the phrase?”
“It went something like: Ashadu an La illaha illAllah, Wa Ahadu an Muhammaddan rasull’Allah.”
Mr Malik translated. “I bear witness that there is only one God, that’s Allah, and I bear witness that Mohammed is the last messenger of Allah.”
Saying these words aloud three times makes the speaker a Muslim. Lex had just unwittingly become a convert.
And that was Pakistan. Never a nasty or aggressive moment. Quite the reverse. But talk of religion was never far from people’s lips.
“You are British, you are Christian.” It was a statement rather than a question – and you heard it stated all the time.
I’d prevaricate. “Well, I come from a Christian country but …”
“Yes, you are a Christian. Welcome to Pakistan. We are Muslims.”
The Indian border is only 20 miles from Lahore but heavy traffic meant a late arrival. As a result I was still dealing with bureaucracy during the famous “lowering of the flags” ceremony. Here, in front of a packed grandstand of cheering spectators, the Pakistani and Indian border guards compete every evening to outdo each other in a show of theatrical hostility.
Another 20 miles from the border is the Indian city of Amritsar. Darkness was already falling and the traffic, if anything, was even worse than Lahore.
Nine months away from home, cycling through 19 different countries, and now the journey was finally coming to an end. I felt a strange mixture of relief and disappointment, exhilaration and emptiness.
Bored of collecting scrap metal, empty plastic bottles and anything else they could sell, a group of young children were having a play flight on top of a rubbish tip.
I emptied out my cycling bags: a broken gas stove; two pairs of cycling shorts, badly frayed; a metal plate, cup and spoon; a Tupperware box; a woolly hat; a paperback novel; a pair of flip-flops; some more dirty clothing.
The children had stopped what they had been doing and were watching me earnestly. As I walked off they began again to fight among themselves, this time for real.
