FOR this column, my first of 2015, I was planning to see in the new year with an upbeat piece about the history and literature of the British curry. Then, just as my sons were getting dizzy with excitement at the prospect of new Xbox games in their Christmas stockings, the attack on the Army Public School in Peshawar happened.

In 1993-94, I briefly taught at Fazlehaq College in Mardan. The College had been established by General Fazle Haq, Gen Ziaul Haq’s right-hand man in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, around 10 years before my arrival. It was modelled on a British public school and many of its (all-male) pupils were from army families. Aged just 17 and something of a hippie, I felt out of place on arrival at this august institution, with its bore cannon on display and Rudyard Kipling’s ‘If’ inscribed proudly on a playground wall.

After a short time, my friend Kate and I moved (or fled) to Islamia Public High School in Peshawar’s University Town. This was a day school with much lower fees and a more diverse student body than Fazlehaq College. About a third of the pupils were Afghan. Some of the Afghans were substantially older than their Pakistani classmates, since they knew only Pashto and Farsi, and so had to catch up with their Urdu. One boy was almost six feet tall, with a ratty moustache and acne, and the poor thing had to almost fold himself in two to get under the desk in the nine- and ten-year-olds’ class to which he was allocated. Some of the pupils were so poor that three siblings would share a single pencil. At least, that’s what they told this teenaged English teacher from Yorkshire. It may have been an excuse to get out of class, and ‘Miss brother Miss pencil’ became a common refrain even amongst kids I suspected didn’t have a sibling in the school.

To my relief, this school had a girls’ section and no military regalia. Kate and I stayed on for the best part of a year, a highlight being when we organised the older girls to write and produce a play version of Cinderella. I noticed that the small number of girls tended to be significantly more middle-class than their male peers. Their brothers had been sent to impressive public schools like Fazlehaq College, and several of the girls said they were lucky to be in education at all.

We lived with the headmaster, a dry, twinkling Punjabi, and his family. His brother, a youth not much older than me, vacated his bedroom for us, and without complaint spent the whole year sleeping on a charpoi on the roof. I joined him and two servants up there for a few nights during the summer when the heat seemed to radiate up through my bed frame, but the choking air did little to help me sleep. We made trips to Saddar Bazaar, Qissa Khawani, and the smugglers’ bazaar at Hayatabad to buy shalwar kameez and toiletries. Each evening, we would go religiously to the adjacent school’s office to watch The Bold and the Beautiful and Santa Barbara, and soon Kate and I were as hopelessly addicted to these soaps as the headmaster. His father, the tall, devout Haji Sahib, occasionally came into the office, and the usually dignified son would lunge, panic-stricken, to change the channel to innocuous state television.

When I heard about the massacre of children in Peshawar at Christmas time, it was especially painful because I could picture the scene. I don’t want to add to the commentary on this landmark atrocity, which has been written by others more knowledgeable about and closer to the situation than I am. Instead, I want to think about the endlessly fascinating literary Peshawar.

Kipling, whose poem alienated me in Mardan, writes of Peshawar in Kim that it is an “insalubrious city”. More famously, he describes it as a “city of evil countenances”. In his essay of the same name, he cements many stereotypes of Pakhtuns; that they are warrior-like, vicious, oppressive to women, and highly sexualised:

“[Peshawar’s] main road teems with magnificent scoundrels and handsome ruffians; all giving the on-looker the impression of wild beasts held back from murder and violence, and chafing against the restraint. The impression may be wrong; and the Peshawari, the most innocent creature on earth, in spite of History’s verdict against him; but not unless thin lips, scowling brows, deep set vulpine eyes and lineaments stamped with every brute passion known to man, go for nothing. Women of course are invisible in the streets, but here and there instead, some nameless and shameless boy in girl’s clothes.”

No wonder, then, that in her recent novel A God in Every Stone, Kamila Shamsie challenges the Orientalism of what her character Viv calls “Kipling’s Peshawar! The North-West Frontier! Where even the finest hotel in town was a whitewashed barracks, a reminder that the world of guns lurked beneath every veneer”. Shamsie pushes back against the pernicious European myth of Pakhtuns as a warrior race. Instead, she concentrates on Peshawar’s pre-Islamic past, the brutal British massacre of Pakhtuns in Qissa Khawani Bazaar in 1930, and the city’s neglected treasure trove of a museum.

Peshawari poet Farid Gul Momand recuperates another, more positive term, “city of flowers,” only to dismantle it in his portrayal of Peshawar as a metropolis in which “those who’ve monopoly over God / ... Could preach nothing / But hatred on your soil.” In another poem, Momand blames himself and his people for allowing these monopolisers in:

“They ruined my schools

Raped my dolls

Orphaned my children

Widowed my sisters

And we kept silent — like stones or tombs.”

Peshawar has also made an indelible impression on poets with Pakhtun heritage from the diaspora. Like turning a corner in the pockmarked road and seeing the Swat Valley for the first time, I find Pakistani-American poet Shadab Zeest Hashmi’s ‘Passing Through Peshawar’ simultaneously breath-taking and invigorating. Hashmi is interested in Peshawar’s domestic life, transportation, and nature, pointing out the poplars and willows, the tonga-horses, “the breaking open of a walnut in a door-hinge” and the smell of Lux soap.

British-Pakistani poet Nabila Jameel remembers Peshawar’s maze of alleys, the sound of the Pashto language which “drizzles confetti” on her listeners’ ears, and the taste of kahwa, green tea. For these women diasporic poets, the city is noisy, sensual, and much missed.

Pakistan of course has a severe West-East divide, such that Britain’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office now blandly advises tourists “against all travel to ... the city of Peshawar and districts south of the city, including travel on the Peshawar to Chitral road via the Lowari Pass.” Accordingly, I haven’t been back to the city since my formative stay in the early 1990s, even though I have returned to Pakistan on three occasions and hope to go again in March. Instead, this frontier city with its view of mountains and green-eyed children comes to me in dreams, and in news reports. With Farid Gul Momand, I “Yearn ... for peace. / All this for you, my city, my sweetheart”.