TARAR, travels and travails go together. They have been doing that for almost half a century now, producing a horde of titles that have moved off the shelves briskly all these years. His latest travelogue, however, comes with a difference: a physical, tangible difference that is hard — if not impossible — to miss.

Lahore Se Yarqand, a month-long visit to the Chinese Xinjiang province, has political undertones that were previously absent from Mustansar Hussain Tarar’s narratives. It is not that Tarar has been apolitical as a writer. In his novels, especially Qila Jangi and Aay Ghazal-e-Shab, one could see the political animal residing inside the writer. However, the travelogues were always about wanderlust and, indeed, Tarar’s roving, probing eye that loved to keep its focus on the social spectrum.

Even when he visited China a few years ago, the output in the shape of Putli Peking Ki remained a characteristic Tarar travel account and Tarar fans know too well what those characteristics happen to be. This time around, however, it is different. The writer has not just commented on China and its internal tensions with the minority Muslim community as well as tensions within the community, he has also not shied away from a remark here and there about the sectarian conflict in Pakistan. A sign of the times? Perhaps.

The visit had come about as a result of an invitation by the Chinese government to spend time in Xinjiang and write a travelogue. Now, everyone knows Xinjiang is China’s raw nerve in the sense that it has a demographic and social texture that is quite in contrast with the rest of the country. And, hence, it was only inevitable that politics will creep in. And it has.

To Tarar’s credit, he has not tried to be a good guest in the sense that he told the hosts before undertaking the trip that the output will not be influenced and that he would be free to write what he sees. To the credit of the hosts, they agreed to this condition.

Yet there are times, though rare, when a reader finds Tarar indulging in a bit of oversimplification in order to downplay certain things which might otherwise have been written in a different perspective. For instance, when he talks of the restriction on making telephonic contact with the outside world, the narrative seems influenced by the lavish hospitality that came his way:

“You can do that from Beijing or Shanghai, but have no such luxury across Xinjiang where you can receive calls from abroad, but can’t initiate one on your own… There must be something dark behind the scenes, but why should we bother? After all, we are not here to lift veils,” writes Tarar and moves on. However, the suspicion in the reader’s eye falls by the wayside on more than one occasion with Tarar commenting freely about the sort of controlled freedom the local Uighur Muslims have to put up with and their tensions with the settler Han Chinese.

And then there is ample evidence of tensions within the Muslim community along sectarian lines; mostly about the Uighur and the Hui divide, with each either refusing to enter the other’s mosques or being denied entry.

However, regardless of the sect, the travelogue leaves no one in doubt that Muslims in China are satisfied — almost happy — despite being poor and less educated than the mainstream Hans. However, the observation of Tarar’s wife Muna is something that sounds closer to reality than anything that Tarar has said to negate it.

“I fear for the Chinese Muslims,” she says, adding: “The Chinese have a one-child policy and they invest heavily in that child’s education who then turns out to be a professional in one field or the other. All the development in Xinjiang is due to the Hans, while the Uighurs, free from the one-child policy, have large families and while away their time in eating meat, listening to music and so on.” This, indeed, is as good an observation as any in the bookAway from the world of the Uighurs and the Hans, there is a little world of Pakistani Muslims — mostly students — residing in Urumqi, the provincial capital. Going by Tarar’s account, there is no dearth of those who came here to study after facing persecution at the hands of sectarian zealots. During a visit to Xinjiang Medical University and Xinjiang University, he comes across many who had adorned the walls of their hostel rooms with Pakistani memorabilia and were feeling homesick but wanted to stay permanently in China, even if it involved marrying a local Uighur because, they say, “at least there is peace.” The chargesheet against life in Pakistan, writes Tarar, was long and “I had nothing to defend myself with”.

Running parallel to the political narrative is the thread of inflexibility that was part of Mao Zedong’s China during the period of Cultural Revolution for which Tarar has few nice words to say, if any. More than once in the text such portions in the narratives have been laced with the adjective “blind,” which tells its own tale.

Joye, Tarar’s guide and interpreter, helped Tarar a great deal in underlining the “inflexibility” part. “If it is in the day’s schedule it has to be done,” she seems to be telling her guests all the time. Talking of an official dinner that was scheduled for 8 p.m., for instance, Tarar describes in his characteristic idiom how Joye “kept checking her wrist watch every few minutes the whole day to ensure that it was not eight in the evening.”

Laced with wit and humour, the narrative has everything that gets associated with a Tarar travelogue, only more. In his own words he has grown up now to be “a dirty old man” which is a kind of reassurance to the readers that while age may have had an impact on the man, it has failed to have any impact on his pen.

Lahore Se Yarqand

(TRAVELOGUE)

By Mustansar Hussain Tarar

Sang-e-Meel Publications, Lahore

ISBN 969-35-2782-8

360pp.