AS it turns out, five years is a long time to leave Peshawar alone. Since the days of the Afghan jihad against the Soviet invasion, the Frontier capital has shown a remarkable ability to change, and take the change in its stride. It’s not a city to be taken for granted, as the PPP perhaps learnt the hard way (or did it?).

Peshawar today is limping back to normality after a tantalising brush with Afghan refugees, nearly all of whom have left for home. Time was when they kept gushing in, as it were, from the slopes of the Khyber Pass until the city’s indigenous population was outnumbered. Now a silent but steady battle to retrieve the scarred soul of this once magnificent conurbation is on.

“The refugees have gone back, with their offspring, their livestock and their vehicles. My Baba (father) says very few like us remain. I’ve never known the other side of the border and we have little there to pull us back,” says Mushka Dilawar, a 15-year-old, semi-literate boy, seen rushing tea trays to shops which stay open during Friday prayers in Qissa Khwani Bazaar.

“We’re the real people of Peshawar,” butts in his look-alike cousin hurriedly frying brain masala in a home-size pan over log fire on the congested pavement. Erratic gas supply has meant buying stacks of wood, now a dear commodity, harking back to the past, to keep out the cold and to cook.

“I make Rs200-250 a day,” he volunteers the information proudly and impromptu.

Saleem, 17, says he has never been to a madressah. Never missed it; had to make a living, “not go for jihad”. The word school never crosses his mind. There is no need to prod.

“Take a picture of the old bookstore right there; been there for ages,” suggests another friendly passer-by, old enough to be Saleem’s uncle. He knows, as if by instinct, that you have a camera in one of your pockets on that rainy day. It’s as if they can read your mind. Just like in the Peshawar of yore. A sense of pleasant deja vu, you bet.

Back on a Saddar shopping street, cabbies speak sparkling Urdu. Time was, in the good old days when Dean’s was a colonial-time hotel — a conjoined triplet of Lahore’s Faletti’s and Pindi’s Flashman’s — and not a dashy shopping mall, when heavily decked up and thus bigger-looking three-wheelers and tongas were a common sight. While the tonga-wallah spoke Hindko and some Pashto, just in case, the rickshaw was the pride of the young Pathan who only knew his Pashto, and missed nothing.

Out-of-towners preferred the motored vehicle and were in for a ride unless they could pronounce their Pajjagi Road right. The museum was not the museum, but Ajaib Ghar. Michni Road in Cantt was beyond the pale unless you knew how to sign-language your way to it to the cabbie. That innocence belongs in the past.

Even the old Namak Mandi Charsi’s Tikka has a very passable new eatery on University Road, just beyond its trendy bend on the way to Hayatabad, where specialty stores now compete in decking up a bride; the attention and the graces offered to the intending groom and his buddies are no less in your face. Mannequins, dressed in wedding gowns in blazing colours adorn the glass windows. This is any Talib’s — local or foreign — nightmare. What’s Peshawar coming to, surrounded as it is by some of the world’s most dangerous tribal territories? Nothing helps like being there and seeing it for yourself.

Charsadda, now nearly contiguous with Peshawar’s urban sprawl, the birthplace of the Awami National Party and their Red Shirt ancestors, is perhaps more conservative. But make no mistakes here either. The seminaries are a reality, but their students today are not from the stock that aspired a generation ago to liberate Afghanistan or Kashmir, and then on to bringing the rest of Pakistan into the fold of Islam.

Hafiz Zille Shah, 45, says he will vote for the nationalist ANP. “Bacha Khan is my hero, and his ideology is our saving grace which must be salvaged,” he reasons, arguing that Pakistani Pakhtun youth are now being lured to Kabul, where they can earn in dollars. “That’s not the issue,” he explains. “The problem is how they spend that money. On prostitutes and liquor in Kabul and here, too, when they come visiting.”

Not that the Kabul river has started running upstream from the vale of Peshawar to the heights of the Hindukush, but the fish extracted from it and served in thatched-roof eateries along the road to Nowshera, is best washed down with imported liquor, they say. The cantonment close by is among the beneficiaries.

“The girls come here from as far as Kasur, and the party rocks,” confides a retired officer in his mid-50s. The nautch girl culture, too, harks back to the past.

“A bearded officer was seen here as a good, brave and proud soldier, one you looked up to and tried to emulate, and not just to win brownie points with your superiors, not too long ago. Today the opposite is the case. If there’s no toilet paper in your loo, you’re one of ‘them’. There’s no ‘report’ anymore on drinking and dancing,” sums up a serving officer. “No harm in this either, but flattery rules the roost, and that’s what’s really gone wrong.”

The gulf between the haves and the have-nots has never been this wide in this essentially tribal social setup which many today find disturbing.

So what’s the solution? Ask a passer-by at a roadside Mardan petrol station and you get a fairly good idea.

“We have to go back to our roots, and the ANP is the only party which can deliver us,” Aqil Shah, a BA student says with conviction.

Mohammad Waseem, 41 and a schoolteacher, along with wife Wagma, disagrees: “Voting for the PPP is the way forward. Thank God the MMA is out of the picture. Good riddance.”

“Nobody wants to go back to the MMA. They did nothing besides trying to preach down to us, and even failed at that because they were not sincere,” Sher Afgan Khan, a bearded man in his 50s confirms.

“The JUI does not have much of a presence here, so I’ll vote for PML-N back in my village in Haripur, Hazara,” he reasons. The majority there will choose between the PPP and the PML-N, with the latter perhaps bagging more votes, he insists. Back in Peshawar, people make very similar forecasts of the Feb 18 election. The PML-Q and the PPP-Sherpao remain unmentioned unless prompted. The former elicits a dismissive whiff; the latter raises an ambivalent brow.

Samiullah, a college student, and others like him, say the JUI will retain its strongholds in southern parts of the Frontier bordering Dera Ismail Khan, Kohat and up to Bannu, and the Kohistan district beyond Swat. A sad uneasiness takes over when the troubled tribal areas or Swat are mentioned.

No one has a clear answer to the biting reality. Dialogue, and not guns, is recommended. The Pakhtun nationalism is decidedly back, and the Hindko-speakers’ pride vows to match up to it. Peshawar is Peshawar again.