Clay in the Desert
Eyebrows were raised when we set off on our annual trip to Pakistan with war in Iraq looming. Apart from fielding comments about the situation with a firm "no comment", the only other difference was to have an armed policeman posted outside our door at the motel in Bahawalpur and my husband having a minder when he went for his morning run.
We began with a couple of days in Islamabad and I returned to the little pottery village of Saidpur tucked in a fold of the Margalla Hills on the outskirts of Islamabad. I was sad to see that the little pottery stall had vanished and wondered if the potters were still there. We left the car and walked up the narrow path between the houses to the pottery. An old man, the father of the potter I had previously met was throwing on his kick wheel. He was making lanterns for festivals and those unfired were piled in the room behind him. Another son said that times were very hard and they had not fired the kiln for months because they had no wood and could not afford gas. Their problem was that the village is now within the borders of the Margalla National Park where the cutting of wood is illegal. The villagers have to walk deep into the hills to cut wood for the kiln and their cooking stoves and hope nobody sees them. One can imagine the English Tourist Board and Craft Council stepping in and promoting the village as a craft centre if it were in Britain but in Pakistan there is little interest in such things.
We then flew in a tiny aircraft to Bahawalpur on the edge of the Cholistan desert for a couple of days. I was interested in visiting the museum to see artefacts from the Indus Valley civilisation. Towns had flourished on both sides of the great Saraswati River before 2000 B.C. but this had long since dried up. Unfortunately the museum was closed but we did visit a high bank of the old river and looked out on the now fertile plain that was the river bed. Thousands of pottery shards lay around. We drove out into the desert to visit the massive Derawar Fort, one of a series built to protect the trade routes. We passed a family of nomads on camels. Clay featured in all its forms as we passed through the timeless rural landscape. Dotted around were the tall chimneys of brick kilns belching black smoke and surrounded by huge clay pits. Ant like workers made individual bricks by hand with moulds. The flat roofed houses were brick built and then finished with a coat of clay and straw, adobe, giving them a rounded look. Some of the houses had decorative patterns made while the clay was wet. Farmyard and field walls were made from unfired "mudbricks" as they call them and covered in adobe. These have to be repaired after the monsoon season. In the farmyards were clay cooking stoves and six foot high clay grain silos. I had never seen these clay silos before and caused quite a stir when I asked what they were for and if I could photograph them. I managed to obtain an example of the local water pot for my collection by buying a used one lying beside a well as we did not have time to find the local potters.
We then flew to Karachi for the Conference which was rather overshadowed by Pakistan playing India in the World Cup Cricket match.