Day 1 in Pakistan: The Glorious grid of Islamabad

Established in 1967, Islamabad was designed by the Greek architect Constantinos Doxiadis during the rule of military dictator Ayub Khan. It was conceived as a giant grid split into square sectors by broad avenues, with each sector having a primary school, two mosques, a few green spaces, and a central square for shops and restaurants. The sectors are lettered from northwest to southeast and numbered from northeast to southwest. Tracing a diagonal line along the map you might, for example, cut through F-6, G-7 and H-8. Each sector also has four subsectors numbered in a clockwise direction from southwest, such as F6/1, F6/2, F6/3 and F6/4. This concept seems so megalomaniacal that it comes as no surprise that it remains far from complete. The letter series essentially runs only from E to I (with only one D-letter sector and some faraway gardens named B-17) and the numbers do not go below 5.

I arrived in Islamabad after a three-day voyage through the Caucasus and Central Asia. My flight via Sharjah had been cancelled because of the US-Israeli war on Iran, so I ended up spending a day in Baku and two days in Tashkent just to get around the Gulf States. On the fourth day, I woke up at half past two in the morning to catch my five o’clock flight to Islamabad. All went well at the airport, except I forgot to exchange the rest of my Uzbekistani som into a more useful currency before passing through security. Instead, I ended up having to spend it at the duty free shops: I bought two t-shirts and a tube of toothpaste, all of which I had been intending to buy in Pakistan anyway. The purchases quite fortuitously (but very proudly nonetheless) brought my cash reserves down to exactly zero.

I found the airport in Islamabad much less hectic than I had imagined. Not too many people had arrived that morning, so the lines were short, and I waited practically no time at all to have my money exchanged. The one difficulty I encountered was finding a place to buy a SIM card. I had relied on being able to get it as soon as I touched down, but I was told at the information desk that SIM cards were not sold at the airport. Instead, I used the airport Wi-Fi to call a cab and prayed that I would be able to find it when I walked outside (which I did thanks to the kindness of multiple strangers, one of whom, despite being a driver himself, called my driver from his phone).

My driver was a chatty and intelligent man with perfect English. He explained Islamabad’s grid system to me, and we got through quite a fair bit of introductory Pakistani history and politics on the forty-minute ride. He said the country was corrupt beyond belief and was not making any progress, which I tried to temper by telling him how was impressed I was by the wide, well-paved roads all around the city, but even more so by how green and clean it was. At the end of the ride, he tried to refuse my money multiple times insisting that I was a guest in his country. In fact, one of the first things he had told me when I boarded his car was “Thank you for visiting Pakistan.”

I was originally meant to stay with my Oxford friend Humza, but work kept him in Karachi for an extra day, so he arranged for me to stay with some good friends of his in F-6. It was a fascinating experience. As a member of Pakistan’s intelligentsia, one of my hosts had plenty of scathing opinions about Pakistan’s political culture, as well as current events. He judged that contemporary reports about Pakistan serving as a venue for direct negotiations between the US and Iran were doomed to failure, saying that Pakistan would try to use the situation to elevate its own diplomatic standing and inadvertently undermine the talks every step along the way (e.g. by leaking sensitive information to the press).

Both my hosts were true embodiments of Pakistani hospitality. Learning of my SIM card troubles, they drove me around town to help me find one, and while we were at it, we toured multiple sights as well. We first stopped by the Pakistan Monument, which overlooks the city from a hill in Shakarparian National Park – though somewhat comically, the view from the viewing platform is almost perfectly obstructed by overgrown trees. The monument consists of a semicircle of inward-pointing granite petals standing over a black star-shaped tower, which is itself decorated with more white stars. The petals symbolise national unity, each representing a different culture. On the inside, they depict famous buildings around the country, as well as some of its heroes.

Just a short drive away from the monument, we visited the International Friendship Park. Theoretically, the park should have good views too, but these are equally marred by trees. What is interesting about it is its collection of trees – mostly araucarias, olives, and magnolias – planted by foreign statesmen and stateswomen, including figures such as Josip Broz Tito and Nicolae Ceaușescu.

We ate lunch at the top of Centaurus Mall, a complex of three tall towers just off the side of Faisal Avenue. The mall is a fantastic place to view Faisal Mosque. Completed in 1986 and funded by Saudi King Faisal, the mosque is meant to evoke a Bedouin tent with gables on all four sides from which the roof slopes upward towards the centre. Its worship hall with a capacity of 10,000 people made it the largest mosque in the world until 1993, when the Saudis started building even bigger mosques in their own country. There were no SIM card shops at the mall but we found one on our way back to the house, and in the evening we made a hike up Trail 3 in the Margalla Hills.