Day 2 in Pakistan: A Guided tour of Rawalpindi

My friend Humza recommended a tour of Rawalpindi during my stay in Islamabad. The two cities are right next to each other, forming a metropolitan area of around six million people, many of whom travel back and forth between the two for work and school. While Islamabad serves as the nation’s capital, Rawalpindi is the seat of the Pakistan Army General Headquarters, which is why it was recently targeted by drones claimed by the Taliban. Interestingly, before the partition, Rawalpindi had a Hindu and Sikh majority. The population left a massive hole in the city’s economy and social fabric when it was forced to leave, and many of their old havelis are in a state of disrepair.

The tour began off the side of the road to Islamabad at half past nine – it was originally meant to begin half an hour earlier, but the guide’s tyre had sprung a leak on the way there. It turned out that the group I was joining was a team of nine young Pakistanis on a work retreat. Being the only outsider was a bit awkward at first, but my fellow travellers quickly made me feel welcome by including me in their conversations and sharing their food.

Our first stop was a Zoroastrian Temple built by the Parsi community that settled in the area in the nineteenth century. The story goes that when they arrived in the city, the king sent their leader a glass of milk filled to the brim. The apparently welcoming message had an undertone of warning: there was no space for any more people in Rawalpindi. The leader of the Parsis, however, mixed in some sugar and sent the drink back to the king. The Parsis, he promised, would not only integrate but would make life sweeter for all the city’s inhabitants.

The temple employs Zoroastrian principles in a very British colonial style. While its columns are European, the arches they create have two different shapes: round for ordinary visitors and pointy for the souls of the deceased as their bodies are walked out of the temple. Interestingly, the building adjoins a Zoroastrian cemetery, which is unusual because Zoroastrians tend to bury people by bringing the dead body to the top of a tower and letting vultures eat it. This is done because the elements of earth, water and fire are considered sacred, so a body can be neither cremated nor buried (nor whatever the equivalent for water would be – perhaps sticking the body in a big blender and flushing it into the river). The British did not look very kindly upon this Zoroastrian tradition and persuaded them to bury their bodies instead.

We continued down the alleyways of Rawalpindi past little roadside mosques and colourful shops to the opulent Markazi Jamia Mosque. This structure, completed in 1902, reflects the Sikh-influenced aesthetic sensibilities of Rawalpindi’s Muslim population, for example by employing a lotus base for each of its three ribbed domes. Its edges are blue and gold to contrast the white walls, but on the inside the mosque has frescoes of vibrant colours depicting flowers and geometric shapes. The rest of the tour took us through mysterious alleys and past old temples and havelis, and we sat down for a few more local treats at hole-in-the-wall eateries.

By the end of the tour, my new Pakistani friends insisted I join them at their Airbnb for biriani, so I took the metro with them back to Islamabad. This entire time, I had been under the impression that Islamabad’s metro was a proper train with tracks and carriages, but when we ascended to the skyway, I found it was just an elevated road with busses running the whole distance back and forth. I spent the ride learning about what my new friends did for a living. Later in the afternoon, after I had returned to my hosts’ house, we walked around the Fatima Jinnah Park, also called the F-9 Park because it occupies the entire F-9 sector.