Day 9 in Pakistan: Mohenjo-Daro and the drive along the Indus

To my great surprise, I found my driver waiting for me at exactly eight o’clock in the morning. I had arranged a ride with my hotel two nights before, as I feared my intended route would be too difficult to explain in a last-minute conversation with an InDrive chauffeur: the plan was to stop by the Bhutto Family Mausoleum just outside Larkana before continuing to Mohenjo-Daro and finishing the day in Hyderabad. Perhaps it helped that I checked about the driver twice at the reception: once in the evening when I arrived and again in the morning just before eating breakfast.

I’ve found that I have many dreams, or at least I remember many dreams, when I sleep in a warm room, and Sukkur was the first place on my trip from Islamabad to Karachi where this happened. I was given an air-conditioned room, but the air-conditioning blew straight onto my bed, so the choice was between freezing and boiling to death (or to be less dramatic, between catching a cold and sweating a little). I took the blanket out of the case and slept under the case itself. The choice stacked up differently in the taxi. There seemed to be no setting in between off and freezing cold, and the driver was more comfortable with it turned on, so I finally put my coat to good use. Until then, I had only worn it in the evening in Baku and Tashkent, and because it was a little old, I contemplated jettisoning it along the way.

Still, the combination of air conditioning inside the car and burning agricultural waste outside was not a fortunate one. I was amused to imagine that as I sniffed and snivelled my way through the monument, the custodians of the Bhutto Family Mausoleum thought the sight of the tombs had moved me to tears. The building itself, though, was indeed a sight to behold. Designed in the style of Taj Mahal, its large white dome – and the four smaller domes that surrounded it – loomed over the entire town as we drew near it. The parking lot, on which we found ourselves entirely alone, was as big as a proper city square and had not one but two helipads drawn directly onto the tarmac. Unsure of my driver’s political leanings, I did not share much about my impressions, save for making the obvious comparison to the Taj Mahal.

On the opposite side of Larkana from the mausoleum stands Mohenjo-Daro, one of the oldest and largest cities in the world, dating to around 2500 BCE. The name Mohenjo-Daro is not what its ancient inhabitants would have called the city. It likely derives from the words “Mound of the Dead” in Sindhi, the language that has dominated the area for hundreds of years. Tablets and seals discovered at the site do bear some inscriptions, but these have not been deciphered, so we know little about the language and beliefs of the inhabitants. However, this has not stopped archaeologists from speculating about a number of things including the religion of Mohenjo-Daro’s inhabitants, which some believe to be an early form of Hinduism due to the presence of large and well-crafted statues of monkeys and elephants.

I almost refused the services of a guide but then thought the better of it, and I felt much nicer about myself when he told me that the local tourist industry was struggling to survive the wave of cancellations in the wake of the war in Iran. My guide quickly convinced me I had made the right choice. He was from the area and had worked as a guide for the last twenty years, even making a few discoveries during the rainy seasons when the water swept away the soil under recent digs. He showed me the place where he had found a little statue of the Buddha, and another place where he kept a brick that, when turned over, revealed the footprints of a goat from thousands of years ago.

The guide took me through all the excavated quarters of the city and the museum. We began by the iconic stupa, which I found out really is a Buddhist stupa and not just a silly moniker. It was built in the “upper city” long after the original civilisation of Mohenjo Daro had collapsed. Presumably it sits atop much older ruins, but of course these have not been excavated to avoid damaging the stupa – as my guide pointed out, this famous structure is even printed on Pakistan’s 20-rupee banknote. Below the stupa lies the ancient city. Archaeologists believe it consisted of several distinct quarters based on the size of the houses and the discoveries within them. Closest to the river (which in ancient times flowed on the other side of the city than at present) lay the military quarter. Among other things it contained the baths and the granary, the latter conveniently positioned for loading grain onto trading vessels sailing up and down the Indus.

The city presumably also had a poor quarter and a rich quarter, with the houses in the former much more narrowly packed than in the latter. The findings in their markets and houses of their respective artisans also indicate a divide between the rich and poor: while excavations of markets in the area presumed to belong to the poorer classes dug up mostly clay pots and other such ordinary articles, jewels made of semi-precious stones were found in the richer areas. Nevertheless, there was an abundance of wells and irrigation channels in rich and poor areas alike.

I was honestly surprised by how much archaeologists have been able to reasonably deduce from different remains. One house, for instance, was identified as a dye-house based on the circular basins in the ground and the discoloured bricks where used water flowed into the canal. Another room was quite clearly a kitchen judging from what seems to be the base of an oven and a window for ventilation. The granary itself was recognised as a granary not just because archaeologists found it to contain remains of charred wheat, but also because of its elevation, which helped the building keep out moisture. And the pool can safely be said to once have contained water because of its tightly packed bricks and bitumen coating.

We set off again at half past twelve, trundling along village roads towards the highway bound for Hyderabad. We passed several groups of men riding on donkeys, as well as men driving donkey carts carrying vegetables and hay. On one stretch, traffic stopped completely as the parked trucks obstructed the passage of a giant truck laden with fodder. Its cargo exceeded the height of the truck at least once over and swelled past its width, bulging under the white tarp that tried to constrain it like the sides of a gorged tick. Farther still, my driver had to drive with one side of the car off the road to pass a herd of cows. He said they were being driven to market for export to the Middle East.

Earlier in the day, my driver suggested that we make a detour to Ranikot Fort on our way to Hyderabad. I had thought the idea a bit far-fetched, seeing as the drive from the highway junction to Ranikot and back would take us at least an hour, not to mention the time we would need there to properly enjoy seeing the fort. When we finally reached the highway, however, I had to acknowledge the plan was feasible. My driver stepped on the pedal and, assuring me we would reach the fort by four, sped like a demon.

The turn towards Ranikot lay right in front of a roadside restaurant where long-distance buses would stop on their way along the Indus River. My driver suggested we eat a late lunch, but at this point I was so infected by his optimism that I could not feel the hunger rising within me and hoped – after the fruit I fed him on the way – that he would understand. He seemed happy enough with the idea of eating an early dinner instead. Still, we made a short break at the junction to pick up our assigned policeman. From the modest English my driver spoke, I understood he usually worked for a tour company, so he knew all the protocols and must have called to notify the police in advance.

The road to Ranikot was relatively smooth and well-paved for the most part, but on a few short stretches it became a trap of steep and unpaved compacted dirt full of jutting rocks that made me wonder what we were doing there without a four-wheel drive. While rattling our way down one of these stretches, I bounced high enough above the policeman sitting in front of me to stare straight down the barrel of his rifle. He had propped it by his side tilted back towards me. I immediately slid back as low as I could. If the gun were to go off, the bullet would have to go through him first.

When we approached Ranikot, I saw the ride had been well worth the time and trepidation. Its crenelated walls stretched far out of sight both left and right, running from the valley over the hills and connecting bastion to bastion. I could immediately see why it has been dubbed “the Great Wall of Sindh.” We climbed up the wall on the right side of the valley, with the driver peeling off first and the policeman eventually gesturing to me that I could not walk past the third bastion. I am not sure if that was the official policy or he was just tired. Still, I made him walk up the other side with me, where he quickly gave up all pretence of trying to keep up and hanged out with the driver while keeping me vaguely in sight as I kept climbing. I felt bad for making him exercise so much in the afternoon sun and made sure to tip him afterwards.