The Trouble With Amb

The Trouble With Amb is that it's very, very small, and people who run across it on maps are apt to think it's a cartographers' abbreviation for "ambush," "ambiguous," or even "ambary," a plant that grows in patches thereabouts, instead of what it really is – viz., Amb, an independent but utterly insignificant country on the Indus River, and smack in the middle of Pakistan. Not only is Amb so small as to be hardly worth mentioning but, to make matters worse, it is getting smaller at an average rate of 21/3 acres an hour, and if it keeps losing ground like this, it will be all gone by the end of the year. The diminution of Amb began a decade ago, when Pakistan passed a law against the jagirs, or fiefs, on Pakistani soil; as 30 square miles of Amb were jagirs, Pakistan took them back. A second, even more stunning blow was delivered in 1950, when, after coming across some 80-year-old papers, Pakistan laid claim to the entire left bank of the Indus, 290 square miles of Amb, and away it went. At the same time, Pakistan appropriated Amb's vassalage, the Khanate of Phulra (pronounced like "pool room" without the "m") – 20 square miles. The upshot of all this aggrandizement is that Amb, today, is only 14 square miles and 4014 persons, all 4014 of them on the good-for-nothing right bank of the Indus, and even there the sovereignty of Mr. Mohammed Farid Khan, the Nawab of Amb, is shaky indeed. His people are restive, some of them want to go to Pakistan, and the Nawab, I understand, is so uncertain of their loyalties that he hasn't been to Amb for many years; instead, he sits in a palace in Pakistan and, with a pair of high-powered field glasses, he watches Amb warily.

In the light of all this, I decided a few months ago it was now or never to visit Amb and, as soon as my Pan American airplane had set down in Karachi, I hurried to the north by train and bus, and I was delighted to find that Amb was still there. The country itself was no delight, though: it was 120 in the shade, so outrageously hot, indeed, that most of the Ambis were sitting up to their necks in the Indus River. They, the 4014 people of Amb, are Moslems, I learned, who came from Afghanistan 600 years ago; they speak in Tanawali, dye their beards red, and, whenever they aren't sitting in the Indus River or swimming to Pakistan – aided, incidentally, by waterwings of buffalo skin – they dress in turbans, a kind of nightshirt and pyjamas, a billowy, white pair of pantaloons from which our own pyjamas (the word and the pyjamas themselves) are derived. On this outrageous morning, the Ambis greeted me by laughing hysterically. It's a rather odd custom, I thought, apt to get on your nerves after a while and I never was given a satisfactory explanation of it. According to someone, the Ambis were awfully shy and were giggling hard, but, according to someone else, the Ambis were awfully friendly and were smiling hard. Whichever it was, I confess to being rather annoyed with the Ambis and with Amb itself by the time I was taken to the Nawab's guest house. There, I was shown to my room, rather a fashionable one with a stained-glass window, a Persian rug, a canopied bed and a fireplace, of all things; it was just as hot as anywhere else. A servant gave me the most appalling glass of water I've seen – it came from the Indus, and it was opaque – and, after dropping five Hala-zone pills into this, waiting for an hour and throwing it away, I fell into the canopied bed and fell asleep.

By four o'clock, it was somewhat cooler, and I paid a call on the Nawab himself, at his palace on the land that Pakistan took away in 1950. I found that he resembles Ed Wynn. The Nawab, Mr. Farid Khan, has a silly face, a sillier grin and his chin is indistinguishable from his neck; that afternoon, his gray bell-bottomed jacket hung over his pot belly to below his knees, his turban was powder-blue and a loose end teetered above it like an aerial – the vogue in this part of the world, but quite absurd to look at. The Nawab was pleasant enough, but, I was told, he's liable to fits of temper and then he'll jump on his subjects (literally), rape them, or push them a foot further into the Indus River. His first words to me, after the usual pleasantries and salaam aleikums, were, "Tell me where you are – Pakistan or Amb?"

"I'm in Amb," I said amiably.

"Right!" said the Nawab, grinning, "and why Pakistan has taken it away, I'll never know. It's worse than the Russians." Wistfully, he looked across the river at what was left of Amb, fingering his field glasses idly, and said, "The people of Amb loved me. Day in, day out, do you know what I do? Philanthropy. I give away money." So saying, he shot a glance at his secretary, a thin, red-bearded man who was doing the translating, and the secretary picked up a little bag and let me squeeze it; I surmised it was full of rupees. "This afternoon," the Nawab said, "I gave money to 20 people," his largess being 90 to a beggar; 30 to another beggar; $3.60 to an orphanage in Pakistan; $17.20 to Mr. Haji Baz Gul, who was starving; $3.60 to Mr. Omar Khan, whose daughter had drowned (while sitting in the Indus, incidentally); and comparable sums to other needy cases. "Also," said the Nawab, "I have granaries, and whenever the people are hungry, I give them grain."

"Where do you get it all?" I asked.

"For the most part, taxes. The agricultural tax is one bushel out of every two."

"One out of two!"

"Well, in certain cases, one out of three." The Nawab of Amb returned to the subject of philanthropy. "A few years ago, for example, I threw open a granary, and I gave away the better part of a ton. Many of the people were starving."

"I wouldn't doubt it," I said.

Now it was evening, a Moslem time for prayer. When someone had sprayed the floor with DDT and someone else had unrolled a Persian rug, the Nawab kneeled and began to salaam to Mecca, and as he did another man pulled a rope, working a huge, burlap fan on the ceiling above, and other men swatted flies. After five minutes of this, the Nawab of Amb arose, huffing and puffing; he put a cigarette in his mouth, but he never got around to lighting it.

"The palace," I remarked, "is terribly hot."

"Here and there, I have a half-dozen others," said the Nawab of Amb," – and much, much cooler."

...

After I had talked with the Nawab, I felt that Pakistan was certainly right in dispossessing him, and too bad it wasn't sooner, but after I heard Pakistan's side of the story, I wanted to call a plague on both their houses. The Pakistani case was given to me several days later by Mr. Abdul Qayum Khan, a politician, at his hot, musty office in the Civil and Military Gazette building, in Lahore. For years, Mr. Qayum had been a sort of Pakistani Cato, shouting, "Amb must be destroyed!" until, in 1950, the left bank of the Indus River and the Khanate of Phulra were invaded by 500 Pakistani police. ("Amb is Liberated," said the Civil and Military Gazette.) At the time, Mr. Qayum said he was doing it out of pity, promising to the Ambis a lower tax, suffrage and free land, although, to be sure, it was also rumored that Mr. Qayum had tried to shake the Nawab for 32 grand and hadn't got it. Anyhow, the liberated Ambis held an election soon after their deliverance, and a solitary name was on the ballot, Mr. Abdul Qayum Khan's.

"What I did," Mr. Qayum was telling me, in Lahore, "was to liberate 60,000 people. Under the Nawab, they were subjected to all sorts of tortures, to feudal excesses and other unspeakable excesses which I couldn't even mention." Mr. Qayum's face was fat, heavily jowled, and his eyes were pig-eyes, lost beneath a beetling forehead.

"Tortures?" I said.

"Unspeakable tortures."

"Which?"

"They're unspeakable."

"Oh."

"After I had apprised Pakistan of these unspeakable tortures and of other feudal excesses, we agreed, naturally, to liberate Amb."

"Would you tell me just one torture?" I said.

"Well. . ." Qayum Khan leaned over conspiratorially and whispered.

"Not really!" I said.

"Don't quote me," said Mr. Abdul Qayum Khan.

After he had been elected by the ex-Ambis, Mr. Qayum rose quickly. In three years he was Pakistan's minister of industries and bucking for prime minister; then, there was a cabinet crisis, he was kicked upstairs, the Moslem League wouldn't support him and he's back where he started. So, in fact, are the 60,000 persons he liberated, who – seeing how the Nawab is still the owner, if not the ruler, of ex-Amb – are paying taxes to Pakistan and rent to the Nawab, and, apparently, are worse off than before, except they can vote for Mr. Qayum. Meanwhile, the Nawab has gone to court to get his country back, but as soon as he files suit for some of it, Pakistan takes more of it away. The result of all this litigation is that Nawab's lawyer, Mr. Sajjad Ahmad Jan, has made $21,000 and with it has built himself a mansion in Abbotabad, the Pakistani equivalent of the Catskills. According to Mr. Jan, the Nawab hasn't a chance; according to the Nawab, Mr. Jan has a father-in-law, a judge, and...; and according to Pakistan, it's a quibble over words. "My goodness," a Pakistani official told me, once, "the Nawab says it's his state, we say it's his estate. So, what's all the fuss about?"

...

The withering away of Amb has been paralleled by an atrophy of its ruling family. Mr. Khan Zaman Khan, the previous Nawab, was a warrior known as "Zaman the Lionhearted," with, in a photograph I saw, a terrifying mustache and a sumo wrestler's face – a fine illustration, I had thought, for Abdul the Bulbul Amir. His son, the incumbent Nawab, as I have said, resembles EdWynn, and his son, Mr. Mohammed Said, the heir apparent to what he persists in calling "the throne of Amb," resembles, I'm afraid, a drugstore cowboy: he is thin, oily, eczematous and possessed of a frail, gigolo mustache. The Nawab Zada is a college freshman; in fact, he has been one for three years, having been kicked in 1954 out of Burn-hall Missionary College, in Abbotabad, where he spent his time drinking, gambling and wenching – particularly wenching – and in 1955 out of Gordon Missionary College, in Rawalpindi, where, although he lived as he always had, he took the precaution of giving the mimeograph men $36 for a set of the final exams. Gordon Missionary College found out, and now the Nawab Zada is applying to Harvard. He has been married to a wise and beautiful princess, and his father, his mother and the rest of the royal family are hoping that the union will sober him somewhat, though they don't expect the princess to benefit any. As for the Nawab Zada, the prospect of a steady piece is clearly a happy one. He hired an architect to build him a honeymoon cottage, but he rejected the first draft, for he had to walk 20 yards to get to the princess' bedroom. He also rejected the second draft – the bedroom was at the front of the house. In the third and latest draft, the princess' bedroom is at the back of the house and next door to the Nawab Zada's, and it's flanked by a moonlit terrace, and the Nawab Zada says it could hardly be improved on.

If what I have said has come as anything of a shock to Mr. Wilbur J. Bender, Chairman of the Committee on Admissions at Harvard College, I'm ready to take the blame. It was I who put the notion of Harvard into the Nawab Zada's head, and once it was there, I couldn't get it out. I met him in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, a week before he was kicked out of Gordon College. I had the devil's own time doing so, for the Nawab Zada wasn't in his dormitory, he wasn't in the dining hall, he wasn't in class, and those who were seemed rather amused that I should seek him there, volunteering, instead, a list of Rawalpindi's fancier bawdy houses, at which, they advised me, the Nawab Zada might reasonably be sought. By leaving a few messages at such places, I arranged, at last, to meet the Nawab Zada at my hotel at tea time, and, when he got there, I shook-his hand and asked if he cared for a beer – it's illegal for Moslems, but foreigners can get it – and the Nawab Zada said, "Of course."

His hair was slick, but he hadn't shaved in several days. He began by saying he wasn't taking part in the Ambi government, but that as soon as he finished his studies, his father would teach him about his royal duties. Gordon College wasn't for him, the Nawab Zada said; it was run by missionaries, who were awfully touchy about certain things; he wanted to go to school in America; did I have any suggestions?

"Well, Harvard or Columbia for foreigners," I said.

"Which is the best? As the son of a Nawab, I desire the best."

"It depends on what you're interested in."

"Well, besides to study," said the Nawab Zada, "a thing I'm interested in are girls."

"There're a lot of interesting girls at Harvard."

"Good." The Nawab Zada sighed, and he gazed out the window at the hot, dusty streets of Rawalpindi. "In Pakistan," he resumed, "there are two kinds of girls. There are the kind, if they see you are coming they pull that black thing over their face. Also, there are the kind, if you pay them you can enjoy them, if you know what I mean."

"I know what you mean," I said, shifting my glass uneasily.

"But if you enjoy them, they don't enjoy it, so you really don't enjoy it, do you?"

"Of course not," I said.

"Of course." The Nawab Zada gazed out the window once again, and I hurriedly drank my beer; then, turning to me with an obscene smile, he said, "Is it possible to have a girl in the United States?"

"Of course. Everyone does."

"I mean," said the Nawab Zada. "is it possible to have` a girl in the United States?"

"Oh! Well, it isn't against the law, but – "

"But?"

" – but the girls – "

"I was only worried about the law," said the Nawab Zada. He had a look of unruffled confidence. I thought it was high time to change the subject.

"Do you think there'll be any Amb by the time you're the Nawab?" I asked.

"Pakistan will give it back," he said emotionally. "It must!"

"It won't. But, even if you can't be a great Nawab, you can be a good one, which is more important."

The Nawab Zada reflected on this a while. "When I'm the Nawab," he said, presently, "what I want to do is abolish the veils. That way, you can see the girls." He grinned lasciviously, winked, and took another slug of beer.