Meandering like the river, her narrative conjures up Sufi saints and marauding conquerors. She visits the birthplace of Guru Nanak who founded Sikhism. Once this Punjabi landscape was thick with forests where lions, tigers, leopards, bears and wolves roamed, but, ill-conceived British irrigation projects and ‘trigger- happy officials’ eliminated the wild animals. Pesticides and dams did the rest: today, it is a dry and dusty plain.

Leaning over the ramparts of Attock fort where, 500 years ago, Emperor Barbur crossed the river, down from Samarkand, she sees two rivers meet: the Kabul, brown with silt, and the Indus, ice-blue with snowmelt. Behind her are the plains and women in bright headscarves; ahead, the Afghan hills, Kalashnikov-toting smugglers, women shrouded in burqas.

She relies on the kindness of strangers, squatting to share the family meal, ripping apart a goat’s thigh with her fingers, drinking yak-curd and salty tea, bedding down with the women of the house. She munches a lump of majoon made from warthog testicles, sparrow’s brain, deer musk, honey and opium. When nothing better is available, she accepts diluted sewage as drinking water. These encounters, often sad in their implications, sometimes hilarious, offer a heart-lifting example of human generosity transcending differences of faith and culture.

She treads her way through the debris of the near and distant past — crumbling citadels, rusting green rocket-launchers, abandoned Russian tanks and Buddhas smashed by the Taliban. Her narrative progress is sometimes slowed down by the weight of history, but the journey remains a spellbinding blend of discovery, elation and frustration.

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