‘I was detained as a potential suicide bomber’

To the Lahore Literary Festival. As I cross the border from India, Pakistan is experiencing an unprecedented wave of sectarian violence: 400 Shias have been killed in bomb attacks this year, while more than 150 houses and two churches belonging to the Christians have been burned in mob attacks. Yet Pakistan always manages to stumble on. Sixty-five years after partition, Lahore still feels like Delhi’s sister city, and is much more like my adopted home than either Madras or Calcutta is. Moreover, there are some hopeful signs. Zardari’s government is about to complete its term in office — the first time in the country’s history that an elected government will manage to do so — and the literary festival itself is a huge success. Every event is packed to the gunnels with excited Lahoris relishing a break from their grim politics. We authors are treated somewhere between Bono doing an airdive and Imran Khan returning home after beating India in a test match. It certainly beats the quiet snores from the back that accompany your average Waterstone’s reading.

It’s not every day that the British Council sends an armoured car to pick you up for a reading. But when I arrived at Karachi airport, I find I have been assigned a guard with a pump-action shotgun to escort me to the quiet university campus where I am to speak. You don’t get that in Cheltenham. Later, in Islamabad, another armoured vehicle awaits — this time the sort of sinister black SUV that Jack Bauer is always crashing in 24. I spend the morning discussing AfPak with the beautiful Hina Rabbani Khar, then in her last fortnight as Pakistan’s foreign minister. She is, as they say, the full package — no wonder she had her Indian counterpart eating out of her hands when she turned up in Delhi with her head covered, wearing movie-star Cavallo sunglasses and swinging her black Birkin bag: the Indian media called her Pakistan’s Weapon of Mass Distraction.