Did I really catch body lice in the Pakistani mountains? 25 years later, I STILL don't know.
'Sahaab, the man in the pharmacy is calling you.'
I heard the squeak behind me and turned.
'Sahaab, in the pharmacy, over there,' said the teenager, pointing enthusiastically at a small shop. I did not know what to make of this but walked slowly over towards the sign that announced that the proprietor was a Master of Greek Medicine and Homoeopathy. As I approached the concrete steps up to the door, it tingled open and a small, dark-skinned man stood at the top, giving me an avuncular smile.
'Did you call for me?' I rasped. Although the air had thickened during the descent and I was only at about nine thousand feet, those three concrete steps up into the pharmacy had to be taken slowly. My skin was tingling, and I guessed it was because of the higher levels of oxygen. I had just had my first night of restful sleep after the dreams of suffocation.
I felt a warm hand on my shoulder as I was practically lullabied into the shop.
The first thing I saw were the fantastical shelves and the exotic word, ‘apothecary’ leaped to mind. The old shelves, which might have been painted white by an ancestor, were cracked and some of the plywood curling. Balancing on top, looking infinitely fragile, and making me suddenly slow down so as not to knock anything over, were bottles and jars in dark purples, stained browns and rose reds. Nothing was labelled; all the bottles seemed to be full of powders or liquids that strained to let forth an explosion of smells and serendipitous healing.
‘You have been sleeping at the Mubarak guesthouse?’ he asked me suddenly.
I stared at the apothecary, at him nodding his thin eyebrows and shiny pate. I was confused. Had I forgotten to pay at the guesthouse? ‘I am not sure what it was called.’
‘Ahh… there is only one place to stay here. Did you come off the bus from Khunjerab last night?’
I nodded.
‘Good, Akbar will have taken you to Mubarak guesthouse. Did you sleep well?’
I was beginning to become mesmerised by his head, and wondered if it caught the light reflected off the bottles or whether it explained the way that some of them glinted back into the general gloom.
‘Why did you call me here? I need to take the bus to Pindi.’ I started to retreat, but did not hurry, desperately worried that I would knock something over.
I remembered the stories that my mother told me about her family being from a long line of hakims, the masters of medical lore in her village near Faizabad in India. She first mentioned it after we had watched a news report on the television about the increase of heroin on the streets and in the penthouses in London. She was amused that such a fuss was being made by the British about a drug that had been stored in a large jar in her childhood kitchen for medicinal use.
‘I need to catch that bus’, I repeated, almost making it out of the shop.
‘Are you itching?’
I stopped and turned back.
‘Are you not itching a little?’ he repeated.
In response, I clawed at my left hand, leaving white trail marks on my skin which had gone, over the year under the Pakistani sun, from a gentle beech to a dark, mahogany stain.
I looked at the chemist and he smiled. Pharmacist, chemist. Apothecary, charlatan. I felt a sudden tremor of movement in the small of my back and even as my hand moved there, I stopped forced it onto the pocket of my kurta. With my other hand, I clutched at my small canvas bag. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘You have body lice,’ he said sombrely.
I realised that my hands had moved to my thighs and that I was now scratching.
‘Rubbish,’ I insisted and marched out of the shop. Back in the cool air that even at this altitude was pregnant with the promise of the smells of the plain, I relaxed and looked around for a place to have breakfast. In the distance, down the dirt track, ignoring the majestic snow-dusted peaks on my left, I heard the first bustles of the market place. But I was scratching and my brain told me that there were thousands of creepies crawling all over me, below my lip, behind my ear, in the crook of my knee. When I realised that my hand was slowly moving towards my crotch, I turned from the road and lumbered back, as fast as I could back into the pharmacy.
I threw down a second razor and it skittered over the rough concrete floor, stopping in the soapy water that lay all around in small puddles. I called through the three inch gap above the small wooden door that would have come up to my shoulder had I been standing. A painfully thin arm was thrust through the gap and I took a third razor blade and continued hacking at the hair on my legs. I was soaking wet and sweating under it.
There was no air and I felt the same suffocation that I had experienced when I was several thousand feet higher. No matter how hard I tapped the new razor on the brick walls, I could not dislodge the hair. Despite being shaped similarly to a Gillette disposable, it soon revealed itself to be a cheap local copy and became blunt. My legs were streaked with blood which had become diluted by soapy water and I was close to tears.
‘Half an hour is nearly up, sahaab’, came a call from outside.
‘I need more time,’ I screamed back, ‘a lot more time. I’ll pay.’
I had been persuaded that I did have lice. And that there was no way of getting rid of them without shaving my whole body and having my clothes boiled in a sulphurous, pink fluid that, I was assured, would kill off the lice and eggs. So here I sat, in a hamaam, a small washing room that was behind a barber’s shop which conveniently neighboured the pharmacy. I was in one of the tiny cubicles that seemed to be the size of a small cupboard, shaving, feeling miserable.
My brain must have filed away the fact that the skin is the largest organ of the body and here and now it took on meaning. Another small patch of leg became clear of hair but I was having trouble breathing in the extreme humidity.
‘Give me a bucket of cold water’, I shouted through the door. A moment later, there was a tap and I unbolted it before squeezing myself into a corner so that my nakedness would not be seen.
‘It is outside,’ came the call. The murmurs grew and soon I realised that the pharmacist and barber were firm friends. They chatted in Pushto and I could hear their respectful banter.
After an hour, finding hair in places that I had not seen in years, when I had poked and prodded myself to make sure that no crevice was left unscraped, I called for my clothes. When nobody replied, I looked out of the gap, into the glare of light, feeling cooler air dancing on my nose, I saw my clothes still in a metal bucket that sat on a rusting primus stove. It bubbled and a thin haze hung over the whole apparatus. The room smelled like a sweaty plastics factory and I felt more trapped than ever.
Then three men walked into the room and started to laugh and as one of them pulled my clothes and my canvas bag out of the bucket. I sat back on the wooden stool and ladled some more cold water over myself.
An hour later, my clothes, freshly ironed, were pushed through the gap, followed by my bag. I had been sweating for hours and now realised that my mouth was dry but I could not bear to ask for a drink, sitting among disgusting puddles and clumps of cut hair, discarded razor blades, small pools of blood, streaks of blood that had started to clot on my leg and turn dark in the gloom. And all the while the three voices, full of merriment came from outside.
The pharmacist and the barber; but I wondered who the third man was.
I found somewhere vaguely clean to stand and managed to dress. When I finally opened the door onto the world, I saw him. At first, he looked relaxed, and then he looked at me looking at him and the conversation that he had been having with the barber and the pharmacist suddenly died.
All three men came over, slapped me on the shoulder and asked if I felt better. My whole body was covered in sores, my clothes were pulling at the stubble on my body and I was in a hundred points of pain that amounted to agony.
All three of them were ebullient until the third man noticed my forehead. ‘Your eyebrows,’ he squealed, pointing up at me.
The barber and pharmacist looked aghast. But all I could do was to stare at this man.
‘You really need to shave them off,’ exclaimed the barber. ‘Come, let me do it for you,’ he cooed.
I shook my head. I was looking at the third man. I might have had lice. I might have had something else. Whatever it was, he would surely know.
It was Akbar. The same Akbar who had welcomed me so solicitously the night before into the guest house.
