PESHAWAR.

Timaru Herald, Volume CXXV, Issue 18626, 23 July 1930, Page 10

PESHAWAR.

CITY OF SINISTER ROMANCE. Peshawar—ancient capital of an ageold border country—has an unenviable reputation throughout the length and breadth of India. More of Asia than of Hindustan, its inhabitant’s are a mixture of many nationalities. The border tribes and the people of the neighbouring country districts are Pathan (the worcj is philologically the same as Afghan); the people inside the city walls are known as Peshawaris became a race to themselves. Within the gates, up narrow alleys and in houses hidden beyond dark courtyards, are always lurking spies, outlaws, emissaries from tribal territory, and the police of the frontier generally have a pretty long list of questionable gentry in the city, who are brought to book sooner or later. The city is very old; to encircle its outside walls, with their 16 gates and their irregular lines, as they were built hundreds of years ago to protect the city as it then was or later expanded to include the house and land of some wealthy khan, is to-day a drive of some 12 miles. Peshawar gains enormously in population, for the increase with each succeeding generation is normally very large, and of late years there has been neither plague nor famine, nor wars, to decimate the total of its inhabitants; and as the bravest of the Peshawaris would not dream of sleeping at night outside the shelter and protection of the walls, the city, not being able to add to its area, must needs grow upwards. Thus one sees on all sides the Eastern equivalent to skyscrapers—storey piled above storey, each with its own architecture and ornamentation and colouring, regardless of the floor below. Each higher storey one would expect to see smaller and slighter, and where this is so one finds the flimsiest of bamboo and matting erections; but frequently, in defiance of any known law of stress and strain, one finds the buildings overlapping and becoming more and more topheavy until the houses on either side of the narrower streets threaten to meet at the roofs. There is an important domestic aspect of this style of building which would not, at first blush, be apparent to the European. The women of the family, who do not appear in public nor in mixed society, have the use of the open flat roofs of their houses, where they are secure from the gaze of strangers—until a new upper storey opposite overlooks their harem. Then they must in turn build higher. Where the Grimy are Virtuous. The old city still adheres to the Eastern custom of collecting each craft in its own quarter. The goldsmiths and silversmiths, the cloth merchants, the sellers of foodstuffs, the sellers of live birds—each craft and trade represents a caste, and each caste keeps to its quarter. Older trades, too, flourish in this wicked old city. The only women visible in all its thronging life advertise their trade by their cleanliness of person and freshness of dress, for the respectability of the Mohammedan woman, who works in the fields of the district, is to be judged by the years of dirt that cling to hands and face and gather on her voluminous clothing. Here cleanliness is not next to godliness. Another old trade still advertises itself in the name of the principal street —the Kissi-Khwana Bazaar—“the street of the storytellers.” What an atmosphere of unhurried days and long, lazy evenings is conjured up by such a name! The domestic rhythms of the “Arabian Nights” are not yet altogether dead. In Peshawar, as in many another city of Asia, the storyteller’s would still be an honoured and a profitable profession. The city, if it could be viewed from above, would present a picture of a veritable maze. Its streets form concentric circles; there are inner walls and narrow gateways within narrow gateways—a labyrinth with many a cul-de-sac, an easy city in which to plant ambushes and to trap the stranger, a deadly city to enter as a force representing the power of unwelcome law\ Until some two or three years ago the gates of this native city at night enclosed three English people —a young officer of police and two women, one the doctor of the Municipal Women’s Hospital, the other a free-lance missionary. There, with amazing sang-froid, they were, in the midst of tens of thousands of Peshawaris, shut in at night in the city with its terrible reputation for sudden stabbing affrays, its wild, uncivilised heart. One never heard that their sleep was the less sound.