Ten days passed and word came back from the military attaché, that we were to go to the visa office, downtown Islamabad, and Mr Muktar Saeed was our man. It was thought wise that I should wear a collar and tie and jacket and my wife should dress formally too.
Before we left Ireland we had applied to the Pakistani Embassy in London for ‘double entry’ visas. Our passports came back stamped for single entry only. I had ‘phoned the embassy and explained.
‘Not a problem,’ the polite official assured me. ‘When you get to Pakistan go to a visa office and they’ll give you a visa for a second entry.’
We recounted this when we arrived with family in Islamabad. My cousin’s wife, herself Pakistani, smiled knowingly. Nothing was quite as simple as that in Pakistan she explained, and with two weeks in hand she started to work right away.
Her late father had been a famous Pakistani general, so she applied the principle of Jimmy O’Dea’s old chestnut as to why the harp was the emblem of Ireland. Answer: because the country is run by pulling strings! She contacted a friend of her father’s, a military attaché at the Secretariat of the Chief Executive, the country’s Military Dictator. Meanwhile we completed visa application forms that she had delivered to the Visa Office.
We arrived at Mr Saeed’s office where he sat behind a large desk on the polished surface of which there was a telephone, a blotter, a calendar and not one piece of paper. There was a hat stand and some chairs and a carpet covered the centre of the floor.
Mr Saeed was expecting us. He stood up, shook hands with me and bowed to Hilary. He welcomed us graciously and enquired kindly if we were having a good holiday. Then he spoke briefly on the telephone and told us that the gentleman at the door would bring us to Mr Aziz who would look after us.
As we sat waiting in Mr Aziz’s crowded public office it was clear that he was a man of consequence. He sat at a desk inspecting papers, signing chits and handing them to applicants without a word. Other unfortunates received no chits, but rather an angry lecture or an abrupt dismissal. Mr Aziz was not a man to be taken for granted. Eventually our turn came. We stood beside his desk while he examined our applications, and I had the feeling that he was going to show these foreigners what an important person he was, and that issuing a visa to them was far from a formality.
Trying to avoid the inference that he was misreading our applications, it took us a little time to point out to him, diplomatically, that we were not applying for an extension to our visas to stay longer, but rather for new visas to re-enter Pakistan. He then rooted in a bottom drawer, pulled out a well worn manual of regulations and thumbed through the pages, eventually stopping to read. He stood up suddenly and said:
‘There is no letter from the Interior Ministry. Follow me.’
We followed him back to Mr Saeed’s office, where we were again received graciously and invited to sit down, while Mr Aziz, speaking animatedly in Urdu, quoted from his book of rules. Mr Saeed then said calmly in English:
‘But they are not tourists, they are visiting family.’
We followed Mr Aziz back to his desk and stood in silence awaiting his decision. ‘Your visas will be ready on Friday morning.’ We thanked him and left.
We were due to catch a train to Lahore from Rawalpindi, on Friday afternoon at 4.00pm. We were reconciled to the possibility that our re-entry visas would not be ready in time.
Friday, mid-morning, at the visa office Mr Aziz gave us our chit, but before our passports could be stamped, we had to go into the city centre to a particular bank to lodge the fee. When we returned the visa office was closed for lunch. We queued again and presented our receipt. Half an hour later we had our visas.
Through chaotic city traffic we set out for the station at Rawalpindi and caught our train to Lahore with only minutes to spare. We needed our visas to cross back into Pakistan after our visit to India.
On the recommendation of our family in Pakistan we visited Jalianwala Bagh, in Amritsar, where in 1919, by the orders of the infamous General Dyer, British troops opened fire on a peaceful demonstration to protest at the detention of Ghandi. 379 unarmed civilians were killed and over 1,000 were wounded. Brendan Behan included this in his list of Britain’s worst atrocities. A biography of Dyer published recently tells us that he went to school in Midleton College and spent a year at the College of Surgeons, Dublin, before going to Sandhurst. The Governor General of Punjab who supported Dyer’s actions was Sir Michael O’Dwyer, a man with Irish connections too.
The real reason for wanting double entry visas was to return to Pakistan after this trip to India to visit the Golden Temple of the Sikhs. It was to be one of the highlights of our holiday, and it did not disappoint. It was magnificent. Indra Ghandi, however, had been assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards because she had ordered Indian troops into this holy place to put down a rising in support of the formation of an independent Sikh State. It is difficult in this world to escape the explosive mix of religion and politics.