BESHAM: What do truckers dream of? Tucked in the sleeping cabins of freightliners trundling through the night on roads without end, as fellow drivers take turns on the long, treacherous Karakorum Highway? Do they dream of perpetual motion from which there is no escape? An immobile state where the terra really is firma, instead of a shaking bed on a moving vehicle and an asphalt surface forever slipping beneath their battered trucks, road signs approaching and receding?

Are their dreams snatches of songs, music mixed with the drone of engines, played repeatedly like a broken record stuck in the grooves of senses numb from navigating the same roads over and again? Or is it the nightmare of desolation that is the Kohistan — the rocky badlands of Dasu, the wastes of Chilas? Or perhaps a faraway, elusive home, a place to rest tired bones?

The owner has a name, but he is better known as “Pakistani” — he says the word with tonal emphasis, like he is proud of being one. For years, he slogged away in Saudi Arabia, saving to start this truckers’ motel in the mountains of Shangla. Over at the back of his restaurant, walled in by trucks looming like juggernauts this early morning, truckers sleep in a drivers’ dormitory, with string beds lined against whitewashed walls and flowered quilts thrown over.

Pakistani stands out in the parking lot among men bedraggled and bleary-eyed, drivers numbed by a monotonous mountainous terrain and addled by the hashish they smoke to blunt the tedium of hauling their 18-wheelers. Their red-rimmed eyes carry no traces of dreams, forced to focus on roads for so long that, asleep or awake, they can’t focus on anything else.

The first clue to Pakistani’s professionalism comes when he detaches himself from the clients at his restaurant — also named Pakistan — to welcome new customers, leading them in through the maze of trucks. Light filters in through pane-less windows in the back wall — there is a red gunny-bag canvass to cover the windows if the weather turns inclement, which it often does in these parts. Behind the restaurant, the River Indus gushes through the valley, a green, rain-washed bowl for the early morning sunlight to pool in. The parathas aren’t greasy, only hot and crisp like they should be, easily chewed and washed down with hot tea. Wakefulness follows in preparedness for an arduous journey.

Pakistani stands in the long porch of his restaurant, amid a crowd of tables, string beds and platforms to seat customers Afghan-style. A beefy man, he barks orders at his workers: “You should have cut the vegetables last night, ready to cook this morning.” He is not a man to laze around in his office, a solarium of sorts at the front of the restaurant where his high-backed chair sits waiting.

Pakistani, it appears, starts and spends the days in the murky interiors of his restaurant, taking orders and chatting with customers. A gracious host to tired, restless truckers, he soothes their overworked nerves and bodies with hot, delicious meals, simple in flavour and recipe. Around him, his men move busily, rushing to deliver orders, kept on their toes by this no-nonsense manager. He didn’t just come upon his little kingdom in the foothills of Besham: he raised it through unrelenting ambition matched by determined hard work. And he hasn’t stopped building even when crowned. Pakistani plans to add “clean rooms” to his establishment, at the back, by the river. They will have clean toilets, he says, and will not be for the drivers who have lost all sense of cleanliness and hygiene, their peripatetic, poor lives not given to comfort and aesthetics.

But restaurants like Pakistani’s exist because truckers do. In here they sit, unwashed and baggy-eyed from the lack of sleep. A little unhinged, one imagines, from the constant drone of heavy engines. Their faces, swollen and pale, betray their detachment from all that is still. When they walk they’re a little wobbly, the earth moving beneath their feet even when they stop — motion entrenched in the bones, a memory of the limbs. From what they look like, it seems that it is not the trucks but their broken bodies that haul tons of freight around the length and breadth of this land, moving Hercules-like through the dizzying heights of mountains, the burden of unsettled, lonely lives on their shoulders.

Here, at the Pakistan Restaurant, they let a caffeine rush clear the numbness of their bodies, the fog deposited on their minds by the monotony of motion on roads so familiar from frequent traversing that they have become an extension of the trucker’s instincts, with dangerous turns negotiated more from memory than mindfulness. Through fog and rain and barren terrain, they spend lonely nights looking at the glowing dials on their dashboards, retinas burned by the high-beams of oncoming vehicles — and their lives a bit like the confined circle cast by their own vehicles’ headlights, illuminating the next mile in the night, beyond which there is only darkness intensified by the hulking mountains above and yawning valleys below.

Published in Dawn, April 7th, 2017