Harold M. Bergsma
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“One Way to Pakistan” Harold Bergsma’s tale of corruption and abduction in Pakistan is a very compelling read that rates right up there with, “The Kite Runner” by Khaled Hosseini. The novel is set in a post 9/11 world where American freedoms are at odds with Islamist traditions and the law of Sharia. Bergsma paints a vivid picture of sexual repression and wide-spread graft in a culture foreign to most of us but all too familiar to him as having been born and raised on the sub-continent. His characters are from all walks of life and social castes and give an insightful peek (literally) at how the other half lives. Inevitable none of them escape unscathed as they try to survive in the maelstrom caused by daily terrorist threats and the clash between imperialism and fundamentalism. As a world traveler and raconteur myself, I wholeheartedly recommend this novel to anyone who is interested in finding out more about a society that we as Americans have embraced as an ally in the war on terror- it is a real eye-opener.
Robert McMahan, San Diego, California.
In One Way to Pakistan, Harold Bergsma takes us behind the headlines to a world where Muslims and Christians are all too human. Using powerful images of three abductions, he weaves a tale which is engaging and passionately written and causes us to care deeply about his characters and their fates. Characters and events such as these, at first glance, may be misunderstood by westerners, but their cultural context on the global stage is made clear and definitely compelling. Fascinating, thought-provoking and sympathetic, this novel is an important contribution to both global and multicultural understanding.
Elaine Jarchow, Ph.D., Dean, Author, Preparing to Teach Global Perspectives, Corwin Press, 1997
Reading One Way to Pakistan by Harold Bergsma gave me a nostalgic visit to my childhood in India. The characters in it became real people for me and I felt very involved in their lives. The story drew me in completely as I traveled familiar roads and visited familiar places when the action took us from village to city. I especially appreciated the detailed descriptions of these areas.
Sally Hazlett Woolever, Storyteller. Living on the Edge Editorial Board and Contributor to Otsego Stories, A Bicentennial Collection, Walton, N.Y. 1995
You are in store for an amazing, bazaar-level, people’s-eye view of a microcosm in 21st. century Pakistan! The spotlight is on sex-starved men, who indulge, with impunity, in hypocrisy, graft, bribery, extortion and abduction, using their victims as chattel.
Tom Stoup, Bluedoor Bookstore, San Diego
Harold M. Bergsma is a son of medical missionaries who worked in Ethiopia and northern India for many years. His early schooling was in India, at Woodstock International School in Mussoorie, U.P. He speaks Urdu and some Punjabi. His earliest memories are of Taxila in the North West Frontier Province. Later he lived in Sialkot and as a teenager in Ludhiana. Bergsma also lived as a child in California and in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
At the age of eighteen Bergsma returned with his parents to India and enrolled as a senior at Woodstock School, in the foothills of the Himalayas. Prior to beginning his senior year of studies he took part in a three month ornithological expedition to Nepal led by the late Dr. Robert L. Fleming, his mentor, under the auspices of the Chicago Field Museum and the National Geographic Society. After completing his high school at Woodstock, he returned to the United States for college. He earned a B.A. in Religious Studies and Elementary Education at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan; his M.A. was in Secondary Educational Administration at Michigan State University and his Ph.D. in International and Comparative Education and African Anthropology and Linguistics at M.S.U. He was a Fellow of the African Studies Institute.
His first overseas professional experience was in Nigeria where he worked for twelve years as the founding high school principal for both the Bristow Secondary School and the Wukari Division Combined Secondary school for the Christian Reformed Board of Foreign Missions. He speaks and reads Tiv as well and has studied the Hausa language.
He worked eight years at Lake Superior State University in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, as Division Head to help establish the new Department of Secondary Education. He moved to New Mexico State University as Head of the Department of Curriculum and Instruction and retired there as Emeritus Professor of Education. He was involved in a variety of international projects while working at NMSU for almost twenty years, including those in Yemen Arab Republic, Pakistan, Belize, Honduras, Swaziland and Namibia. He lived with his family in many of these countries while doing educational development work for USAID and World Bank. He is an Emeritus Professor of the College of Education at New Mexico State University.
He has published widely in professional journals.* Bergsma has written extensively about the Tiv Tribe of Nigeria, publishing a school reader, Tales Tiv Tell with Oxford University Press which is in its sixth re-print and has published two monographs for Africa, Oxford University Press, London, one about traditional Tiv Kuraiyol, and the other, Tiv Proverbs as a Means of Social Control.
Lalla and Lavina, Stories about Indian Women, a work of fiction was published in 2005. Rhododendron Wine Factory, Memoirs of a Wanderer, was published in the spring of 2006. His newest work of fiction, One Way to Pakistan, is scheduled to be published in November, 2006.
Harold Bergsma is retired and living with his wife Lily Chu a retired educator and a writer, in their home overlooking San Diego bay. He continues to travel internationally, gathering information for future writing projects.
This fictional work, One Way to Pakistan, draws on my personal experience of growing up in that part of India which is now Pakistan; living there as a teen and working there as an adult. This country was home for me. I spoke Urdu, played with Indian kids as a child, became enamored with an Indian girl as a teenager, finished high school in the foothills of the Himalayas in Woodstock, an international school in Mussoorie, U.P., and worked as an educational development professional in a World Bank Project for the Ministry of Agriculture in Lahore and a USAID project with the Pakistan Audit Department, Audits and Accounts Training Institutes. It has been my joy to travel to most of the places mentioned in the novel, to have had first-hand experience in the towns and cities mentioned in this work of fiction.
Many Pakistanis and Indians living in the United States and England have grown up in an adopted country with their transplanted families who retained their cultural identity as South East Asians, as far as food choice, family habits, friendships and choice of mates was concerned. Many such cultural transplants lived in ghettos in their parent’s city of choice and grew up as Americans or British and have never or seldom returned to India, Pakistan or Afghanistan. Very few of them return there to work. Yet from these people we have begun to see wonderful works of literature, novels and poetry in English of world class quality. Their voices are being heard. The wonderful works of Rohinton Mistry, A Fine Balance, and Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner and many others, have caught the attention of the world for the excellence of their English prose, their beauty and creativity. Their voices emerge from cross-cultural experience, from the richness of the duality of their experience which reveals the tension and adjustments which they have made simply to exist, to compete and to be heard, expressed in a literary nostalgia for their cultural roots.
Cultural critics such as V.S. Naipaul or S. Rushdie, world renowned authors, have been able to put their finger on the pulse of their own people while revealing the social ills of their ethnic origins, but not without some personal repercussions from both the culture of their origin as well as the adopted culture. Their voices have been heard, however, loudly and clearly. They have written about their roots, have exposed areas of life which, though painful, reflect perceptions emerging from cross cultural socialization.
For me to write about Pakistan as an expatriate has its hazards as well, for a number of reasons. My roots are in India but my major socialization was in the United States and the international world. “If you want to talk about your own family, go to it, your family is weird anyway. Don’t you dare talk about my mother or dad.” For an outsider, no matter how well connected, it is best to hold your tongue lest the wrath of the in-group descend on you with all its fury. What applies at the family level applies even more for the novelist who writes about the international ‘in-laws’. But to write about ‘ugly Americans’ abroad also has its obvious hazards.
This work of fiction had its genesis in India and Pakistan. As a child, I was warned by my parents about the need of always staying together, of not becoming too familiar with the natives, or strangers, not allowing for personal physical affection from male adults, not allowing our sister to be alone or isolated. The list went on and on and I heard it often. I heard dreadful stories of abductions of expatriate male and female children who were snatched away from parents, who were inattentive or careless and never found again. The reality of abduction of native adults came to me much later.
In America we hear of abductions, rape and murder of women and girls almost every week. The press and television put these horror stories in front of us with great drama. Whole communities search for missing girls, bloodhounds are put to work, and sometimes the victim’s body is found. Frequently the girl is not found; she simply disappears from the face of the earth. The horror of abduction!
In my first work of fiction, Lalla and Lavina, this theme of abduction reared its head in two places, one in the experience of the expatriate boy who grew up in India and who was made aware of this unhappy reality personally; as well as in the story of a eunuch who was castrated as a boy and lived an altered and tragic life in, ‘My Name is Larka’. In my recent memoir, The Rhododendron Wine Factory, memories of unwanted attention by affectionate native men are recorded. (See: www.haroldbergsma.com) Then, while living as an adult in Lahore, Pakistan, the young American wife of a personal acquaintance disappeared, for good. She like so many others, are never heard from again. They are abducted and vanish. Their stories are never told.
Two years ago I began a study of abduction of women, boys and girls in Pakistan and was amazed at the statistics. I found initially 205,000 Web entries for “Rape and Abduction Pakistan.” A brief perusal of reported incidents on the web search engine revealed reported cases in the hundreds, annually. Just a few personal stories of returned women and girls who had been abducted were presented, tragic stories of being taken against their will; then when found, being rejected by the males of their own families because they were tainted, not suitable for marriage, and in some cases blamed for having been abducted and raped. The vast majority of the hundreds of girls who disappear annually are never again heard from. Once having been taken behind the high mud walls of some remote household in the Northwest Frontier Province, which is a law unto itself, such girls just vanish.
I have been invited personally by a number of gracious Pakistani householders in NWFP and Baluchistan to drink tea in their extensive walled homes as a guest. In one instance only, I was introduced as a respected ‘uncle’ and met the women of the family. In all the others, it was men only. It is hard for me to imagine the degree of isolation the women of these households must endure, for a lifetime.
Then, in my studies, there were the accounts of girls who were turned over to other families to repay blood debts and became low status females in the household, lower than servants; I hesitate to use the word slave. The slave girl Ankh in this story is one such person.
One Way to Pakistan is the story of the abduction of an American young woman in Pakistan as well as two other Pakistani non-Muslim girls. It is a story of personal horror, religious intolerance, frustration and the meaning of purdah. It is the story of the abuse of power, gender and political influence. Though tragic for the American woman, a secondary character in the plot, it is equally tragic for the young Pakistani non-Muslim women in the story, who faced the reality of abduction and were torn from their families and their homes to be forced into a life where they never again enjoyed liberty and personal life choices.
A word or two about my use of Urdu/ Hindustani proverbs at the beginning of the chapters. Proverbs, enigmatic sayings in which truths are cloaked, are used in all cultures to influence, to provide social control and reveal the mind, the humor or sarcasm of the culture. How better could it be stated; Asman ka thuka munh par ata hai. (Heaven’s spit comes back against the mouth.) Spit not against the wind. Sailors have a similar saying, ‘don’t piss into the wind.’ I have used a few such Urdu proverbs to provide linguistic links, local color, to the reality of each of the chapters. These are presented to the non- Urdu speaking reader as an attempt to pull the story more closely to Pakistan. To those who speak and read Hindustani and English, it is hoped that these proverbs will dredge up loving memories of their people and home.
An old tattered copy of English-Hindustani Dictionary, without covers, but assuredly published prior to1947 was used extensively to verify Roman-Urdu spellings of words used in the proverbs sections. Finally, all quotations, in English, from the Holy Koran were taken from The Meaning of the Glorious Koran, by Mohammed Marmaduke Pickthall, Mentor Book, 1953; (cloth-bound edition from Haroon Chambers, South Napier Road, Karachi). Verification for geographical places and names was made using Pakistan Handbook, by Isobel Shaw, Moon Publications, Inc. Chico, California, 1990; and Pakistan Places of Interest, by Prof. Masud-Ul-Hasan, Ferozsons Ltd., Lahore, undated. Wildlife, science and natural history usages were validated from Birds of Nepal with reference to Kashmir and Sikkim, Robert Fleming et al, a Robert Fleming publication, Kathmandu, Nepal, 1976 and the wonderful web-site Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia.
