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For a foreigner in Istanbul in the 1990s, buying a car was a complex business. One didn’t have to pay the exorbitant tax levied on Turkish citizens but once you had one of these blue-plate cars, you had to sell it to someone in the limited pot of Istanbul-based foreigners. The red tape was forbidding. Without a job at one stage, I no longer had part of the red tape to entitle me to a blue-plate car so I had to sell it quickly. I put an advert in the Turkish Daily News.

One day the phone rang. “This is Muhammed Ali.”

I had no answer to this.

“I am calling about your car.”

It turned out that Muhammed Ali was a military advisor from Pakistan’s armed forces who was stationed at the military college close to where I lived and wanted a car. We met up in the oficers’ mess on the base where he gave me an insight into the Indo-Pakistan conflict. In a dispute, he said, military strength and strategy were Pakistan’s strong points. Indians, and here he sniffed slightly, preferred to use diplomacy.

Oddly, a year later I bought a car from an Indian military advisor working at the same place. He said roughly the same thing as Muhammed Ali but with a slightly sadder tone.

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