A Carpet Ride to Khiva: Seven Years on the Silk Road

by Christopher Aslan Alexander

  The following day my flight was on time. Nargisa even came to wave me off. My only thought as the plane took off was a deep but irrational fear that I might be deported from Azerbaijan. I felt a wave of panic as I remembered that two passport photos were needed for the visa application form. I rooted around in my bag, tearing a photo from my Uzbekistan ID document and fretting that the only other picture I had was a black and white photocopy.

  At Baku airport I tried to appear normal as I handed over my application form, hoping my smile looked relaxed and not crazed. Wild feelings of joy at my visa stamp were immediately followed by paranoia that some other obstacle would prevent me leaving the airport. It was only as I made it through the barrier that I felt a wave of relief. Ruslan was waiting and we hugged, no glass door between us. We walked outside – it was allowed now – and I felt sun against my skin. I was back in a world of rights and freedoms and I took deep breaths of fresh air.

  14

  My mother’s friend the warlord

  Childlessness is better than a son who flees the battlefield.

  —Pashtun proverb

  I spent a week in Azerbaijan recuperating, trying to laugh at comparisons with the recently released film Terminal. I wanted to put my time in the transit lounge behind me but I found myself lying awake at night, remonstrating over all the things I should have done differently, replaying the moment when I wrote down the dates for my visa at the Kazakh embassy in London and thinking how easy it would have been to apply for one that started three days earlier. If I did sleep, I’d wake up in a cold sweat with the panicky feeling of being trapped again.

  I tried to settle back into English ways, but still found my head bobbing and my hand placed on my heart whenever I thanked someone. I seemed unable to sit properly on sofas, ending up cross-legged, and was mortified whenever guests strode into my parents’ house with their shoes on. I was told off for asking a friend how much they earned. Trying my best to refer to the bazaar as the market, I still found myself haggling, and discovered an embedded compulsion to offer food to strangers if eating on a train or park bench. Communal mealtimes also felt incomplete without a prayer at the end, hands cupped to receive blessing.

  News from Khiva was mixed. Aina helped Madrim manage both workshops – a set-up that worked well. Malika, my Uzbek little sister, got married, and Uncle Richard flew out to attend the wedding in my stead, returning with bags of my stuff. Aksana the guide managed to get into university without paying a bribe – a highly unusual event. The Operation Mercy team struggled. They experienced increasing governmental harassment, as did most NGOs. They were forbidden to work in schools or orphanages – the children in both feeling bewildered and abandoned. Soon, entire NGOs were closed down and within six months the number dwindled to just six foreign development organisations, including Operation Mercy. These last few organisations hadn’t been shut down, but nor were they granted new visas, and it seemed just a matter of time before the government won a war of attrition.

  March the 21st loomed and I knew that it would be an ordinary working day in England with no one to celebrate Navruz with, so I called my Uzbek family, Madrim and Zafar. Each conversation ended with the traditional invitation to come and visit soon, and I wished I could. I focused on writing, and decided that 2006 would be an unexpected sabbatical of sorts.

  In the short term, I took up an invitation to visit Afghanistan as a consultant for two textile projects there. I would assist a carpet cooperative in Kabul and an embroidery project in Kandahar. They also wanted me to run a natural dye-making workshop, so I suggested that Madrim might join us, hoping for a reunion.

  * * *

  Leaving the gleaming glass architecture of Dubai’s international airport for an older terminal nearby, I immediately felt at home in the scrum of Afghan traders with their flowing beards and turbans, heaving cloth-wrapped bales of merchandise and bargaining with harried check-in staff over luggage weight allowance. Passengers on the plane were neatly segregated, Afghans at the back and Westerners at the front. The latter were either earnest laptop-carriers or burly private security muscle, sporting crew-cuts, tight vests and an extravagant variety of tattoos. My three travelling companions were all Americans – of Chinese, Japanese and Cuban extraction – and had been invited along as a business consultant, web-page designer and journalist respectively.

  We arrived at Kabul’s Soviet-built airport – the faded and dated modernist architecture jarring with the timeless faces of passengers who would have looked more in keeping unloading their goods from camels than conveyor belts. Outside the weather was warm but pleasant, the heat kept at bay by the high altitude. The city sprawled without a clear centre, ringed by dusty, barren mountains.

  We drove through teeming bazaars of colour and squalor – the air alive with the shouts of hawkers and the smell of sewers and spice. My colleagues craned their necks for photo opportunities among the exhilarating chaos. I just sat back and enjoyed the feeling of returning to where I belonged.

  We drew up outside a modest compound where Dave, our host and the project leader, greeted us. He looked Afghan with his white beard, portly stature and shelwar kamiz – an effect that dissolved as he pronounced how ‘real neat’ it was to finally meet us. Dave had identified an impoverished and squalid suburb of Kabul called Dashti Barchi as a place of particular need. His aim was to provide income generation opportunities among the local population – mainly returned Hazara refugees.

  The Hazaras – descendants of Genghis Khan – still retained flat Mongolian features and were despised by the dominant Pashtun clans. They had suffered greatly under the Taliban, considered lowest in the ethnic pecking-order. They had now returned from exile in Pakistan, where many had learnt to weave carpets, and their previous employers were keen to maintain a monopoly on the carpet trade. They provided the Hazaras with designs, buying their completed carpets at bargain prices and attaching a ‘made in Pakistan’ label along with a large mark-up, and then shipping the carpets internationally.

  Dave had started a carpet cooperative in Dashti Barchi. He hoped to establish a direct link with American buyers by using the internet to bypass Pakistan. Direct exporting would mean the weavers themselves would see more profit, with an opportunity to work themselves out of poverty.

  We drove out to Dashti Barchi along unpaved roads, the air choked with a fine dust spewed up by every van, donkey-cart and bicycle that jolted along it. Turbaned men and young boys squatted at the roadside stalls flicking blackened water from the open drains onto the road in vain attempts to settle the dust. Most stalls displayed bales of wool – spun and un-spun – and rows of hook-knives hanging from strings beside piles of carpet combs. Ornate Pakistani trucks – a celebration of colourful excess – drove past laden with untrimmed carpets, their decorative metal tassels jangling along the pitted road.

  We lurched down a side-street, arriving at the cooperative headquarters, and were introduced to three local staff workers. There wasn’t much to see, as the cooperative was still in its infancy, but we visited a home nearby where boys as young as eight perched on their benches busily weaving – their tiny, practised fingers flying across the loom.

  That evening we discussed the issue of child labour with Dave. On the one hand it was important for weaving families to apprentice their children and pass on skills to the next generation. On the other, these children weren’t receiving an education or much leisure time. Effectively monitoring child labour within a domestic context was impossible, but we agreed that all families partnering with the cooperative should send their children to school, allowing them time to weave in the afternoons.

  I asked Dave why the cooperative was producing ubiquitous Turkish oshak designs rather than something both Afghan and unique. I was sure we would find some interesting designs – as we had with doors and tiles in Khiva – at the Kabul museum, and planned a visit there.

  The
museum was situated beside a bombed-out hulk that was once an opulent palace. We were frisked on entering, passing a marble placard that stated: ‘A nation stays alive when its culture stays alive.’ It seemed more of an epitaph than anything else. We wandered through empty halls. Laminated sheets of photographs were all that remained of many priceless artefacts, captioned with the inevitable ‘destroyed in 2001 by the Taliban’.

  Fortunately for us, what had survived the iconoclastic Taliban was mainly non-figurative arabesque work. We discovered a 19th-century marble door, and traced the intricate border and field designs. The lotus and peonies that entwined the border were a similar, simpler version of one of our Khiva tile designs, and I found myself longing to know more about the history and migration of the patterns we discovered. There were marble tombstones outside with delicate filigree, and upstairs a fascinating collection of carved wooden items from Nuristan, known previously as Kafirstan. The wild mountain people of Nuristan had been forcibly converted to Islam in the 19th century and most of the artefacts on display were strongly tribal and pre-Islamic in terms of motifs. Totem poles, fertility doors and thrones were covered in simple patterns which would work well as modernist carpet designs.

  For the rest of the week, we scoured the Kabul bazaars for natural dyes and discussed internet marketing strategies and publicity. The structure of the cooperative concerned me, as power was concentrated in the hands of one Afghan whom Dave seemed to trust implicitly. The rest of us found him downright shifty. We researched the market price for wool in Dashti Barchi and discovered that this man had produced receipts for a considerably higher sum, pocketing the difference. Dave reluctantly fired him, and the working atmosphere within the cooperative improved considerably. We prepared for a natural dyeing workshop and Madrim made plans to join us via Tajikistan, as the Uzbek/Afghan border was now closed.

  * * *

  I was keen to meet up with a warlord friend of my mother’s. She’d insisted that I not refer to him as a warlord, as technically he had been general to a warlord and was now involved in politics. I prefer not to use his name, so will refer to him as the General. He had served Ahmed Shah Massoud – the head of the Northern Alliance – until Massoud’s assassination by Al Qaeda just before the World Trade Center attacks. Grief-stricken, the General had left Afghanistan and spent time in Holland with his family before enrolling on an English course at a language school in Cambridge. My mother had been one of his tutors, treating him with honour and respect. He regaled her with tales of war and strategy, turning the classroom desk into a battleground map and enjoying a subject he was well versed in.

  Lonely in Cambridge and accustomed to status and deference, the General felt lost and unappreciated. His family came to visit, and my mother invited them all for Sunday lunch. The General was impressed that my father prayed before the meal and decided that my parents were people he could trust his wife with. My mother then visited them in Holland. Now, armed with a letter, a parcel of posh tea and a phone number, I hoped to track the General down.

  We finally made phone contact on the day before I travelled down to Kandahar.

  ‘Please Mr Chris, what can I do for you in Afghanistan? What is your need? You just must say it. I will look to everything. Also please to must be careful. It is still little interesting in Kandahar,’ he explained.

  I thanked him for his kindness, looking forward to our meeting on my return to Kabul, and passed on warm ‘Salaams’ from my mother.

  I just had time to visit the tailor and collect my new shelwar kamiz – the one permissible item of clothing in Kandahar – before leaving the following morning. We’d been told to do everything possible to blend in, which worked well for my ethnically ambiguous travelling companions who all looked passably Afghan. I, however, was far too tall and blond, wore glasses, and was clearly a foreign fake. Even the large headscarf I wore, covering as much of my face as possible, did little to disguise my foreigner status.

  We woke before dawn and made our way to the main bus station, where ageing German buses and tarted-up Pakistani vehicles left in the cool of the day. Travel by bus was considered the safest, as foreigners were assumed to travel only in gleaming SUVs. Once outside Kabul, we passed arid hills emblazoned with lush green settlements where orchards and fields of poppies were carefully irrigated. A camel caravan passed us laden with goods to sell in one of Kabul’s bazaars. Peasant girls in bright dresses and headscarves tended the fields and boys in dusty shelwar kamiz led flocks of sheep and goats to pasture. The 21st century rested lightly here.

  A new arrival to our group was an intern at the Heritage Foundation – a conservative think-tank in Washington. I sat next to him and we struck up a whispered conversation, keen to avoid attention. I listened to his views on American foreign policy, President Bush (not conservative enough) and his support of Israel, before launching into my own opposing views. Soon turbaned heads craned round to see what the foreigners at the back were shouting about. We were reprimanded over greasy eggs and long flat naan at a tea-house stop by our Afghan minder.

  ‘It’s not just you they will kill if they know there are foreigners on the bus,’ he explained, referring to Taliban elements. ‘They hate Afghans who work with foreigners. They will find my papers and then it is all over for me.’

  We apologised and spent the rest of the journey in a sweaty stupor as the day warmed and we drove to the lower, hotter Afghan plains. Kandahar felt more Pakistani, with motorised rickshaws weaving between cars and lorries. The faces of all visible adults were heavily bearded. We passed a large poster providing a helpful contact number for those observing suicide bombers. We learnt later that a suicide bomber had blown himself up on the airport road half an hour before our arrival. Suicide bombers were commonplace. Many were poor ethnic Pashtuns from Pakistan, taken in by madrassahs and groomed – their families generously provided for in the event of their martyrdom.

  One of the General’s friends was another general from Kandahar, and he told me this story after I’d returned to Kabul. A taxi driver picks up a fare and drives to the airport, half an hour away. His passenger waits silently in the back seat for twenty minutes and then tells the driver to return to the city centre. They stop in the bazaar, beside the main bank, and outside the import shops. After two hours of random driving, the passenger gets out and pays.

  ‘What’s this?’ the driver demands. ‘We’ve been all over Kandahar. You should be giving me at least ten times the amount.’

  The passenger looks deep into the driver’s eyes and tells him: ‘Go home, embrace your mother, then go to the mosque and thank Allah for your life.’ He lifts his vest enough to reveal explosive devices strapped to his torso. ‘It was not the will of Allah for me to find foreigners today, so we both live to see tomorrow.’

  * * *

  Understandably, there weren’t many international NGO workers in Kandahar, and those there chose to keep a low profile. Our hosts asked to remain anonymous. They were looking for ways to empower Kandahari women, hoping to establish an embroidery cooperative exporting overseas.

  Our hosts explained how embroidery was one of the few avenues of employment open to Kandahari women, who rarely left their home more than once a month, and even then were always under the supervision of their husband or mother-in-law. Within the home, the segregation continued. Two sons and their respective wives might live under the same roof, yet neither son would know the name of their sister-in-law, much less see her face uncovered. The outside world was almost exclusively male. While visiting a local gym – trying not to get weights tangled up in the baggy folds of my sweat-stained shelwar kamiz – I was chatted up and offered orange juice, watching young men preen and flirt with each other, for who else could they flirt with? This complete separation of the sexes seemed to benefit no one, and I struggled to understand it.

  ‘You have to stop thinking of men and women as the same species,’ I was told. ‘Wom
en are like sheep and men are like wolves. Everyone knows that it is in the nature of sheep to be led astray and that sheep make a tasty meal. You never trust sheep – what a notion! – nor do you leave your sheep unguarded, because men are like wolves and the nature of a wolf, given the chance, is to prey upon unguarded sheep. If sheep and wolves freely mingled together, it would lead only to bloodshed.’

  I realised that our challenge was trying to empower sheep within the sheep-pen. We might not free women from their cloistered existence – any attempt to do this would result in the inevitable male backlash – but we could at least liberate them from the bonds of boredom. Embroidery gave women something creative to do, earned them an income, and brought them status and favour with their husbands and mothers-in-law.

  We discussed embroidery designs. The traditional khamak that graced the collars and breast-pieces of men’s shelwar kamiz was extremely detailed but unlikely to sell well abroad. Instead, we focused on textiles embroidered with tiny mirrors, and more utilitarian items like cushion covers, handbags and bed-spreads. The women in our group all wore burkas when visiting the embroiderers, knowing that they were more likely to be tolerated if they showed respect for local traditions. I asked one of the single foreign women how she managed to survive. ‘It’s true, Pashtun culture is a challenge and Pashtuns can be hard to love, but by God’s grace, we try.’ She was later abducted along with her driver, and at the time of writing it’s still unclear whether she’s dead or alive. Five hundred Pashtun women protested for her release.

  Even before this abduction, security measures were tight and we scurried in our vehicle from one compound to another. It was frustrating when all I wanted was to wander through the bazaar, my internal danger-ometer seriously dulled by a childhood growing up in war-torn Beirut where I had a shell collection that had nothing to do with the sea. We made one or two furtive trips to mosques and mausoleums, looking at tilework and other potential sources of design inspiration. A tomb – one of the few pilgrimage sites permissible for women – was surrounded by a metal fence covered in votive rags and rows of padlocks. The latter represented locked curses placed by women, usually against particularly abusive mothers-in-law.