by SAIMA WAHAB
Pashtu is complex. In general, there are two grammatical genders, as well as singular and plural. Verbs must agree in person, number, grammatical gender, and tense, and word order is usually subject-object-verb. However, there are so many exceptions to the rule that attempting to learn Pashtu by grammar and word order will drive almost anyone to just throw up his hands and seek out another language, any other language, to learn. I have mastered several languages, but I know that if Pashtu had not been my mother tongue, I would never have been able to learn it. I tell my soldier friends who wish to speak Pashtu fluently that they shouldn’t bother. You can speak Pashtu if you are born with Pashtun genes—otherwise, it’s impossible to keep track of the rules and countless exceptions.
There are major regional accents, even for words describing simple, everyday activities. A favorite pastime of Pashtuns all over Afghanistan is to try to convince one another that their form of Pashtu is the correct one. I can’t count how many times I have sat in villages surrounded by young and old men, while they tell me my Pashtu is not the real one because I pronounced my “sh” sounds as “gha,” for example. Of course, it was expected that I would make fun of their Pashtu, too, and I did, gladly.
Even before setting foot in Afghanistan I knew that we couldn’t expect to build rapport with the locals or show that our soldiers were there to help them, not conquer them, if we didn’t even understand the difference between the two official languages, not to mention the locally well-known historical ethnic tensions between their speakers.
So I was both surprised and relieved that this soldier at least knew the importance of learning Pashtu to speak to Pashtuns. I couldn’t bring myself to tell him that his little dictionary was useless, that in some parts of Afghanistan the animosity toward Pakistan was so great that he shouldn’t even try if he was going to make the mistake of speaking Pakistani Pashtu. The hostility most Afghans feel for their Pakistani neighbors is nothing like the good-hearted humor Americans employ when talking about Canadians.
I’m unlike your typical Pashtun in many ways, but even my blood pressure rises a tiny bit when someone mistakes me for a Pakistani. It is not hard to imagine how villagers who have lived under the conditions of war most of their lives, and who blame the conflicts on the involvement of Pakistan, feel when someone addresses them in Pakistani Pashtu. And, unfortunately, the accent is unmistakable.
Speaking the right language is a matter of respect and shows that you understand the history behind the language. You understand the tensions between the two groups and you are respecting the Pashtun history by bringing in a Pashtu speaker instead of a Farsi speaker, who might insult with his tone or attitude, which I have seen happen in meetings where I was asked to observe. Pashtuns expected American soldiers to bring competent interpreters who spoke the correct dialect and with the right accent. On that first meeting I felt bad for the soldier, who was obviously eager to do the right thing, but I was too new at my job to know that I should have told him what little I knew about Afghans at the time.
“You’re the first soldier I’ve ever met!” I said.
We shouted a short conversation about his tour, which was lost in the roar of the aircraft. He nodded a lot and maintained his white-toothed American smile. I watched him tuck his useless dictionary inside the pocket of his duffel bag and was reminded of my biggest worry. If Afghans would be insulted by this well-meaning soldier’s failure to address them in the proper language, what would they think of me, a female Pashtun working with the same American soldiers? Would they find me unworthy of speaking with them? Would they insult me in front of the soldiers of my adopted country? There I was thinking of myself as a bridge between the two cultures most dear to me, but would they burn down a bridge for what they perceived to be my unforgiving attempt at being American? I had left my father’s country when I was six, the continent when I was fifteen. At twenty-four I became an American citizen. Given all this, daring to show my face in some parts of Afghanistan might even be a stoning offense.
It was becoming impossible to ignore the cold. When I sighed I could see my breath. The soldier on the other side of me was curled up in his seat, shivering in his sleep. He didn’t even look old enough to buy a beer. He didn’t have a jacket. Feeling protective of him, I took my army-issue blanket out of my duffel bag and laid it over him.
When he awoke he thanked me so sincerely that I was humiliated. Here was a kid, who in an ideal world should only be worried about girls and sports, on his way to my country to try to improve my people’s lives. And he was thanking me for this tiny gesture compared with what he was potentially sacrificing for my country.
The plane landed in the middle of a village that didn’t appear on many maps. There are certain images that burn in our brains, that we can recall in their sharpest detail at a moment’s notice. For some people, it is the birth of their firstborn. For others, it might be a beautiful day with a loved one in Hawaii. For me, it is my first look at the mountains of Afghanistan as I deplaned that day. I had packed my camera in a duffel bag—a mistake I will always regret, as I would have loved nothing more than to have captured my vision of those mountains. It had recently snowed. When I stepped down from the plane, they appeared to be the purest white, and were so close I felt as if I could reach out and touch their snowy crags. The sky was a bright, raw blue, and the snow sparkled in the sun. It looked as if humans had never set foot there. Even today, I can close my eyes and in a heartbeat be standing in front of those majestic mountains, shining like they were on fire, feeling so close yet so out of touch that I thought I was imagining them.
My limbs were heavy. My contact lenses felt as if they were made of sandpaper. It was below freezing, and the strong wind whipped my hair around my head. I stood there gazing at the mountains, dazed by their beauty. Finally, the soldier standing behind me gave my shoulder a little shove to get me moving.
TWELVE
The news of the bus accident spread quickly. A group of local interpreters was traveling in a bus that a U.S. company had hired to transport them to Bagram Airfield from Kabul. Even the non-mountainous roads in Afghanistan are famously terrible, rutted with potholes, lined with improvised explosive devices (IEDs), and today, in 2011, openly patrolled by insurgents. The driver was speeding, the bus flipped over, and the few who didn’t die were severely injured. Suddenly there was a shortage of interpreters, and everyone who could speak Dari or Pashtu—even those like me, waiting to be sent elsewhere—was called to help.
Bagram air base is the size of a small city. It appears to sit in the palm of a giant’s claw, surrounded by the rocky crags of the Hindu Kush. Afghanistan is a landlocked country through which the Silk Road once ran, bordered by Pakistan to the south, China to the east, Iran to the west, and the -stans to the north: Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan, all part of the former Soviet Union. Every Afghan alive today knows of Maidan, as Bagram is known by the locals, and BAF, as it is called by the Americans who have either lived there or used it as a transit point for reaching the rest of the country. During the time of the Soviet occupation, from 1979 to 1988, it was known as Howa-i-Maidan, the Dari word for “airport,” which is what it was used for by the Soviets. Wrecks of burned-out Soviet planes still sit rusting beside the main runway. Years ago, because of its strategic importance, the Taliban and the Northern Alliance forces slaughtered one another like animals while fighting for its control.
In January 2005, when I arrived at BAF, the few buildings left standing at the base were scarred from rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) and bullets from these battles. A busy Burger King operated out of a blue CONEX (a military acronym for Container Express, basically a shipping container) with a giant burger painted on the side. There was also a movie theater, a beauty parlor, a library, and a paved main street called Disney Drive.
Afghan men in shalwar kameez and hard hats worked like ants upgrading buildings, digging, hammering, and kicking up the dust. They cleaned the bathrooms, replenished the gravel on the b
ase’s many walkways, and drove the water trucks every few hours to spray down the dust to settle it. Every clutch of local laborers had its minder, an American supervisor who worked for Halliburton and whose primary task was making sure the Afghans didn’t steal anything or build bombs from smuggled pieces of explosives. Later, as the war entered its eighth year, those American supervisors were replaced by third world nationals, probably in order to cut back on costs, since they worked for a lot less than U.S. citizens.
When I first landed at BAF there were thousands of soldiers stationed there, working in one of the hundreds of offices, but there were also hundreds of soldiers trying to get flights out to wherever in the country they were permanently stationed. The soldiers who worked on the Forward Operating Base (FOB) did so from early morning to late at night. The soldiers in transit killed time playing video games in transient B-huts, watched movies, exercised at one of the enormous gyms, and shopped at the PX (the store operated by the military) or local shops on the FOB, just waiting for their flights to manifest.
I was only a few miles from my birthplace in Kabul, but arriving at Bagram was like no homecoming I had romanticized about. I kept wondering what I was doing there. I had left Afghanistan as a girl of six, and I hadn’t been back. I’d expected it to be less foreign and more bittersweet, but there was nothing about BAF that matched what I had imagined Afghanistan to be while I had been away. The Afghans there did not speak Pashtu, the language I had come to interpret in. Instead, I was surrounded by non-Pashtu speakers and might as well have not have left Oregon. I didn’t hear a word of Pashtu for several days after I arrived. These were not my father’s people, I was reminded.
Even the women who shared the living quarters with me were Farsiban. One of them was Suraya, a hairdresser from Southern California who was on her second contract as an interpreter for a private defense contractor. Her room was the room of someone who was there to stay. An ironing board was set up, draped with piles of clothes. A line of shoes was parked against one wall. I spied a curling iron and a flatiron.
Moments after I arrived she said to me, in Farsi, “You must be terribly jet-lagged. Go to sleep, and when you wake up we can talk.”
I did as she instructed. I was new, and I was jet-lagged. I needed to sleep. Suraya was in her late fifties, older than Mamai. I thought that she might look after me as she would a daughter, and perhaps show me the ropes, even if she was Farsiban.
I slept through the evening and night, waking up at dawn. I lay in bed, trying to hear if any of the other ladies were up yet. We were staying in a B-hut—a square plywood structure that housed up to eight people, each in a narrow room, the rooms separated by flimsy walls, much like a beehive, thus the name. With only thin plywood between us, I could hear the quiet breathing of the other female interpreters as they slept. I had left a huge master bedroom with a vaulted ceiling and walk-in closet for a square box that was shared by at least three other women I didn’t know. I’m crazy, I told myself, and sighed. What could I find out here that I couldn’t have come to terms with in America? My mind went in circles, trying to figure out if I was already ready to call it quits. Well, I’m here, and I might as well take a shower, I thought to myself, trying to escape more incessant questions. So I got up, collected a change of clothes and my traveling kit in the dark, and walked outside, where the light was so bright it hurt my eyes.
BAF was spooky that early in the morning. Hardly anyone was moving around, and those who were were doing so very slowly, as if sleepwalking. The women’s bathrooms were double-stacked CONEXes, with the shower on top. As I walked up the metal stairs, I froze. They say our sense of smell has a longer memory than any of our other senses, and I believed it then. I inhaled deeply, taking in the powerful scent of fresh fires from the village next to our base. Instantly, I was five again, in my Baba’s village, standing next to Mamai as she made our bread on an open fire. With that vivid memory I was reminded of my resolve to discover more about what had made my father give the ultimate sacrifice. Standing on those stairs, clutching shampoo in one hand and trying to hold my jacket tight with the other, feeling miserably cold, I knew that I was where I belonged at that moment. I was exactly where I needed to be in order to find peace in myself, for myself.
I showered; the water was probably at least half chemicals, as there were too many things living in the local water for it to be safe for us to shower in it untreated. Therefore you came out of the shower smelling like you just took a dip in a highly chlorinated pool. It took a while to get used to that—and in the process, it stripped my skin and I lost most of my hair. During the first month of using the water, I watched my skin fall off in chunks, like snakeskin, and I was mesmerized by the process. I thought, I am stripping off my American skin to get in touch with the Afghan inside. It made perfect sense that I would have to go through this physically painful transformation to get to the person I wanted and needed to be.
I came back to the B-hut and saw that Suraya was awake, in full makeup, smoking by the door. I said “Salaam alaikum,” the universal Muslim greeting. She replied the same, and then asked, in English, how my night was. After a bit of chitchatting she asked me what I would get asked a million times over the next five years: Where was I from?
I said, in Pashtu, “I am actually Pashtun.”
In English, she said, “I was married to a Pashtun once.”
In Pashtu, I replied, “So there will be no problem speaking Pashtu.”
“Yes, but we should speak English.”
I found it very strange that she claimed to speak Pashtu but wouldn’t speak a word of it to me. Much later I would find out that the army required all its interpreters in Afghanistan to speak Pashtu, even the ones hired as Farsiban. Because of this requirement, a lot of Farsiban, who traditionally and historically had never liked to speak Pashtu, suddenly swore that they were fluent, just to keep their jobs as interpreters. When it came to translating, they always reverted to Farsi, and expected the Pashtun locals to understand and respond to their inquiries, which of course resulted in local resentment toward Americans for not understanding Pashtun history. It was a vicious, destructive circle.
When the call came to report to the site manager’s office, I was lying on my bed in the B-hut, reading a book. Or maybe I was wandering around the PX pretending to shop, or checking my e-mail at the Morale, Welfare and Recreation (MWR) building, or reading a book at the library, which I found by following the signs (written only in English and Farsi). Wherever I was, whatever I was doing, I’m sure I was bored, frustrated, and cold.
For almost a month I’d been waiting to be deployed. I’d been stuck at BAF, trying to keep myself entertained. In my memory those early days were like Groundhog Day, each day just like the one that came before, blending together so that I couldn’t distinguish what date it was. The only day I could identify for sure was Friday because there were fewer local laborers on the FOB, since it was a holy day and most locals didn’t work.
My personal disappointment at having wasted over a month was so great that I wasn’t even ready to address it at that point. Every day felt like a failure. I had given myself six months to get to know my roots, to learn secrets about myself and my people that would make it possible for me to achieve inner peace and happiness no matter where I was. Instead, I had spent every day for the past month walking around the FOB, receiving hostile, glaring stares from Farsiban, feeling like I had wasted any chance of pursuing my destiny.
I talked to Greg twice, sometimes three times a day. I called Mamai and e-mailed Naj and Khalid constantly because I was so homesick. Still, when Greg started asking me to come back home, I stopped complaining to him. Returning would mean failing in my mission, which was not an option. This was my chance at eternal happiness. It sounded cheesy, even to me, and so I never uttered those words out loud, but I could not deny that I felt them.
Every afternoon I checked with the site manager, who oversaw which interpreter was shipped out to which base, and every af
ternoon he said the army language manager was still trying to figure out where to send me. He confided that it was rare to find a female who was fluent in both English and Pashtu, so rare, apparently, that in 2005 I was the only Pashtun female who spoke fluent English and who had a security clearance in the country. While they sorted it out, I waited, and wasted my time, time that could have been spent doing what I was there for. I was frustrated to be in my father’s country but not actually interacting with any of his people.
THE DAY AFTER the bus accident the site manager told me to go to the hospital on the FOB. On Wednesdays and Saturdays the medics opened a clinic for the local community. The locals who were brave enough, or desperate enough, to be seen walking into an American military installation for medical assistance were there to be seen by the army doctors, and they needed interpreters. I could feel my heart thumping as I hurried along the gravel path leading to the hospital. BAF is nearly a mile high, and just a few miles from the foothills of the Hindu Kush. The mountains, postcard beautiful, loomed over the valley like disapproving parents. The dry, freezing weather was merciless. The shiny gravel crunching beneath my feet was mixed with beads of ice, glinting with flecks of silvery ore, hiding all evidence of warmth in the soil. It was like walking on icy diamonds. Now that I was about to do what I’d been hired to do, I was nervous. I spoke English and Pashtu, but I did not speak sick and desperate.
My family joked that I would have made the world’s worst doctor. I’m susceptible to sympathy pains. When my mom complained about her joints aching, mine ached too. When my sister reported that she had a stomachache, I felt nauseous. As a result, I refused to listen to anyone tell me what ailed them because I knew I would feel the symptoms shortly thereafter.
