‘Oh, I thought if you had a ponytail, Allah would pull you up to heaven by it.’
‘No, no, no, brother. He does that by the beard. A good Muslim keeps his hair cut and clean. Ponytails are for Westerners. Come and sit down with us if you have the time.’
So I put off going to the camp and decided to have a haircut first. I had a bat and ball and the photos with me and I had to sit on them so the kids wouldn’t be distracted from their lessons.
The bloke said to call him Afsar San. He’s a moderate Pashtun from Kabul and was educated first in England and then in Russia, but now he chooses to live in Pakistan. ‘I felt pressured to become a communist,’ he said. ‘But I’m a Sunni, brother.’
‘Do you teach any of the camp children?’
‘I teach street kids wherever they come from, boys and girls. There are a lot of orphans in Peshawar these days and a lot of them are Afghans. I’ve been teaching here a long time. I used to have a lot more kids coming, but these days, there are madrassas in the camps being set up for the boys. They’re run by those crazy camp mullahs. They take boys from poor families, dress them up in smart uniforms and pay the families money for them. Then they sit them down in a group like this, only with no girls – they don’t take girls – they keep their wives and daughters under lock and key. They sit them down and teach them – you know what they teach them? They teach them the Persian of the Quran. These kids don’t know Persian! The mullahs tell them “what it means!”’ he doubled up, laughing. ‘Then those kids sit there in those camps in their black uniforms and sway back and forth all day long, reciting the Quran until they’re mad with heat, but they know the verses by heart. Then they’re taken away, given guns, which they like, having seen them in the camp, and they’re taught that they are fighting a war for Islam and Allah. Imagine, a boy of ten or twelve, who’s never had a toy and never played a game – he’s given a gun. He’s taught that death is glorious and if he dies in the service of Allah’s just war, he’ll go straight to Paradise where he can play whatever he likes all the time. So he wants to be a martyr; he wants to go to Paradise and for his body to lie in the martyrs’ graveyard and be garlanded with flowers. He dies with a smile on his face, having asked his father’s permission – or, if he has no father, then the permission of his beloved mullah. But he hasn’t read the part of the Quran that forbids suicide, or the part of the Quran that forbids assassination. If he blows himself up, brother, no one will touch him, no one will claim him; he’ll be left to rot, while the corpses of the people he has killed will be ritually washed and given a decent burial. The people who taught him to blow himself to kingdom come for the jihad aren’t going to reveal who they are by going and scraping up the pieces – they’re going to say prayers with the other boys they’re teaching. They’re going to say, ‘Think of little Mohammed in Paradise. Inshallah, you will join him as a martyr also. And so I run my school here and what I teach is Self Defence. To save these kids from a martyr’s death.
‘I tell you brother, there are billionaire Saudis in Peshawar who feed the camp mullahs money – they want to cleanse the world of infidels – like you, brother…You’d better start pretending to be a long-lost son of the soil come back to his homeland without being able to speak the tongue. How about it, brother?’
‘I thought I was already doing that.’
‘Learn a few things, brother. Watch me, I will show you what to do. I will show you how to crap, for instance. I bet you don’t know how to crap in a Muslim country.’
‘Well, I’ve had some practice…’
Afsar lives in Peshawar with his wife and sons. He has a daughter who went to Karachi to be educated as a teacher because in Peshawar, in the mixed high schools where she had had most of her education since coming from Afghanistan, women were invisible. The education of girls in these schools is ‘insipid’ – to quote Afsar – and uninspiring, so she lives in Karachi now and uses her talents there rather than wasting them in a backward system. Afsar runs his madrassa as a teacher on a small government stipend. ‘Oh yes, it’s possible to do that under Pakistani auspices,’ he says. ‘You can set up as a trained teacher. But you know… people, tourists like you and aid organisations, come and promise me money to build a school. But they never come back. They ask for money in the name of my school and never a rupee finds its way to me. I don’t care, that’s life – I’m a government employee on a teacher’s stipend. I am one man and I have one hundred students. Not all of them are here today, as you can see. They come when they can. The rest of the time they try to make a living. They work in a shoe bazaar and can’t even afford sandals. One day they will. I teach them Self Defence: the Self Defence of the written word and numbers they can add up to make a credible sum. I teach them to bargain and to wash their hands before they eat. We’ll see who’s alive in twenty years’ time, eh?’
Through his friendship with Afsar, Eli began to understand some of the complexities of life in this border region, crisscrossed over the centuries by traders of different ethnicities. He learned about drug and gun smuggling and the smuggler’s bazaar in Peshawar where you were taken by taxi, introduced to a warlord, who would then show you his cache of AK-47s, heroin and opium – you could be a local operative, a Western hippie, even CIA, it didn’t matter, the smugglers had eyes and ears and muscle everywhere.
He sent me a reel of film to have developed and there he was with his mate Afsar sitting up smoking a hookah in a den. I wrote back smartly all I knew about the evils of drugs. He was too sports mad to be into drugs when he was growing up, so there was never a problem; now, he wrote that it was only weed. But you said the best hash in the world comes from there, I wrote straight back. And marijuana can give you schizophrenia if you’re susceptible. I wasn’t terribly impressed when he wrote back asking whether I was still drinking several glasses of wine every evening – One thing is, Mother, they don’t drink here.
Afsar’s lessons in Muslim etiquette were timely when Eli finally returned to Jalozai Camp with bat and ball. He was greeted at the camp gate by the same armed mullah they’d seen the first time. ‘As-Salamu Alaykum,’ he said, formally, remembering to tap his heart with his right hand. He indicated that he couldn’t speak the language, but that he was a cricketer from Australia – descended from Afghan cameleers. Could he come in? And he flourished the bundle of photos I’d sent. They were pretty impressive: Eli leaping to catch a ball, Eli, bat in hand, at the crease, Eli au Don Bradman after hitting a boundary. It struck a chord. The mullah called another mullah and soon he had a circle of admirers looking at his photos.
Not much English was spoken in this territory, but enough to inform him that within the tent at the gate there was a registration tea party going on if he’d like to partake – a family was getting its ration books and permits. Inside, men sat on the bedsteads drinking tea, eating mints and being cooled by a rotating electric fan. The women were hiding their faces in a hot truck at the entrance where the children stood around, staring at the newcomer who was exciting so much interest.
Eli was invited into the camp and one of the guards, gun and all, accompanied him on a tour. People lived better here than they did beyond the walls, but That wouldn’t be hard, Eli wrote. The women on the outside told me that these blokes with guns had no idea what it was like to live as they did. They drove cars and lived in upmarket houses in Peshawar’s new districts, while the women were trying to make money out of selling donkey bones! Donkey bones, Mum!
The cricketing gear was a success. Boys poured out of the tents for a chance to play. They were rapt. Poor little beggars have to make do with next to nothing and play in the dirt and the poor girls don’t get to play at all.
Could I send some money for cricket equipment? He thought if he bought them cricket equipment and gave them lessons it would be a way of finding out about their families – also, he wrote, a way of distracting them from the recruiting that was going on. He could quietly spread the word that there was other education on offer that didn�
��t involve selling your sons into soldiery. Oh, and by the way, he finished, I forgot to tell you that the pack with my European clothes in it was stolen out of my sack on my visit to the outside camp. I was able to buy everything back the next day from one of the bazaars in Peshawar. Part of the reason that I need more money.
So I sent money for cricket equipment and Afsar helped him pick up more of the local language and he began to catch the drift of what people were saying. Lotte also helped. She didn’t need him to accompany her now because she’d made a friend from the UNHCR who was part of the Good Offices mission to Afghanistan and Pakistan. He was in Peshawar overseeing the keeping of the Geneva Accords during the Soviet withdrawal. There was a group of people doing various things for his office; a couple of them were Australian.
Eli was more interested in Peshawar and what was happening there than in meeting up with countrymen, even if they were with the UN. He felt he could discover more by being his own agent. Inside Jalozai he learned that some people had been there so long their teenaged children were born there, same as in Kacha Garhi, he wrote. They get work in the bazaars, these children, and develop a taste for Indian films and want to look like film stars. They forget all about being from Afghanistan and if there’s talk of returning, they don’t want to go. They run away rather than get onto the amazingly decorated Bedford trucks that go like a stately parade of caparisoned behemoths, jingling and jangling and tooting, laden with families and equipment, back to Afghanistan.
The Bedfords were decorated in factories in the region where the smugglers’ bazaars were. Photos came back of these towering ersatz temples, their intricately embellished ladders leading up from the ground to caverns within the luggage where the families would sit, to the outward eye, like maharajas. These contraptions depart along the great A1 highway to the Khyber Pass and over into the border regions of Afghanistan that have been cleared of landmines and where, for the time being, the war has stopped raging.
It was in one such convoy of Bedfords that Eli went into Afghanistan with Jager and the documentary crew. They were bound for Nangarhar Province just over the Khyber Pass and an area called Shinwar. Eli rode high up in the elaborate canopy of a Bedford, playing cards with some other young men for part of the way, but he found it was just too stifling and, once he had arrived undetected over the border, he swapped with someone in the crew’s ute. Jager had managed to dig out Habibullah, the land holder, who spoke English fluently and well. He was the son of a rural landlord in the feudal style of Afghanistan. He was well respected by the people whose lives and welfare he’d been responsible for before the war drove them out: in exchange for a third of the take, he’d organise the selling on of their produce and keep their houses and equipment in order. Eli imagined that the system would work well so long as the ground was rich and productive as it was in the Shinwar region, but he wondered if things would go as smoothly in less forgiving terrain. The farmers had an education, but it was minimal. They were literate and could use figures, but Habibullah had been educated in Karachi and was several levels of sophistication above them. He obviously had great power and if he had it, no doubt others in his position with less intelligence or fewer scruples could misuse their power.
Habibullah and Daoud were enthusiastic about what they would do the moment they arrived. There was talk of mending the walls of the irrigation canals and of setting up cooking facilities inside any of the houses that remained. But the reality precluded this. When they arrived after a fraught journey of hours from the highway over potholed and torn-up land, people just dropped down from the sides of the trucks, raised their tents, handed round uncooked food and slept.
You could see it had been a nice place, Eli wrote. It was green, there were lots of trees. They’d had a good life once, growing cereals and keeping cows, but now the fields were full of tares, the main well of the settlement was staved in and they had to get water from the irrigation canals, which were also busted up and muddied. There was enough rice, but cooking it was hard yards and it tasted like the mud slurry it was. The women set about making a kind of dough – like damper dough, out of coarse flour, and they made bread, but it wasn’t very appetising. They had grain with them and they took it to the next village to see if they could get it ground, but the miller had cleared out and his mill was broken. There was another mill working, but it was a long way away and the machinery kept breaking down – a) because it was primitive and b) because it was so much in demand that the miller couldn’t cope. They only managed to get one bag ground. It had to be enough for the time being, but it was pretty clear they’d have to get the neighbouring mill back into working order or be making the trips every other day.
Even though the land around Shinwar was supposed to have been secured, there were still landmines there that hadn’t been cleared, so it was very slow going, with someone out the front of the Toyota clearing the way with a stick.
When the women began winnowing, the mood picked up. They were glad to have their faces back and to be occupied with productive work. It was soon clear, however, that there was no prospect of schooling for the children – the school had been shelled and the teacher had fled – and if they became ill, then they would have to be taken back all the way to Nasir Bagh, so far over the border it was practically in Peshawar. They all had experience of Nasir Bagh – it might or might not have the medications they needed and the medical staff might or might not be able to help.
Once there had been civil servants whose jobs were to oversee the water supply in the area, but they hadn’t been available for a long time and the water had by and large dried up. Pictures came home of Eli dangling from a long rope down a manmade chasm or Kareez, a hole leading to a system of water canals some thirty to fifty feet down. These Kareezes are the ancient water supply of Afghanistan that once fed fabulous pleasure gardens. After the age of the Moghuls, fruit was grown here for an excellent dried-fruit market. Figs were a specialty. Eli, who has always been a keen climber and tunneller, went down with some of the men to clean the Kareez. They would go down the narrow shaft one at a time to lift out sand and silt by the bucketload. I hated to see him in such a narrow underground place, but he said he loved it and could keep on doing more of it. The Kareezes run down slopes from a water source and are perhaps half a kilometre apart, guiding the water to where it is needed. It was gratifying when clean water came shooting out the end of the tunnel into the concrete canals, called jubs, which then fed the irrigation system.
This is right up my alley, Mum. I love doing this kind of thing – sure beats Lego!
I was glad he was having fun, but it didn’t last long.
All this effort came to nought when they heard shelling and gunfire nearby within a week of their return. Shinwar was all but surrounded by troops and mujahedeen doing battle. There was nothing to do but load up the Bedfords again and go back to Peshawar.
He’d learned now why Daoud was so reluctant to return without Habibullah. If there is a context in which to make a return, then it is much more easily made: without Habibullah, the ‘knowledge man’, Daoud would have been defeated by circumstances in an even shorter time than it took the war to swing back into Nangarhar. A tent, some cooking oil and some money might mean mayhem, or nothing, without a community to put them to use.
Eli was very disappointed by the failure of Jager’s mission and badly in need of a beer. Lotte knew where he could find some. Phoebe Häken-Green, the Australian girl in the office, was hiding a stash for the Australians in the mission. There were very few pot plants of the common or garden variety in Peshawar, but Phoebe had them. There was rubble enough to make crock for thousands of pots in Peshawar’s streets, but Phoebe didn’t resort to that. In place of crock in the pot bottoms, Phoebe used cans of Victoria Bitter; although they looked real, they were like me, wrote Eli, fakes.
When Eli met Phoebe, I was still living up in New South Wales at Reg Sorby’s retreat with Stella and Nin. Nin was around nine and attending a little local school. Stel
la had come out of her grief over Allegra enough to be aware that her surroundings weren’t what she was accustomed to and we were making frequent visits to Canberra for retail therapy. Home we would come, up the winding, mountainous roads behind a truck from David Jones containing a Fleur lounge suite that would suit a genteel woman living in retirement with a daughter who did nothing but paint all the time. Into the local township we’d go, after the installing of the suite, for coffee with people! Don’t you know any people?! And I’d be bored to tears, talking to country drunks and liars while Stella tried to find out if she was related to any of them. When they found out we were living at Reg’s, they all wanted to come and enjoy famous, rarefied surroundings, surroundings where Reg had gone naked with nymphs and been seen cavorting. Telephone numbers were exchanged. Stella has never been able to live without a phone of her own. The one we had for her at Reg’s was just a disconnected handpiece in the days of her madness, but once she started to improve, I had it connected so she could spend her days dialling wrong numbers and receiving calls from people who thought they were privy to Reg’s private number, which they were not. All kinds of hoboes and fakes started to knock at the amazing front doors that Reg had brought back from his days as an ancient hippie on the Silk Road. They were carved wood, studded with metal bolts and hung with chains and they creaked mightily on their hinges when you opened them. For a girl who’d been raised in the country, Stella was lax about opening them – I think it was fear of the doors more than anything – and I was quite a fierce person to meet on the threshold. We never knew if and when David Silver would find us and press, indignantly, for his paternal rights. I began to miss Melbourne and the old escape hatches I knew there.
We were being supplied with money by Reg.
Reg had coveted the home where Allegra and I grew up with our parents in inner Melbourne.
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