by Gwen Florio
Mrs. Khan finished her tea in two gulps. She spoke a few words to the man, who moved in front of Liv, grasping her elbow, lifting her arms high and measuring their length, as well as the distance between her shoulders. Finally, to Liv’s mortification, he wrapped the tape around the fullness of her breasts and then hips, somehow managing not to touch her body. Mrs. Khan, meanwhile, hauled bolts down from where they leaned against the wall, holding coordinating colors against one another. She stared critically at Liv, considering her for some time, then banged two bolts of deep blue, one with a tiny geometric print, another with a larger coordinating pattern, onto the narrow counter.
Mrs. Khan pulled the scarf from Liv’s head. “With your hair and your eyes, these, I think,” she said. Liv’s hair, long and fine, only a few threads of silver woven through its shining gold, was the one feature about which she remained vain. Even the proprietor, who had been careful not to look directly at Liv’s face, stopped and stared.
Mrs. Khan said something to the man. He chose a third bolt of blue, this one thin and filmy, pale as a summer sky, and cut off a six-foot section. He mounted a ladder in one corner of the room and handed the cloth up to someone. Liv heard a rhythmic thumping noise and a whir. She craned her neck and saw, in a dark cubbyhole above them too cramped to allow even someone as short as Mrs. Khan to stand up straight, a man hunched over an old treadle sewing machine. Within moments, the cloth came back with its cut edges neatly hemmed.
Mrs. Khan took the cloth and draped it over Liv’s head. She wound one end beneath Liv’s throat and let it trail over her shoulder and down her back, then did the same with the other. It formed a sort of wimple beneath her chin and across her chest, an extra layer of cloth, light though it was, covering her breasts. “This is your dupatta. In Islamabad, in the Blue Zone where people are more sophisticated,” she said with a twist of her lips, “you do not need to wear it over your head. But for where we are going today, it is necessary to cover your hair, if for no other reason than as a sign of respect. And you should always wear one, even if it’s not over your hair. Pay close attention to the women you see here. See how they arrange their dupattas. And the young women, oh, la! You will see how very much can be said with the simple drape of cloth. Besides, I think your husband will like this, too. He is cooperative?”
“Excuse me?”
“He doesn’t mind you starting work today without him?”
“I didn’t ask him.”
Mrs. Khan adjusted her own scarf more firmly. “I will never understand your Western marriages. We will return for your shalwar kameez tomorrow.”
Back in the car, Mrs. Khan played tour guide. “Now we are leaving the Blue Zone.” She explained that this was the district of foreign businesses, NGO offices, and smart shops. As far as Liv could tell, “smart” merely consisted of storefronts where whitewash covered the moisture stains that darkened the concrete buildings elsewhere in the city. Otherwise, the shops looked as small and mean as those she’d seen on the ride into town from the airport. But she wasn’t about to say as much to Mrs. Khan, who was in the process of burdening her with more information and an onslaught of initials.
“Pakistan plays host to three and a half million Afghan DPs,” she told Liv as the driver maneuvered the car through a seemingly impenetrable wall of traffic. “About a third of its people left the country during the war with the Soviets and then the civil war. Still more left after the Taliban took control. Most of them came here. The idea is that they’ll all go back to Afghanistan now that you Americans have brought them peace.” Liv noticed yet again how she emphasized certain words, in a sarcasm bordering on insolence. You Americans. Peace. “Here in Pakistan, Face the Future works to resettle them back across the border. Your job in Kabul, as you know, is to devise training programs for these women with neither education nor skills.”
She handed Liv a fat binder. “You will find everything I’m telling you in here.”
Liv opened Face the Future’s report, its cover featuring photos of Afghan refugees, the children nearly winsome in their wide-eyed, high-cheekboned proximity to starvation. She flipped through it, searching for the terms Mrs. Khan threw around with such familiarity. “You’ve already lost me. DPs? And, the report mentions IDP?”
“Displaced persons. Internally displaced persons.”
Liv was remembering her World War II history, textbooks with grainy black-and-white photos of families trudging along muddy roads, each person toting his or her belongings in a single suitcase, walking beside vehicles piled high with furniture.
Mrs. Khan dispelled those images. “They arrive with nothing. Only the clothing they are wearing. You must imagine this. Not a pan for cooking, nor a pot for tea. No rugs for their floors, no sleeping mats. No blankets. Here it is not so bad, but in Peshawar and along the Frontier, it is higher, colder. You can freeze to death there, and people do. The women have too many children, and are too malnourished to nurse their babies. Their breasts are shriveled flaps upon their chests. So they give the babies water, and none of the water is clean, you understand. Or they wet their babies’ lips with a bit of tea they beg from someone. This keeps the babies alive longer than you might think possible. An aid packet here or there, from the UN or maybe a group like ours, strings them along for a few months. But the babies die eventually. You’ll see.”
Martin had mentioned that Mrs. Khan’s sister lived in Afghanistan. “What does your sister do there? Is she an aid worker?”
As she had the previous evening, Mrs. Khan shook her head in a way that brooked no further questions. The car stopped before a warren of tented stalls fronted by makeshift wooden counters piled high with produce. Even from inside the car, Liv could hear the flies buzzing in clumps above the mounds of wilted greens and discolored melons.
“This is Sabzi Mandi, the vegetable market.” Mrs. Khan pointed across the street. “And that, a katchi abadi—you would call it a slum, I think—is our destination. Today, here in Islamabad, even though we are far from the border, you will begin to see Afghanistan.”
* * *
Acres of one-room mud houses roofed over with bits of board nearly obliterated the low, rolling landscape. The odor of rot filled the air.
Liv stepped out of the car. A clot of children surrounded her. She beamed at them. Their fingers wormed into her pockets. “Hey! Stop that!”
The driver yelled. The children scattered, but not very far. Mrs. Khan called to them, and they crept back, eyeing the driver. She held a few folded blue rupees toward them, then pulled her hand back and dangled the money high, speaking in what sounded like a different language, more guttural than Urdu. “I told them that if we are permitted to walk here undisturbed, that if we come back and our car is exactly as we have left it, these rupees shall be theirs. But if there is the least bit of trouble, there will be no money, and besides, I shall send the police to search for the opium that I know is sold here, and then no one who lives here shall have a full belly tonight. Not that anyone will, anyway.”
She began to pick her way along a muddy, trash-strewn alley between two rows of houses. Liv walked behind her, trying not to step in the thin stream of raw sewage that trickled down the center of the alley. She pulled her dupatta across her nose and mouth against the stench. Already, she was beginning to appreciate this strange new garment.
The children trailed them, providing a shouting accompaniment to their progress. They trod barefoot through the sewage, leaving damp footprints on the hard-packed ground of the alley. Liv trained her eyes forward, where she could see fast-moving wisps of blue, women in burqas darting into doorways as they approached.
Once again, Liv felt the frisson that had stirred within her upon her arrival. Research here, she realized, would not be a bloodless matter of clicking through websites. Another feeling sneaked in, despite her attempts to push it away. Martin had interviewed his share of Afghan refugees, but Liv knew that the circumstances had been carefully controlled, with hand-picked subjects bused to ant
iseptic conference rooms far from the squalor in which they lived. Liv allowed herself a moment of self-congratulation as she imagined telling him what she’d braved so soon after her arrival.
Mrs. Khan stopped before a gateway shielded by a tattered bit of cloth, and called out. A dirty hand clutched the cloth from within and moved it slowly aside. A man stood there, and Mrs. Khan spoke to him in that new language. Pashto, Liv concluded. She and Martin were to study it in Afghanistan. The man stood aside as they entered a small courtyard. Skinny chickens fled squawking at their approach. They halted outside another door, this one without even the benefit of a cloth across it, and Mrs. Khan kicked off her shoes. Liv bent to untie her sneakers and tried not to think about what her socks would touch. They ducked through the low doorway and into a dark room whose single small window, a hole in the mud wall, let in barely enough light for Liv to distinguish a thin woman lying on a straw mat atop the dirt floor.
Mrs. Khan stooped and whispered to her. Liv crouched in awkward imitation of Mrs. Khan’s effortless pose. Her knees screamed in protest. The woman struggled to sit up, but Mrs. Khan urged her back down. An infant lay beside her, its papery skin wrapped tight around a prominent skull.
Liv’s hand flew to her mouth, pressing back the rising gorge. She hadn’t expected to see death on her first outing. “Oh, no . . .”
The baby blinked, a corpse come to life. Liv fell back, hands scrabbling blindly at the dirt floor as she struggled to right herself.
Mrs. Khan waited until she had regained her composure. “This is one of the babies of which I spoke.” Mrs. Khan reached beneath her kameez and withdrew a packet, unwrapping it to show a bag of rice, a wad of tea leaves wrapped in cheesecloth, and a tin of what Liv would later realize was UN-distributed baby formula. “Maybe this will keep it alive a little longer.” Mrs. Khan spoke again to the woman, who obediently opened her mouth wide. She peered down the woman’s throat. “It is still very infected.”
She pulled a pouch from beneath her kameez and laid it beside the woman, speaking softly to her in Pashto. “Antibiotic pills,” she explained to Liv. “And some for the pain. I told her she must take them herself, and not sell them.”
The husband loomed in the doorway. Even in the dim light, Liv could see his glance, quick and avid, toward the pills. Mrs. Khan spoke sharply to him. “I told him that if his wife is not better when I return, I will know he stole her pills, and that I will report him.”
She turned away. “Come,” she said to Liv. “I’ll show you more babies.”
Liv found herself so grateful to leave the dark, despairing room that the reek permeating the katchi abadi no longer bothered her. “That woman. Was she starving?”
“No. She is sick. Her family was supposed to be resettled back to Afghanistan last week, but she suddenly fell ill. I think she took some sort of poison, a little bleach, maybe, so she wouldn’t have to leave. More likely, her husband fed it to her. She would not have been able to refuse him. But nobody in their right mind would want to go back to what these people know they will face in Afghanistan.” Her voice rose as she spoke, and she stopped and took a breath.
“At any rate, other than the babies, people here generally don’t starve. They get just enough to keep them alive, but not enough to keep them healthy. They get tuberculosis, or cholera. Or the men sleep with prostitutes and bring home venereal diseases to their wives, which weaken them so that they catch other diseases. You pile one disease on top of another, and you realize that even if you dispense antibiotics, the people will sell the pills to buy food, and so the accumulation of problems finally kills them. It takes years, though. These Afghan women will surprise you. Things that would kill an ordinary person, not just a Westerner, but even a person here, they can survive. That’s one thing I’ve learned working at Face the Future.”
“How long have you been with Face the Future? Have you worked for similar organizations before?”
“Here, only recently. As to before, I’ve worked as an interpreter for all manner of groups, some like this, others not. But these Afghan people have been coming to Pakistan for the whole of my life. You can’t help but know about these things. Of course, since coming to Face the Future, I’ve learned so much more. And besides . . .”
“Besides?”
Mrs. Khan shook her head, cutting off her questions.
They stopped. The alley ended, giving on to a broad field of trampled earth. Children ran about, anchoring crude kites that dipped and swirled in a sky hazy with woodsmoke. Liv laughed in a mixture of pleasure and relief. “So things aren’t entirely hopeless after all.”
“You think not?” Mrs. Khan’s tone, previously pleasant and informative, turned bleak. Her next words came as though driven by some inner compulsion. “Look closely at this place.”
The field stretched into the distance, so big that even the hordes of children playing there could dash about without fear of running into one another. Liv had not seen so much open space since her arrival within the crowded confines of Islamabad. The children wore filthy beige shalwar kameez, but the kites above them were made of bright bits of paper, and below, on the ground, green cloth pennants fluttered from tall, spindly sticks poking out of the hard-packed earth, giving everything a festive air. Liv looked again at the sticks, many of them surrounded by mounds of rocks.
“Oh, no. Those are—”
“Graves. This is the cemetery for the katchi abadi. I would imagine the majority of these hold children.”
Liv shrank from the bitterness in her voice. But she didn’t know where to look as the children pounded across the graves of their brothers and sisters, their cousins and friends. Behind her, Mrs. Khan continued speaking.
“In just a couple of weeks, you’ll be in Afghanistan, working, as you people say, for its future.” Future. “But its real future, its children, will remain here, beneath the earth. So what, really, do people like you”—people like you—“expect to accomplish there?”
“But that’s why it’s so important that we go!” Liv, too vehement, trying to persuade herself as well as Mrs. Khan. “We have money, resources. People like you”—she barely avoided the same sort of emphasis Mrs. Khan had just employed against her—“can show us where the worst problems are, help us figure out the best ways to relieve them.”
Mrs. Khan’s sigh went on and on. “Look well at what you see before you. You will think back on it with nostalgia. This small loss of life, these easy deaths due to mere sickness? It is nothing compared to what has been visited upon Kabul.”
Liv took her arm and turned her away from the cemetery. “Then we must visit good things upon Kabul, yes?” Another inadequately disguised appeal to herself.
A hot wind swirled through the alleyways of the katchi abadi, stirring a noxious mix of dust and stink. Behind them, the flags above the graves snapped in the breeze. Mrs. Khan’s voice was barely audible beneath the cacophony of wind and flags and shouting children. “I hope I’ve done the right thing.”
Nineteen
ISLAMABAD, MARCH 2002
At least Mrs. Khan alternated the disturbing with the practical.
“Today, you learn the most difficult lesson of all for you Westerners,” she told Liv as they set out in the car another morning.
“Eating only with my right hand? I can do that.” Liv came up with her own trick early, tucking her left hand, the one used for the bathroom in a region nearly entirely lacking in toilet paper, beneath her thigh during meals.
“You underestimate me. And overestimate yourself.” The car stopped before a market. Mrs. Khan opened her door and gestured for Liv to follow. “Today, we bargain.”
Within minutes, the burgeoning affection Liv felt for her demanding instructor had vanished.
“You shame me!” Mrs. Khan hissed as she dragged Liv away from a stall where Liv, charmed by the wooden models of the garish jingle trucks that made Islamabad’s streets such a challenge, had acquiesced to the second, barely lower, price named by the proprie
tor. “It is not worth half that. Not one-quarter.”
“But it’s nothing.” Liv would have paid twice the original amount and more. Which, she realized, the proprietor probably knew. And most likely resented. “I can’t win this one,” she told Mrs. Khan. “If I don’t bargain, I hurt his pride, right? But he needs the money more than I. Which is worse?”
Mrs. Khan put a hand to Liv’s back, its force just short of a punch, propelling her toward another stall, one displaying soft woolen paisley shawls. “Do you want to be respected? Try again. And remember, no matter what he tells you, these are not pashmina.”
Whatever it was made of, there would be no shawl for Liv. No embroidered pillow covers. No knife for Martin, its silver—“hah, tin,” Mrs. Khan interjected—handle carved into the shape of a snarling leopard, as she dragged Liv away after yet another incompetent attempt.
“Almost,” Mrs. Khan allowed when Liv argued down the price of a chapati basket by two-thirds. Liv replaced it with reluctance, admiring its woven conical circles of red, green, and yellow, imagining it full of puffed circles of pan-fried bread.
“Useless,” Mrs. Khan muttered when Liv departed the next stall with a pair of curled-toed slippers embroidered in metallic threads. At least, she finally allowed, the price was acceptable.
“I’ll hang them on the wall. No one at home has anything like this.” The slippers, the largest in the display, were far too small for Liv. “I like them.” Mrs. Khan ignored such foolishness, caught up in her own examination of cookware.
“Oh!” Strips of wool, bright with tassels and pom-poms, caught Liv’s eye. She made her way toward them, trying her best to fake disinterest.
