‘Here, let me take that.’ It was my co-passenger smiling sympathetically. He got a cab with me and dropped me off at a guesthouse on Saddar Street in the centre of town before leaving me his phone number.
‘Call me when you’re feeling better.’
But I felt a lot worse. The hotel manager pointed me towards a doctor’s surgery that was a stone’s throw from the hotel. Dr Khan greeted me with a warm smile before announcing cheerfully: ‘Got hep, have you?’
I looked in his mirror to see the whites of my eyes had turned piss yellow. He said there was no treatment except the ‘three plentys’: ‘Plenty of rest, plenty of water, plenty of fruit. Don’t worry, you’ll be fine in a few weeks.’
I figured I had just enough money to get back to Japan overland as long as I didn’t hang out in Pakistan too long. This news was a serious blow, but Pakistan was so cheap I could stay as long as I liked within reason. My room at the guesthouse resembled a small prison cell, but it was on the roof with a small communal garden, which I appeared to have all to myself. There were other guestrooms across the way with shutters on their windows, which I took to be empty, so I made myself at home. I took off my shirt and sat drinking water from a plastic bottle when two immaculately dressed men with tightly cropped beards approached me.
‘Excuse me, sir. Would you mind putting your shirt on while our wives pass on their way to the mosque?’
Iranians are the most courteous of people, and I was embarrassed. I apologised for my slobbish behaviour and quickly put the shirt backon. Seconds later, a group of women spanning four generations shuffled past me, averting their eyes from mine. A couple of young children took a peep out of their veils to reveal eyes as blue as Kashmiri sapphires. They were Shia pilgrims from Mashhad who’d come to celebrate the martyrdom of one of the Imams. Loudspeakers trumpeted the call to prayer, and looking over the wall of the roof garden into the street below, I saw lines of riot police closing ranks to separate the pilgrims from Sunni protestors who’d come to torment them. It was my first experience of the Sunni–Shia schism that had divided Islam since the death of the prophet, and I sat entranced as the two factions attempted to drown out each other’s cries, like Celtic and Rangers fans at an Old Firm derby.
The hotel receptionist asked me if I wanted any hash. It’s usually a bad idea to score from the place you’re staying, so I said no thanks and wandered down the street to buy my own. I didn’t have to wait long, as a guy sitting on a moped yelled ‘hashish?’ from across the road, within spitting distance of the hotel. He spoke a little English and told me to hop on the back of his bike. He seemed a nice enough young man, so I climbed on and off we went. His name was Babur, and he was an Afghan refugee from Herat, in the west of Afghanistan. We drove along the main drag of Saddar Street before taking a sharp turn down a long road lined with poplar trees out of the town.
‘Where are we going, Babur? The town is that way, no?’
I was a little nervous. I’d imagined he was going to take me to some family shop and get a commission for his trouble, but we were heading out of Peshawar now. Every few hundred yards there were army checkpoints, which waved us through, but if I was buying dope I’d have to come back along this road and run a gauntlet of uniforms.
‘No problem my friend, we will go to my family’s house. They have very good hashish.’
It was too late to argue and I was under no obligation to buy any dope, so I just sat back and let him take me where he liked.
We drove a good ten minutes outside of Peshawar and off the road into a maze of mud-walled compounds. It was a refugee camp, but not as I’d always imagined them, with sky-blue UN tarpaulin tents and corrugated-iron huts. These refugees were here for the foreseeable future and had built sprawling shanty towns alongside the Pakistani cities. It occurred to me I was lost and that I was entirely reliant on Babur to get me out of the place. I had little money on me and had left my passport at my hotel so I wasn’t really worth robbing, but I’d probably been foolish to get on a motorbike with a complete stranger.
‘I’d like to go back to Peshawar now, Babur. I can’t buy hashish here anyway.’
‘No problem, my friend. We will get you hashish. Here is my family’s house.’
He pulled over to the side of the road beside a green door built into a brown wall and banged on the door. An old man appeared and was clearly shocked to see me, but Babur spoke to him in Afghan and ushered me in. The house was dingy and badly lit, and we sat on a tattered piece of carpet in a medium-sized room with a cow-shit floor and a large loom along one side. A young man was working at it while several small boy slooked on. A door opened and several men walked in and sat down. One of them was very old, while the others were in-between. It occurred to me I was sitting with at least four generations of the male members of the family. Apart from the small boys, everyone wore a beard except me. Nobody spoke English except Babur, who, I was discovering, only spoke a handful of words himself. The men started asking Babur questions about me, and he did his best to translate.
‘How many kilograms you want?’ said a stern-looking uncle with a saffron-coloured beard.
‘I don’t want any kilos, just a small piece to smoke.’
‘You want heroin? How many kilograms?’
‘No thanks, just a bit of hash to smoke, please.’
‘You want boy?’ said one of the other old men, running his hand through the hair of the youth who sat in his lap. ‘Afghan boy very good.’
‘No thanks.’
‘Carpet?’
‘No carpet, thank you. Too big.’
They were disappointed and started talking amongst themselves. I wanted to get out; there was no way I was buying anything off these people, and I got up to leave when tea arrived. They looked offended and I began to feel I was being rude, so I sat down again as another man with a huge silver beard came through the door with a kilo of hash in his hand. I broke a tiny piece off the corner and gave the man 50 rupees and the rest of the hash. He looked puzzled and handed the brick back to me.
‘Babur, you must tell them I can’t take this hashish away with me. There are police everywhere, and I don’t have any money with me anyway.’
When they discovered I didn’t have any cash, they relaxed. Now I was a family guest, and a large, round naan bread arrived. I tried to eat some but I wasn’t hungry, so I tried to take an interest in the carpet-making. The wooden looms looked a hundred years old and were worn out. The carpet being made looked cheap and nasty, and I wondered how these people earned a living. I felt guilty that I wasn’t spending money and asked if they had any stones. I was thinking of lapis lazuli or some other semi-precious stones popular in the area, and I showed them the lapis stone in my ring as a clue.
Once they saw the ring, one of the small kids was despatched to find some lapis. Five minutes later he returned looking pleased with himself, carrying a small handkerchief, which he opened before me. None of the stones were blue; in fact, I think he’d just grabbed a handful of gravel from the side of the road. I’d had enough; it was clear that there were no stones here. Drugs, young boys and carpets, sure, but I’d have to find my lapis elsewhere.
I said my goodbyes, and after a lot of hand-shaking managed to get back onto Babur’s bike for the trip back to Peshawar. I was stoned at least, and I’d got a little smoke for later, but the massive police and military presence around the refugee camp made me paranoid. I wrapped the bit of hash in a handkerchief and stuffed it down my underpants for the ride back to town.
An American junkie from New York called Arty (or ‘Ardy’, as he pronounced it) was staying in the room next door to mine on the guesthouse roof garden. He was around 50 and had had a habit since his 20s, but looked pretty good on it. Like many addicts with access to high-quality drugs, his skin looked remarkably youthful, presumably due to the lack of stress involved in being out of it for decades. He offered me some smack, but my flirtation with the stuff was long behind me and I declined. Like me he was doing a dope
scam, and like me he was looking for lapis lazuli. Peshawar bazaar was an Aladdin’s cave of the stuff. I’d put aside a hundred dollars or so to buy some and enjoyed haggling with the Afghan traders who sold everything from beaded necklaces to carved figurines in the lovely blue stone. Many of the simpler items were sold by weight, and I ended up with a good-sized collection of the stones. Arty bought several mini pestle and mortars as gifts for friends to use as ‘coke crushers’, and I bought a bead necklace for Rosie.
Arty loved the North-West Frontier Province and had been coming to Peshawar for years. In the ’70s he’d visited Mazar I Sharif, but now Afghanistan had been ravaged by war and Peshawar was the next best place. He had many tales of his dope escapades in the old days, when hippies drove VW camper vans from Kabul to London and borders were less heavily policed. Terrorism had put an end to that, as had the War on Drugs, and you could no longer pay a fine to have your vehicle pass through the green channel unsearched. The tribal area was one of the last places on earth where the old rules still applied, since the Pakistani law had no jurisdiction there and a Pashtun version of sharia law was enforced. Rather than jail time you’d be more likely to get sentenced to lashes, which could be overturned in favour of a fine, but since drugs were sold openly anyway you’d be unlikely to be arrested in the first place.
‘How many kilograms do you want?’
I was sitting in a shop on Saddar Street drinking tea with a middle-aged Afghan man. He had a kid of maybe five sitting on his lap, with almond eyes and a blue plastic aeroplane in his hands that he whirled around in circles while his dad talked business. The father reminded me of the English actor Brian Blessed, with a booming voice and a jet-blackbeard. Before taking his flight to New York, Arty had introduced me to the guy, whom he’d been dealing with for years, and suggested I ask his wife to sew it into the lining of my guitar bag for me.
‘Inshallah, you will have a safe journey,’ the Afghan reassured me.
I was running low on cash, so we settled on 600 grams and that I’d drop off the bag the following morning. That night, I sat on the roof of the guesthouse smoking a spliff in the moonlight. I’d always been interested in visiting Peshawar, but my health was so poor I could barely move from my room. I was drinking mineral water by the litre, but it was dripping through the pores of my skin at a faster rate than I could swallow it. Now, on top of everything else, I was about to embark on a dangerous dope scam across several highly policed borders. I must’ve been mad.
The building shook. There was a slight pause, and then the whole thing seemed to jump a foot in the air. I staggered into the doorway of my room, which is supposed to be the best place to be during an earthquake. The Iranian pilgrims came out of their rooms, too, and we all stood staring at each other, waiting for a follow-up tremor. It never came, but I was superstitious enough to take the event as a shot across my bows. Of all the days to have an earthquake it was the day I’d bought my dope, but now I couldn’t afford to go back to Japan without it. Everything was going wrong, but I was determined to carry on regardless.
The following day I had a visitor. I was strung out on the roof terrace drinking mango juice when a giant with a small briefcase arrived in a jalaba. I’d been complaining to the hotel manager about my illness and he’d offered to help. ‘My uncle is a doctor, he will make a massage for you,’ he’d said. I wasn’t convinced a massage would help, since the doctor had already told me there was no cure for my condition, but it couldn’t do any harm. Now a huge turbaned man had turned up at the hotel to give me a massage and ‘cure’ my hepatitis. He looked like one of the mujahideen guys I’d seen fighting the Russians on the TV news. His hands were calloused and hairy, like grizzly bear paws, and it wasn’t long before I asked him to stop. I doubt the man had ever massaged anyone in his life before, but had simply got the job because he was the manager’s uncle. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but it seemed a good idea at the time.
The Iranian pilgrims were returning from evening prayers and saw me topless, lounging on a mattress with the man on top of me. The father looked embarrassed and quickly hustled his women into their room. I can’t imagine what they must have thought. I gave the guy some rupees and, as a parting shot, he gave me some ‘medicine’, a small piece of opium.
I tried not to let my illness stop me from making the most of my time in Peshawar and booked a one-day tour into the tribal region around the Afghan border. By the time my cab arrived, the temperature had become unpleasantly hot. It was a dry, dusty heat, and yet water streamed down my neck as I sat glugging on a bottle of mineral water. There was no air conditioning in the taxi, so I wound down the window and hung my head outside like a drunk waiting to vomit.
We stopped at a roadside cafe for tea, and the owner got out a water pipe, loaded it up with sticky hash and handed it to me. I took one puff and went into a coughing fit. My lungs had packed in completely and every puff left me convulsing, so I had to blow the smoke out immediately. I’d come all this way to find the best dope in the world and I couldn’t even inhale it: my body had had enough. The owner of the shop took over and smoked it himself, and I sat back on the cushions looking at the purple peaks in the distance. It was a beautiful place that had barely changed in a thousand years. Only the weapons had been modernised, and they’d produced little more than death, destruction and millions of refugees. The Afghans were war-weary even then; little did they know that 15 years later things would be even worse.
The Khyber Agency is the last outpost before entering the no-man’s-land that borders Pakistan and Afghanistan. Every visitor to the region must first submit their passport and pay for a bodyguard. Mine was to be Hasan, a mountain of a man with a black turban that brought his height to around seven feet. He had to slide down the seat with his rifle between his legs to accommodate the headwear that identified him as a member of one of the local Pashtun tribes that ran the border region. A photocopy of my passport was handed to a security guard on the edge of Pakistani government territory, and the cab was waved through.
There was a monument commemorating the British soldiers who’d died fighting the Pashtuns. Finally they’d given up, and instead drawn a line through the region known as the Durand Line separating India and Afghanistan. The idea was that this Pashtun area would eventually be seceded to Afghanistan, in much the same way as Hong Kong was returned to China. More than a hundred years later the conflict remains, as Pakistan grows increasingly embroiled in a conflict between the Afghans and Western forces.
Ramshackle shops lined the dusty road, their contraband displayed for all to see. Old men sat dozing lazily in shaded corners while young men and boys dawdled about, stocking the shelves with the latest gizmos from the Gulf. A minibus hurtled by with Afghan men dangling from the sides, a loudspeaker on the roof blaring out an exotic mix of sounds reminiscent of Ravi Shankar’s sitar compositions and John Coltrane’s snake-charming music. The women inside wore the family’s wealth in gold rings, necklaces and bangles while children slept on their laps. The men huddled together wearing long white tunics, holding hands and chewing betel nut, pausing only to squirt the red slime onto the roadside. A seemingly endless caravan of trucks lay on the hard shoulder of the road to Kabul, while their drivers haggled with the various border guards and tribal chiefs in makeshift customs shacks. Barefoot Pashtuns with Kalashnikovs and bullet belts rummaged through the cardboard stacks of microwaves and video recorders as cartons of Marlboros changed hands over cups of mint tea. A street kid grabbed hold of my sleeve and directed me towards his family’s barber shop, and I didn’t resist. A cup of tea arrived as the lather foamed up around my sprouting beard.
‘You want heroin?’ whispered the barber as he slid a switchblade from my chin to my throat, expertly navigating round my Adam’s apple.
‘No thanks, just a shave, please.’ The barber shop was packed, but I’d jumped the queue, probably because I was prepared to pay twice as much for a head massage than the price of a shave. My face was smooth for the
first time since leaving Hong Kong and now he set about my head, pouring coconut oil into my tightly cropped hair and jerking his cupped hands backwards and forwards over my scalp. In the mirror I could see a row of men and boys waiting their turn patiently, all looking at me with interest as the barber kneaded the back of my neck with his knuckles. All the adult customers waiting had beards, so it seemed a lousy place to earn a living shaving people, but the men were fastidious about their beards and liked to keep them trimmed regularly.
Outside, a group of five or six men stood brandishing Kalashnikovs. I took them to be the bodyguards of one of the men getting a shave. In a country rife with land feuds and intertribal vendettas, a visit to the barber’s could be dangerous. Then there was the civil war raging a few miles away in Afghanistan. The border region was the main staging post for the war, with various mujahideen militias passing through at any given time. After the Russians had been driven out in the 1980s the country had descended into chaos, but the North-West Frontier Province, with its burgeoning arms manufacturers and smuggling routes, benefited from its lawless liminality. The Pakistanis used the area for transporting vast quantities of tax-free electrical goods from the Gulf states, while the Afghans made use of the region’s ancient smuggling routes to get their opium to the West. As the middlemen overseeing these clandestine activities, some of the tribes of the North-West Frontier Province had prospered, and the modest-looking mud-walled compounds that dotted the landscape concealed an independent, relatively affluent society between the two poor nations it straddled.
Monkey House Blues Page 8
